Post-it Notes from Hades

Band/choir/orchestra geekiness meets Doctor Who geekiness

2012-01-31T10:26:00.003-05:00

Still dog-paddling, gazing across the bleak expanse of February. Here's something keeping me afloat. This is the third collaboration of the Doctor Who Fan Orchestra, where musicians and singers from all over the place submit a video of themselves playing or singing part of Murray Gold's Doctor Who score which is then knitted into a quilt of gorgeous geekiness. (Yes, I know. You don't knit quilts. It's been a tough month, okay?) The first two were fun, but sounded a wee bit like high school band class. This one is the best one yet.

I just love these glimpses of bedrooms, living rooms, band rooms from all over. Coordinator Stephen Willis tells us: This final mix includes a total of 177 submissions from 154 individual participants, ranging in age from 11 to 57, and who are located in at least 18 different countries across the world, including: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.

I've subscribed to http://www.youtube.com/user/socksofbalhoon so I won't miss the next one! (Don't quite have the nerve nor the technology to join in!)

BabelColour does it again!

2012-01-27T20:08:00.005-05:00

I've been --- occupied. Plenty to write about, but somewhat overwhelmed. However, I simply cannot resist this. I have mentioned BabelColour before. He is totally batty about Doctor Who, but I've yet to meet a Whovian who wasn't. (The Resident Fan Boy has just spent over thirty dollars on a SFX Magazine with a DW theme; he swears he will not eat lunches in restaurants for weeks.)

Anyway, there's some sort of Doctor Who milepost or anniversary coming up this year (or next?), so here's a worthy offering. All hail the BC:

For Doctor Who fans only (and possibly for literal video fans only as well)

2012-01-08T10:56:00.004-05:00

Two or three years ago, I did a post on literal videos which featured the work of dascottjr, featuring his classic literal version of Bonny Tyler's epic and weird music video "Total Elipse of the Heart". Dascottjr's version went viral, so naturally, the people responsible for the original got it yanked for copyright infringement (presumably they didn't appreciate such a work of -- cof, hac, wheeeeze -- art being made a figure of fun), and since I'm among those who failed to save it to my computer, I can't show it to you here.

Recently, a very strange tribute has appeared on YouTube by someone who evidently did have the foresight to save dascottjr's masterpiece to her computer. Zeborahnz took the soundtrack of the literal version of Total Eclipse and made (wait for it) a Doctor Who fanvid.

Now, I don't know if you need to be familiar with the original literal video to find this amusing or clever, but I certainly do -- although I echo Zeborah's recommendation of using the CC (closed captions) option so you know exactly what the singers are saying.

MAAN-i-cure

2012-01-06T14:18:00.004-05:00

Not everyone sees out Christmas by seeing one's youngerdaughter crowned The Royal Fool at a Twelfth Night celebration and having oneself serenaded with sonnets by two august members of the Company of Fools. Okay, one so-called sonnet was actually the lyrics to "Poker Face" as recited by the very handsome AL Connors, but being compared to a summer's day by the very intense Scott Florence was dreamy. Too bad I knew he was acting.

Then Epiphany dawned and I got all bogged down taking the decorations off the tree, so badly that I had to beg the Resident Fan Boy to only play major key music on the computer and to hide the tree out back until it's time to leave it out for the city.

Thankfully, I found this on the 'net yesterday. It's nowhere during the play, so I must assumed this was something reserved for those entitled few who actually got to to the theatre in person. Take it away, Davy and Cathy:

Hugo First

2012-01-05T17:09:00.002-05:00

New Year's Day hit me like a hair-pin turn. Shortly before awakening that morning, I was hit with an attack of gremlins, and woke up in a sweat of anxiety, the myriad of worries I'd set aside for Christmas flying at me like panicked bats. What I'd like to know is, do I get overwhelmed by anxiety in the wee small hours because I'm vulnerable with lack of sleep, or is it because I'm seeing things with dangerous clarity? Oh gawd, I really don't want to know, do I? I'm blaming this on PMS.

Best to cling to what is beautiful. I started the new year with the almost completely silent filmThe Artist because I've heard so many good things about it, and it is charming and lovingly made, but I'm going to make a plea for what is the most gorgeous and beguiling movie I've seen in ages:

Hugo is also a tribute to the art of silent film, but the much earlier works of Georges Méliès. The movie itself is not silent; it's a russet-brown and midnight-blue fantasy of Paris eight or nine decades ago. It's meant to be seen in 3D but the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I saw it in 2D in a small-screen cinema and you know what? We were still enchanted.

There is not a single ugly shot in this entire work, and the performances by Ben Kingsley, the two child leads, and a half-dozen not-quite-cameo supporting performances are a joy to watch. If this doesn't get some sort of Oscar recognition, I certainly will be pelting the television with foodstuffs.

If you haven't seen it, go. 3D or 2D, it won't matter.

Singing out the Seventh Day of Christmas (and 2011)

2011-12-31T18:37:00.003-05:00

Well, I've made it to the National Arts Centre twice within the past twenty-four hours, first, to see Oliver, and this afternoon, The Blue Man Group, and only managed to hack during "As Long As He Needs Me", so I don't think too many theatre patrons want to kill me. "ALAHNM" is such a lame song, don't you think?

However, my cold has left me with no singing voice whatsoever, so I'm leaving it to good ol' Uncle Jay to sing out the old year. He's American-centric, but damn funny:

Oh yes. And the very best of 2012 to everyone. May it be an improvement. We could all use improvement...

Getting zymotic on the second day of Christmas

2011-12-26T18:22:00.003-05:00

My sore throat persists (please Gawd, not another strep throat), so I lingered in bed and re-watched the final ten minutes of the new Doctor Who Christmas special because I had dozed off last night. Space Canada evidently doesn't view Doctor Who as a family show; they screened it at 9 pm which is a little too close to my bedtime, particularly after a day of guzzling spiked egg nog and battling off whatever it is I've got.

So this Boxing Day has been too quiet to say much of interest, but if you've been following this lame excuse of an alphabetical series of posts, two or three looming problems may have (just may have, let's not tempt fate, shall we?) been resolved.

We are reading through Watership Down with younger daughter, roughly three chapters a day. Even though we took Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off (we're not monsters), we have got through sixteen of the fifty chapters. Very encouraging.

This morning, I took younger daughter up the snowy hill with the Accent Snob to return overdue books through the slot of the closed library and to give younger daughter a chance to walk the dog with little traffic to worry us. This proved to be a good thing because younger daughter is still learning the ins and outs of a retractable leash, so the stroll was punctuated by shouts of "It's not my fault!!!" However, she clearly enjoyed the Boxing Day strollers' greeting the dog and persevered for the fifteen minutes up and ten minutes down the hill.

The afternoon of the Collar-less Coronary Incident, the Resident Fan Boy marched the Accent Snob down to the local pet supply store to fit him with a harness. It has become clear to us during the past seventy-two hours that this dog has been wearing harnesses most of his life. Not only is he calmer and less liable to pull, he actually co-operates in getting the harness put on.

Finally, elder daughter used my account at Digital Theatre to download Tennant and Tate's take of Much Ado About Nothing on to her laptop. I watched it today, smooth and non-jerky, even during the dance numbers. Now I want my own laptop, but I won't hold my breath.

So, life throws challenges at us and we actually cope sometimes. And I managed to flame the plum pudding this year. I seem to succeed in this every two years. Still, mustn't get cocky...

Yule be home for Christmas (and so will we)

2011-12-25T10:06:00.004-05:00

On the first day of Christmas, my daughter gave to me --- a fabulous post-nasal drip. Gee, thanks, younger daughter.

Elder daughter appeared at the bedroom, as I dozed on and off, floating in a pleasant haze of cold medication, sat cross-legged on the bed and opened her stocking which included a humane spider catcher The problem is, the kit includes a plastic spider for practice and elder daughter is creeped out by it...

We'll have patience with her arachnophobia, however, because we learned yesterday that she had been awarded the George B Pickett Prize for "highest aggregate grade in First Year Journalism" at the University of King's College. An early Christmas present? More like a really late summer's present. She only found out that she had got this when she went to check her Christmas exam marks online and noticed that this had appeared on her page. Still, it's an encouraging sign that she's picked the right major. (Clearly, entomology would have been a bad move.)

Younger daughter waited until no one was looking, then quickly took her groaning stocking to her bedroom and shut the door. I could hear her reading aloud, no doubt deciphering the lengthy explanatory notes provided by her grandmother. Later, she appeared in the kitchen, clutching hazelnut spread and two bags of tealeaves: chocolate cream chai and egg nog. "Santa brought them," she informed me briskly. She had carefully sorted and put away her treasures, which is a bit of a pity, because I can't remember what they were...

As for me, I got Turkish Delight (the good stuff, not the dollar store perfumed kind) and enough chocolate to do minimal damage. And in the grand tradition of book-giving between Demeter and myself, a biography of Beatrix Potter which I have to give back. This time, Demeter has actually read it, but wants it for a friend of hers.

The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter have trudged off to church amid the new-fallen snow (Good Ottawans rejoice) after a breakfast of home fries prepared by elder daughter. Presents this afternoon and for the very first time in Canada, new Doctor Who on Christmas Day itself! Just like in Britain! Only with commercials.

I hope your day is shaping up as well. (If not, God bless you.)

Xmas Eve

2011-12-24T18:44:00.000-05:00

I've never cared much for writing Christmas as "Xmas", but you may have gathered that I've been loosely doing a sort of alphabetical theme this month. This is because by the end of November I had only posted seventy-four posts and I'm just obsessive enough to want to have written at least one hundred posts per year. Faced with twenty-six posts wanting, I thought: What the a-b-c...

Christmas Eve here in Hades has been a mixture of busy and quiet. Younger daughter, who has been ill this past week, made it clear that she wanted to go out, a sure sign she's getting better. (Naturally, I feel a sore throat coming on.) So out we went to see Arthur Christmas which was pretty charming, actually. Hard to go wrong with a film made by the Wallace and Gromit team, voiced by the likes of Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton among many others.

When we emerged from the multiplex, the western horizon was an amber glow, and younger daughter impatient to get home: "C'mon! It's dark!" We grabbed a half-filled bus and hurried through the Rideau Centre which seemed to be full of women in hajib, all shops but the snack bars and the drug store shuttered up.

Christmas is tomorrow. Our gifts are wrapped; the tourtière is in the freezer. The best thing for now is a song in a John Rutter setting, the anti-Semitic lyrics of the original mercifully expunged, leaving a lilting, lovely choir piece. These young ladies are in the Oxford High School Caritas, in Oxford, Michigan.

May you dance, too.

Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?

2011-12-23T18:48:00.001-05:00

Things were going so well this morning. I got up early-ish and, while listening to holiday music offerings from Otis Redding and Bruce Springsteen on CBC Radio, glazed one of the tourtières I had prepared yesterday, popping it into the oven for the Resident Fan Boy's office holiday luncheon which used to begin at noon and now begins at 10 am. Then, sipping egg nog, I prepared breakfast for younger daughter who has been home with a frog in her throat all week so "White Christmas" is moot. I then read another chapter of Watership Down with younger daughter. As a matter of fact, I was going to call this post "Watership Countdown". Witty? No?

Then elder daughter returned home just before noon, after I finished wrapping the last of the Christmas gifts, so I thought I'd grab the opportunity to take the Accent Snob for a walk.

It was a brisk morning, a light icing sugar covering of snow from last night, and ice crystals drifting in the air. Our pooch, as we've discovered during the past few weeks since his adoption, is not an avid walker. Generally, he lifts his leg in the shrubs in front of our house, then tries to go back inside. I pulled him up firmly and set off to the corner, then across our street.

Once the Accent Snob realized I was determined to make this a proper walk, he headed straight for some bushes to make a deposit. Then attempted to turn tail and go home. I gave a quick yank and struggled to get under the shrubbery row with my flushable poop-bag. It took a few more commands and yanks to twist the bag and clip it with a clothes-peg, then as the dog plunged around the corner, I struggled to get my gloves back on, the bag in my left hand and the retractable leash in my right. Immediately, I began to feel an uncomfortable cold trickling down the back of my neck. While I'd been retrieving the dog deposit, the bushes had deposited a cup or so of snow in my hood.

At each cross-street, the Accent Snob made a dive to the left, knowing by now that this is the way home. Tempted as I was, given the chill settling between my shoulder blades, I sternly pressed on, intent on a riverside walk in the brilliant, heat-less sunshine.

We reached one of the entrances to the stretch of pathways beside the Rideau River, and the Accent Snob became entwined around one of the posts that serve to discourage through-traffic. As I tugged his leach to disentangle him, he suddenly broke into the expanse of shallow snow, collar-less and leash-free.

The awfulness of my predicament took a fraction of a second to sink in. The pathway that stretches east to west by the river was deserted, this final weekday before Christmas Eve. The Accent Snob was looking with great interest across the nearby road as he made wide galloping circles around me. Suppose he made a break for the streets? I knew from past experience that he is clueless about cars. Furthermore, his identifying tags were dangling from the collar in my hand.

I spent several increasingly desperate minutes calling him, trying to sound enticing rather than frantic and failing miserably. The Humane Society had warned us that he didn't respond to his name and that he was not a candidate for off-leash. I had fleeting and ironic thoughts about a runaway dog I had witnessed exactly one year ago. The lady in that nightmarish scenario didn't know the dog's name. I knew this dog 's name and it didn't matter. I tried sitting down on the snowy benches. He did approach me then, before scampering nimbly sideways when I reached for him. This is cute as all get-go in our living room, but in the deserted, frozen park, it was infuriating. I knew there was no malice in this dog, but vacillated between wanting to kill him and fearing for his life, particularly when he made repeated forays down the bank to the river's edge where I could hear the ice creaking under his paws. More than one dog has been swept away by the freezing currents of the local rivers.

What to do? I could try going home, and he'd probably follow me, blundering into the paths of oncoming cars. I could stay here, but how long? And what would my daughters think when I failed to return?

To the west, a figure in a parka appeared with a long-legged gangly white boxer who was tumbling about in floppy dog-boots, a common sight in this neighbourhood. The Accent Snob shot toward him. When he's leashed, the AS is rather stand-offish with other canines, but he seemed to recognize a fellow free spirit: "Look at us, we're off-leash!"

I followed rather less speedily and smiled sheepishly at the young woman. "I'm afraid I'm in big trouble," I said and explained what had happened.

"Oh," she said in concern and called her dog (who came promptly, of course). Accent Snob followed and I was finally able to nab him. My fingers were now too cold to feel the catch, so I held AS while my saviour clipped on the collar, then held his lead so I could struggle to my feet.

"I'm so glad you came by," I told the girl fervently, and feeling stiff, wet, and cold, took the Accent Snob home by the nearest short-cut.

When I posted my sad story on Facebook this afternoon, I was told kindly by one of my Facebook pals that she has a harness for her pooch who also slips out of his collar. I guess we'll be making a trip to the pet supply store.

I'd ask for a strait-jacket for myself, but I don't think they carry those.

Vanishing Christmas

2011-12-22T22:01:00.002-05:00

When I was twenty-three, I belonged to a small choir directed by a talented musician and composer. We sang one of his compositions for holiday concerts and services. Being an alto, my part sounded something like this: ♫OOOOOooooh -oooOOOoooh - Ooooooh - we'll remember, we'll remember - OOOOOoooh - Christmas - as it was today, as it was today...♪

As a result, I can't really remember the lyrics, but I do remember the gist of the song, a cataloging of things to do with the modern Christmas.

It occurred to me when I was listing "Christmas essentials" yesterday that there are aspects of my remembered Christmases that are already gone or on their way out. I can think of three offhand:

1. Magical, moving shop window displays. I'm trying to figure out when these vanished; I don't recall seeing any in the nineties. I gather they still do them in New York, but then, they would have the cash, wouldn't they?I don't think there was anything as grand as this on Douglas Street or Jasper Avenue, but there used to be ambitious mechanized Christmas tableaux that appeared in Canadian shop windows the day after Remembrance Day. Now we get sulky, skinny mannequins.

2. Decent Christmas television. Plays, variety shows, concerts. In Canada on Christmas Day, you're pretty well stuck with The Sound of Music (that great summertime Christmas movie complete with Nazis) and White Christmas They've even stopped showing "Christmas at Kings". I see the BBC promos for Christmas Day telly, and sigh heavily.

3. Christmas cards. We still get quite a few of those, but the eternal and infernal so-called "Christmas Letter", with its carefully laundered and impersonal list of familial accomplishments and travelogues, has been gradually transforming our Christmas card strings into something resembling a clothesline. Increasingly, we get the letter as an email attachment which is a sort of improvement in that it can be deleted with one key-tap.

It all comes down to money and time, I suppose. Shop windows need staff to maintain them and someone to fix the moving parts. Shows must be thought up, produced, acted and paid for somehow. And snail-mail? So last century, expensive and labour-intensive.

I'm not really looking forward to explaining to my grandchildren (should I have any - children are so last century and expensive) about shop windows, television and stamps.

Ultimata

2011-12-21T21:41:00.001-05:00

The Grinch in Doctor Suess's classic story may not have been able to stop Christmas from coming, but unlike the Whos in Whoville, I seem to need certain things to be and to happen, in order for it to be Christmas. I crave:

1. Mandarin oranges. The loose leathery feel of the peels which come off so easily and the readily separated sweet segments... When we first came to Hades, all we could find were wretched Clementines which aren't the same at all. Now the Resident Fan Boy keeps a careful watch out for the precious cardboard boxes in which the Mandarins come. We squirrel away a few for stocking toes, and eat the rest way too quickly.

2. Egg nog. The commercial egg nog here in Hades is wretched, but when we started getting our milk delivered in glass bottles (it really does taste better) from Cochrane's Dairy in Russell, Ontario (to the southeast of Ottawa), we discovered they make their own egg nog. It's fabulous. I can't decide if I prefer it with rum or brandy or just straight up. I don't ever want to know the calorie count. It's only available during December, after all.

3. The lone child-soprano beginning "Once in Royal David's City, preferably on Christmas Eve.

4. Alaistair Sim as Scrooge. No one better.(This bit always makes me cry.)

5. I've had artificial trees and real trees. I must say, I do love the smell of the real ones and the fact that they're different each year. However, the realness of the tree is not essential. I do demand that they be cluttered, completely covered with decorations from Christmases past. The Resident Fan Boy does not agree, but he values his life.

6. Chocolate gold coins in my Christmas stocking. One of my favourite Christmas memories is that of elder daughter (6 at the time) informing me that there was frankincense in her stocking. The coins were inscribed republique français.

7. Multi-coloured lights. None of this tasteful, all-in-one-colour crap, or, for that matter, the all-white "icicle-lights" that were all the rage fifteen years ago. (This year, it seems to be hanging oversize glass ornaments on deciduous trees -- in Hades at least. It's pretty, but probably trendy.)

8. Dancing Day by the Toronto Children's Chorus and The Bells of Dublin by The Chieftains. I don't know if I would find it impossible to enjoy Christmas without these albums, but by golly, when I've had a tough Christmas, these really help!

9. A Child's Christmas in Wales, the 1987 Welsh/Canadian production starring Denholm Elliot. This isn't my favourite bit, but it's the only bit on YouTube. Demeter's favourite line has always been: "Go on to the Useless Presents!"

I like to think that, were I deprived of these things, Christmas still would be Christmas. My inner child would be heart-broken, though.

Terpsichore loved these guys

2011-12-20T23:31:00.003-05:00

A few days back, I posted the Nicholas Brothers dancing to Glenn Miller's "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" because I adore the song and I adore the Nicholas Brothers. JoeinVegas sent me a link to this Nicholas number from the movie Stormy Weather with the incomparable Cab Calloway. I'd seen the last minute of it many times, but had never seen the entire number, where Mr Calloway makes way for Fayard and Harold. Hold on to your hats:

If we can trust Wikipedia, Fred Astaire himself told the Harold and Fayard that this number was the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen. Well, he would know. Here's my absolute favourite Astaire/Rogers moment from the movie Swingtime:

Gee, those final climactic few seconds are among the most exhilarating in movies and dance. Think I'll float off to bed now and try to dream I can move like that....

Soup and Stuart

2011-12-19T14:42:00.003-05:00

Up in our favourite loge at the National Arts Centre, I peered over the edge with my trusty bird binoculars as the seats filled for this year's Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert. The Resident Fan Boy and I have been going every year for the past seven or eight years, and for this is the fourth one to which we've taken the girls. Elder daughter usually likes the stories; younger daughter loves the music.

The focus of these concerts is the "Dave and Morley" story; the Christmas concert usually offers two or three. At that time it's just Stuart McLean who created the Vinyl Cafe radio show about twenty years ago, a lectern with notes, and a microphone. He sort of dances as he tells the stories, sometimes his left foot kicks back, and his long fingers roll through the air before he draws them to his chest like a rabbit.

Younger daughter particularly enjoyed the jazz stylings of Christmas songs by the so-called "Vinylettes", three young women who have just completed the Jazz Performance Certificate at Humber College, a performing arts college in Toronto. Elder daughter was very pleased that the guest performer this year was Hawksley Workman. (Yes, that is his stage name; he was born Ryan Corrigan in Huntsville, Ontario.) I was pleased too; anyone who spends much time listening to CBC Radio Two will have heard him at one point or another. I'm always delighted to listen to the beautiful back-up of Dennis Pendrith and John Sheard who have to be amongst the ablest session musicians in Canada.

After the concert, we swam through the crowd (these concerts nearly always sell out) and the Resident Fan Boy bought Hawksley Workman's Christmas CD for elder daughter. Here's a sample of how he sounds. This YouTube film of a performance in Toronto a few years back joins him as he's beginning the second verse:

Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold
Let's stir it together 'til we are both grey and old
Let's stir it together 'til it tells the story of its own
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Pumpkin and parsnip, carrots and turkey bones
Bay leaf and pepper, potato and garlic cloves
You stir a moment while I put more wood in the stove
Let's make some soup 'cause the weather is turning cold

Moon's almost full and the candles are burning low
It's almost midnight you wouldn't even know
The light gets reflected on freshly fallen snow
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

We'll make enough to feed everyone we know
We'll make enough to feed everyone we don't
No one is different and everyone's alone
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Let's make some soup because everyone feels the cold
Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold

Almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon
almost a full moon

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run...

2011-12-18T11:47:00.003-05:00

Watership Down by Richard Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Younger daughter, who is on the autistic spectrum, needed a novel for her independent reading project, so I googled "middle school books" and up came Watership Down which I'd never got around to reading. Perfect, I thought. It's about animals, which younger daughter adores, and there's a well-reviewed animated film which will provide badly-needed visuals for her very concrete-thinking mind.

In preparation for helping her get this read over the Christmas holidays, I downloaded an audio version from our public library, and listened to it on bus commutes. Ralph Cosgrove's narration is lively and doesn't distract the listener from the story. I particularly enjoyed his portrayal of Kehaar the gull as a straight-talking Scandinavian. Three things you need to know about this novel: it's gripping; it's dated; it's looooong.

Adams tells us in the forward that the novel came out of stories he would tell his young daughters on lengthy car rides. Apparently, it was the girls who suggested the stories were good enough to be written down. I can see why. This is the epic tale of a group of rabbits, led by the heroic and self-effacing hero Hazel, who flee their warren on the basis of the mystical warnings of Hazel's psychic brother Fiver. Their journey to establish a new rabbit colony in Watership Down in Hampshire is dangerous and full of death-defying deeds. (I trust it isn't a spoiler to say that surprisingly few rabbits die during the course of this novel.)

Dated? Well, it was published in 1972, and despite the fact that Adams was writing these stories for his daughters, all the main characters are male. We get a hint of heroism from the doe-rabbit Hyzenthlay who helps in the escape from the oppressive warren Efrafa, but she barely figures in the story and few of the other does are even given names. It is clear that Hazel and his fellow-bucks expect little from the female rabbits except for breeding purposes. Adams includes a rather quaint apologetic passage explaining that rabbits are practical and not romantic by nature -- as if the attitudes of the males in the story somehow differs from the attitudes of men of Adams' generation. (Adams' military background is very evident throughout.)

That said, it's an entertaining and clever book, but it does go on, including four or five rabbit legends which, although illuminating, break up and slow down the narrative. It's going to be tough going over Christmas. I wonder if younger daughter will ever forgive me.

View all my reviews

Qu'est-ce c'est? (Fa-fa-fa-fah, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fah...)

2011-12-17T19:26:00.002-05:00

This morning, my Friend With Whom I Have Coffee turned up on my doorstep to whisk me away to select our Christmas tree from the Byward Market. (I am known throughout her van as the woman who can pick a tree in under five minutes. And that usually includes paying for it.)

FWWIHC knew our dog was a veteran of francophone homes and as she stepped over our threshold, bathed our new pet with caresses and endearments Québécoises. We had been told by the Humane Society that the dog responded more readily to French commands. We had noticed no such thing over the past week (the Resident Fan Boy being reasonably conversant en français), but, judging from the joyful tail-wagging and shivering, it became painfully clear -- we have opened our home and hearts to an accent snob:

Madame! Sauvez-moi des têtes carrées!!

Ungrateful brute.

Poop post

2011-12-16T22:19:00.002-05:00

I have gone on record as stating that I have little patience with those who refer to their pets as their "furry children". I have children. I have never locked them in the house with food on the floor while I went out for a few hours.

Now I'm a dog-owner, I'm being inundated with emails, flyers and pamphlets addressing me as a "pet-parent". Puhleese.

I'll tell you, though, there is one particular parallel between caring for babies and caring for dogs: you find yourself thinking about in-put and out-put a lot. Particularly the output.

I'm not quite sure when it became mandatory in Canada for owners to pick up dog droppings, but this occurred after the last time I owned a dog, when I was very much younger. We just walked the dog, and, uh, left his leavings. In the interim, after poop-scooping became the rule, I would come upon dog-droppings and shake my head: Another irresponsible owner. Shouldn't be allowed. Doesn't deserve to have animals.

I came up against the hard (well, rather gooey) reality about this time a week ago when I took our newly-adopted canine for his first walk after the interminable ride home from the humane society. He made a beeline (dog-line?) for a neighbour's garden and did his business in a pile of dead leaves. I realized that I couldn't possibly locate what he'd done in the dark and shamefacedly skulked off into the night. I've resolved this problem by being the one who does the daytime walks. The Resident Fan Boy, who is a bit more O/C about this matter, has been out more than once with a flashlight, searching for the contents for the little blue bag.

And rather like when we had babies, we quickly got over our queasiness, and I find myself, along with my fellow neighbourhood dog-walkers, making the rounds with the dog pulling on the lead in my one hand, while the other clutches the little bag, which means I find I have to ignore any itches on my nose until I can get home to flush the thing. The past week has been full of little discoveries like these.

Children grow up to be toilet-trained voters if one does one's job. It seems, however, that this is unlikely to be the case with a dog. So, I'll pass on the title of "pet-parent", thank-you. I'll also refrain from writing on this topic again, for which you may possibly thank me.

Oblivious (write of passage number twenty-three)

2011-12-15T18:58:00.000-05:00

I could hear her long before I saw her, the steady and inane chatter of someone on a phone in transit: "OH HI!....I'M ON A BUS...YEAH, WHAT'S YOU UP TO?...."

When I rose to make my way to the exit, I found my way blocked by the usual crowd of people who cling to the space near the exits. One was a stocky woman, shopping bags slung on her arms, both hands gripping the bars on either side of the door. She had her head severely tilted to one side, gripping her cell phone between her ear and her shoulder, her eyes fixed in the middle distance, talking incessantly.

As we reached our stop, I managed to trade places with one young fella, so that I was standing at yakking lady's shoulder. The door opened and someone stepped down. The woman's arm dropped but she had not moved, so I nudged into the narrow space between her and the door.

"I'M GETTING OFF AT THIS STOP, SO YOU DON'T NEED TO PUSH," declared Yakking Lady over her shoulder as she clambered out. She proceeded up the flights of stairs, keeping up the commentary into the phone, with periodic backward glares at me. When I got to the bridge over the station, I watched her toddling off down the road and into the evening, cell-phone glued to her ear, packages swaying, possibly regaling her listener about the pushy woman on the bus. (The nerve.)

Wake me up before you nonny-nonny

2011-12-14T22:16:00.001-05:00

Watching David Tennant and Catherine Tate in a filmed performance of Much Ado About Nothing downloaded to my computer is a bit like the live-stream videos of the Sunday services at my mother's church. Now there's something I never thought I'd be saying.

See, last week word came from DT fan sources that last summer's West End production of MAAN at Wyndham's Theatre would be available on DVD come February. Almost immediately, Amazon.co.uk seemed to back-pedal, announcing it wasn't happening just yet. Then word came through Doctor Who channels that this production is available now for downloading. You have to install something called Digital Theatre (DT - nice symmetry, wot?), and the downloading process takes more than four hours. Mind you, my computer is a bit of a dinosaur -- the programmes on it are almost two years old -- so that may be at the root of what ensued.

When I finally completed all this and settled down to watch, I found the images beautifully defined -- when the actors don't move much. Unfortunately, this production involves plenty of physical comedy, a revolving stage, and gyrating to eighties-style pop. When this happens, the images tend to freeze and jerk, and often the speech isn't quite synchronized to the moving lips. As I said, it's rather like the live stream of Unitarian church services in Victoria, which tends to freeze every time the camera pans or the congregation rises to sing a hymn. When the actors are still, they are beautifully visible, though; if you want to feast your eyes on Tennant's stubble and Tate's mole, you can do so. The audio, likewise, is crystal clear.

Anyway, it took me the first half hour to get over the distraction of the flashing and freezing and get into the story.

I've probably seen more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than any other Shakespeare play, although I've never sat down and done a tabulation. It is the one play I've seen at Stratford-upon-Avon (set in the British Raj with a line of Indian guards bellowing: "Stap in the niem of the Prince!"). It is a fine play, a rollicking play, but I actually have more difficulty with it than I do with The Taming of the Shrew or even The Merchant of Venice. This is because I find it hard to concentrate on the humour when, like Beatrice, I want to kill Claudio.

I wrote about a Company of Fools production of MAAN a couple of years ago which dealt with the problem of the Hero-and-Claudio plot by making both wronged Hero and cloddish, self-righteous Claudio attractive airheads. It worked very well. After all, why else would they end up married at the end of the play after Claudio has shamed Hero at their first attempted wedding on the flimsiest of evidence, unless both parties were not all that bright?

Tennant and Tate's version puts heavy emphasis on the rage of the wronged family: the reactions of Beatrice, Leonato, Ursula, and finally, Benedict to Claudio's (and the Prince's) appalling behaviour and lack of remorse. There still remains the problem of restoring the Prince and Claudio back to the status of "good guys", so we get to see Claudio go into paroxysms of grief in a vigil for the supposedly dead Hero with the aid of a bottle of whiskey, a ghetto-blaster and a pistol. He doesn't use the latter because he catches a brief glimpse of Hero whom he presumably mistakes for a ghost before the Prince arrives to escort him to his wedding to Hero's "cousin" (who turns out to be Hero herself, of course). It still doesn't quite work, but it's a nice try.

Things I liked about the production:

1) The neat conceit of paralleling Hero in this eighties-flavoured show with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, right down to her wedding dress. Too bad they didn't find a jug-eared actor to play Claudio.

2) The predicaments in which Benedict and Beatrice find themselves as they eavesdrop on their friends' staged conversations about their passion for each other. Benedict gets tangled up with cans of paint, and Beatrice is hoisted aloft by the seat of her pants (although the harness is clearly visible).

3) The serious scenes following Hero's shaming at her own wedding. I found myself, despite the technical distractions of this download, getting totally absorbed in events and believed, for the first time, that there was indeed a deep connection between Benedict and Beatrice. There was a truth there that simply hadn't been in the comedy which, coming from performances by Tennant and Tate, surprises me. Maybe they did too good a job of eighties shallow.

4) Elliot Levey's portrayal of the villainous Don John. This is a fiendishly difficult role to pull off because Don John is supposed to be a thoroughly unlikeable chap. He's shown here as being rather socially inept and it's clear that his princely brother Don Pedro loathes him. This rescues him from the second dimension and makes his actions more understandable.

On the downside, the director and Catherine Tate evidently decided to give Beatrice an awkward side. When Don Pedro suggests marriage, and when Benedict declares himself to her, Tate dissolves into odd vocalizations and hyperventilation. I can see what they were aiming for, but I found it more grating than humanizing and it rather spoiled my favourite line in the play (and possibly in all of Shakespeare), when Don Pedro comments that she was born in a merry hour and she replies: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. In a flash of lyrical poignancy, we get the measure of Beatrice, but I think it was lost here.

I also didn't care much for Tennant's and Tate's more obvious playing to the audience. I'm sure it was far more amusing for those actually there, but it leaves us poor schmucks who couldn't come up with the airfare to London out in the cold.

All in all? It's good fun, but I feel I'm missing a lot due to the technical difficulties of this download and I really hope this is released to DVD soon.

They did the Christmas Mash...

2011-12-13T10:09:00.003-05:00

Followers of this blog (a small and discerning group) may have noticed that I have a bit of an irritation going, on the topic of songs about winter being called "Christmas Carols" -- when they're neither. Vancouver's musica intima (they go for the lower case) may have found a way around this:

Mind you, we'd always shout: "Like a flashlight!" then "Like a lightbulb"; and we said "Monopoly" instead of "Basketball"....

Ya gotta love the YouTube commenters who have never heard of "Once in Royal David's City". Bless. It's not quite such a tradition on this side of the Atlantic ocean unless you have British parents, or are Anglican.

Psychology lab

2011-12-12T22:19:00.001-05:00

Way back in the dark ages, children, if you wanted a dog, you went down to the SPCA, picked a dog and brought him home. You fed him, played with him, left him in the house or tied up outside if you had to go out. You didn't buy him coats and booties, you didn't spend hours crate-training him, and you certainly didn't send him Christmas and birthday cards.

We put in our application with the Ottawa Humane Society just under a year ago. There's a multiple-choice form you fill out, which you are encouraged to answer keeping your "ideal dog" in mind. We soon found out that you need to think of a "less-than-ideal" dog, otherwise you won't be considered a candidate for any of their animals. Strikes against us: we live in a semi-detached without a fenced yard; we don't have a car, we lack recent canine experience (the Resident Fan Boy and I last had dogs in our adolescent years); and we made the mistake of ticking "non-shedding" (well, they said "ideal") and apparently that sort of creature rarely shows up at a shelter. We also don't jog, which seems to be the criteria for several of the more active breeds there.

After our application ran out twice, we resubmitted it last fall and broadened our parameters considerably. We saw dogs everywhere, being walked by people who apparently were far worthier of dog ownership than we. Perhaps everyone in New Edinburgh purchases their dogs through puppy mills?

Last Thursday, a co-worker, a hard-core animal-fan whose dog lives in her car while she's at work so she can walk him during breaks, encouraged the RFB to try for a ten-year-old lab cross. His profile (the pooch's, that is) indicated that he was afraid of riding in cars. We'd hoped for a younger specimen, but heck, we're car-free and this was a medium-sized dog, short-haired and not small and yappy, so we decided that, after eleven and a half months, it was now or possibly never.

Dog-crazy co-worker offered to drive us out to the Humane Society which, in the past year, has moved from its accessible quarters near Dow Lake to an isolated crescent way the hell off Hunt Club Road, a half-hour hike from any bus stops. With the Friday evening traffic, it took the better part of an hour to drive out there, even though the RFB and DCC had left work at three-thirty.

Once arrived, we went through another long vetting process. We were required to read the dog's full profile, which included a report from a recent month-long fostering. Then we had to wait for an available staff member to bring the dog out to meet us. We followed a strict protocol: a long greeting session, followed by a walk outside on the AstroTurf, then a play session in a small room. All during this process, we were giving a dizzying list of tips, including never saying goodbye and not greeting him effusively on home-comings to allay separation anxiety. Oh. Okay...

Then the staff member was required to remove the dog back to his holding room while we made the decision.

By this time, we'd been there well over an hour and our kindly ride was now late for a dinner being given in her honour for her fiftieth birthday. (We hadn't known this.)

"He's very thorough," I offered, apologetically.
"He's slow," she scoffed. "The other guides don't take this long," She purchased a large bag of dog food and assisted me in picking out a collar, lead, and (gulp) crate, probably to speed us along as much as anything. Meanwhile, our thorough (slow) staff member was typing up the forms on the word processor -- with one finger...

Finally, we bundled our canine companion into the back seat between younger daughter and me and yes, he really hated the car ride, all thirty minutes of it, whining piteously and only stopping for red lights and heavy traffic. (Sandy Hill was closed off, if you please, by police monitoring the demonstrations at the Congolese Embassy.) During the final five minutes, the dog made a dive for the very back and thrashed around a bit. We arrived, and I quickly escorted him indoors. Our ride had made her escape by the time we'd completed a lightening tour of the house.

On the first night, we discovered that Labradors chew. Our duvet will never be quite the same. By the third night, we discovered this dog is obsessive about marking the boundaries of his territory, and the Resident Fan Boy was a whiter shade of pale from fretting and lost sleep, blaming DCC for "pressuring" him into adoption. He seemed to have a particular horror of this dog-gone fella piddling and pooping in the house.

I pointed out that our new family member did not bite, kept the barking to the occasional mild woof, and, best of all, waited quietly in his crate for us to return from two (2) plays over the weekend. (We'd bought the tickets before we had any idea we were imminent dog-owners.) As for the occasional accident, hadn't his boyhood pet ever messed in the house? No, declared the RFB stoutly, but admitted that, since the said sainted pooch had joined his household when the RFB was but a pup himself, he doesn't have any real memories of actually training her. My bet is, his mother, a farm-girl from Alberta and rector's wife to boot, did all the dirty work. (She usually did.) At my childhood home, the rule was, whoever discovered deposits and/or puddles had to clean them up, the result being that stuff would sit around for days. My late mother-in-law wouldn't have been a bit surprised.

This evening, we're at the seventy-two-hour mark. The Resident Fan Boy seems to have spent most of his day swapping doggy tales at the office. Younger daughter has banned our new friend from her room because he makes off with the long dis-used items in her toy basket, but greets him joyfully on her return from school. Me? All of a sudden, I have way less time, but this seems to be forcing me to do things without dithering. And my pedometer is looking impressive.

The best moment of all was elder daughter's face when she saw the lithe black form on Skype. When she was eight, she did an oil painting for art lessons entitled "Dream of Having a Dog". We've hidden it in the basement all these years, possibly to spare our late cat's feelings.

Let's see how well the Resident Fan Boy sleeps tonight...

Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zu-zoo-zu-zu-zu-zooo

2011-12-11T22:34:00.002-05:00

Must go to bed. Might tell you why tomorrow. In the meantime, you've heard of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, but did you ever hear of the fabulous Nicholas Brothers? Watch and learn....

Take joy

2011-12-10T19:23:00.003-05:00

It's not Christmas yet, but it's bearing down upon us. This has been an extraordinarily stressful weekend. Not sad, depressing, or hopeless. Just a weekend of great change about which I will write.

But not yet.

I found this famous prayer long ago and liked it so much that I made copies to stick in with my Christmas gifts in that distant year. Demeter still has her copy on her fridge, because it's not just for Christmas:

Fra Giovanni’s Christmas Prayer

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present moment. Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach is joy. Take Joy!

And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

And it's a little early for the following, as well, but I'm ready for it, even if I have written only six Christmas cards. It's beautiful, and I love the exhortation: "And therefore, be you merry/ Rejoice and be you merry/ Set sorrow aside. . . .":

Isle of Dogs

2011-12-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered why our next door neighbour keeps her dog in a cage when she's out of the house.

We live in a neighbourhood full of dogs, and it's easy to get judgmental. There's the appealing little fella across the way whose people let him wander in their unfenced backyard. There's the lady around the corner whose bichons frises younger daughter and I discovered crisscrossing the road two blocks north of where we live -- in the midst of after-school traffic. They had dug their way out of her yard, and she swore they had not been gone for more than half an hour -- even though half an hour is the time they'd spent at our house after we'd carried them all the way home. Across the way is a lady who also let her tiny white dog wander up and down in front of the house without a leash. When I pointed out to her that he had crossed the street and was now wandering up to the opposite corner, she was astonished: "He's never done that before..."

When we discovered that our neighbour in the other side of our semi-detached keeps her Jack Russell terrier in a cage (rebranded a "crate") when she's at work, we felt so sorry. We can hear him barking and yelping and call through the wall: "Hi Jerry!" There's silence and then the barking resumes. He's not a loud barker, but we worried about his being bored and lonely.

The Sunday before last, I was dusting around the living room window. I was probably avoiding doing something else, but the dusting was badly needed. I happened to glance out the window and spotted our semi-detached neighbour's weekend guest on the sidewalk with her own small dog on a lead while she checked her cell phone. I went back to my work, and heard her steps on our shared front porch.

What happened next was so quick, I couldn't quite fathom what had happened. In a brown streak, Jerry had zoomed across the street as a car screeched to a halt. Next-door Guest dashed after him, hauling her own dog. Jerry had crawled under a parked car and was cheerfully ignoring her pleas, until (swoosh!) he dashed back to our lawn, halting another automobile. NDG attempted to find a lull in the traffic to get back to Jerry, but he flashed across the street one more time. By this time, I was on the porch, wondering if he could be tempted into our place, which has always held some fascination for him (perhaps due to lingering whiffs of our late cat who departed this house and this life a little over a year ago). NDG was so frantic, she had dropped her own dog's leash. A lady rushed to her rescue and helped her corral Jerry, then thoughtfully caught the little white dog's leash and held her while NDG bundled the unrepentant Jerry back to his door.

"Has Jerry been naughty?" I inquired kindly, remembering a long-ago afternoon when I nearly lost a close friend's three Schnauzers. (I should tell you about that some time. Imagine three Schnauzers wandering unconcernedly up the longest street in Burnaby.)

"Jerry has been very naughty," she agreed emphatically. "She usually keeps Jerry in his crate, but I don't know how to latch it, so I didn't put him in, then he slipped out when I opened the door..."

Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of Jerry some mornings through the window in the neighbour's front door. He sits glumly in his crate, staring at the opposite wall. We're less sympathetic now. The rogue.

The hell below Haggerston

2011-12-08T21:49:00.003-05:00

The Blackest Streets: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book out of the library for two reasons: 1) someone recommended it in the Goodreads reviews for Lost London: 1870-1945 which I'd recently bought; 2) I thought, based on my struggles with working out historical London streets, that I had ancestors living in the Nichol around 1840. I've since discovered that my lot were actually in Haggerston, several blocks to the north, but never mind.

This is a very readable account of the neighbourhood behind St Leonard Shoreditch which, for about one century, had the reputation of being the dirtiest, poorest, and most dangerous place in London. Sarah Wise doesn't dispute the dirt and poverty, but she has some perspective to offer on the danger. The Nichol was a dangerous place to live, no doubt, but more for malnutrition, disease, and domestic violence than murder. Wise tells the story of how a rather rural area surrounded by gardens became a dark warren of poorly constructed and overcrowded buildings in a few decades. We hear what it was like to grow up in such an area, why so little was done for the residents, and finally, the grand plans to transform the neighbourhood into a wholesome and aesthetically pleasing community for the "deserving poor", with predictable results.

It's an interesting angle on the nineteenth century and underlines how much, and how very little, has changed.

View all my reviews

Go West

2011-12-07T22:47:00.000-05:00

And so this is Christmas. Well, it's really Advent, but Christmas stuff is getting in full gear, including younger daughter's school's "holiday concert" which, of course, has nothing to do with either Christmas or Advent, since we have a mix of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and non-practising types. Fair enough.

(Actually, what really used to amuse me was the situation at the public elementary elder and younger daughter attended which featured a holiday concert and un soir de Noël for the French Immersion students which invited involvement from the English Stream French classes. The former was scrupulously secular, and the latter blithely consisted of carols, presumably because it was somehow politically correct to warble Christian ditties in French.)

Younger daughter was all set to perform Macavity from Cats, as she did TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats for her poetry project earlier in the fall. However, yesterday at the bus stop, she struggled for the words - a sure sign that something is desperately important to her - and announced she wanted to do something "Christmassy" instead.

I dropped her off at her voice teacher's apartment where it was decided that "White Christmas" might work. Despite the "C" word, it's a very secular song. I hurried off down to Lees Station to waylay a bus, pondering what people perceive as Christmas music today.

When, for example, did "My Favourite Things" become a Christmas song? Sure, it mentions "silv'ry white winters" and "brown paper packages", but those things happen without Christmas, and besides, The Sound of Music is set in the summer. With Nazis.

"Jingle Bells" is often described as a Christmas carol. It's a) not a carol; b) not about Christmas. Same deal for "Winter Wonderland", "Sleigh Ride" and "Jingle Bell Rock". Check the lyrics. They're songs about winter. You could sing them in February. "Baby, It's Cold Outside"??? C'mon, people!

Then, of course, there's "Santa Baby". Okay, Christmas is involved. But still, it's not a carol. And Marilyn Monroe never recorded it. I've got nothing against these ditties, y'understand, I just think they're radically mis-categorized.

I gazed out the bus window, wrapped up in these thoughts and only vaguely aware of the salmon-coloured sunset. Wait a minute. The sun sets in the west....

I suddenly realized I was barreling west along the Queensway. Our house is to the northeast of downtown Ottawa, nowhere near the Queensway. I had absent-mindedly boarded a 101 Bayshore bus. After a second's disoriented panic, I noted that the automated voice had called out "Catherine/O'Connor" and hastily made my way to the exit. From there, I scurried another block west to Bank Street, and peered into the glare of the headlights in search of a #1 bus home, while Elton John's "Rocket Man" played on CBC Radio Two in my earbuds. (Also not a Christmas song, despite the bit about Mars being cold as hell.)

♪And I think it's gonna be a long, long time...♪

It wasn't, really; I got home a few minutes before the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter....

Too bad younger daughter has opted out of Macavity. I think her version would have been dynamite, although probably minus the swivels and wiggling you'll see in the DVD version:

Fashion for the unconscious

2011-12-06T23:31:00.002-05:00

There was a wide variety and ages and voices at younger daughter's holiday recital. Well, seventeen sopranos and one very brave baritone, but a wide, curving range of ability, style and motivation. Three little girls with anxious mothers, half a dozen mature singers pursuing pleasure and self-improvement, and adolescent and post-adolescent young women in search of...themselves? A vocation? A career in music and theatre? Probably all of the above.

This was my third visit into this rarefied world of performance, the first two being younger daughter's first festival competition and the spring recital with much the same crowd as this one. As younger daughter becomes used to this sort of thing, so do I, and I found myself relaxing more and taking in the whole performances.

Which includes, although maybe it shouldn't, what the singers chose to wear. The little girls were, of course, in variations of little-girl-party-wear which these days seems to be a sort of shift affair with ballet shoes or Mary-janes. The mature ladies went for dressy-casual, some dressier, some more casual; usually a scarf was involved.

Nearly all the young women were in black minis. And here's the problem. It was an afternoon recital. In a church. Not a church service, mind, but the key words here are "recital" "afternoon" and "church".

I was most startled when I heard a clomp-clomp-clomp and up hobbled a girl in a spaghetti-strap chemise-top over a body-con miniskirt, complete with lace stockings and backless shoes with six-inch heels. She did wear a sort of black cardigan over this ensemble, but she still looked -- oh, how aged do I sound? -- kinda like a hooker...

Looking back without checking the programme, I can remember what the little girls and the mature ladies sang. I only remember what most of the adolescent girls wore.

(Oh. Younger daughter sang a gospel song, and a clear and expressive version of "Jingle Bell Rock". She wore a hot pink tee-shirt and mini-skort with dark pink tights and flats. She looked lovely. Her totally objective mother thanks you for asking.)

Enervation

2011-12-05T23:32:00.003-05:00

So many things I would have done -- the clouds got in my way.Stuff from left field again. I drugged myself with family research and funny videos on YouTube, and every time I stopped, the pain came seeping back like a burned finger. I won't burden you with it.

Clever Dick (Duke?)

2011-12-04T23:06:00.001-05:00

This is bloody amazing. The Duke of Clarence speaking in two dozen voices, some English, some American, a Scot, a Welshman, and one Shakespearean Canadian actor (although I doubt he did this role):

Things that could be improved with cats

2011-12-03T23:56:00.000-05:00

I was watching It's a Wonderful Life tonight. It's not my favourite Christmas movie (that would be Scrooge with Alistair Sim), but it's full of wonderful moments. I particularly love the bit when the angel in charge of Clarence (Angel Second Class) tries to explain his shortcomings to his superior: "Sir, he has the IQ of a rabbit!"

If it were my favourite movie, I'd invest in a DVD. As it is, it takes three hours to show the darn movie on television because there are fifty minutes of commercials. That got me to thinking of this, which showed up on YouTube recently:

"People don't want to watch ads; they want to watch cat videos." Damn right. Come to think of it, that's what It's a Wonderful Life is missing --- cats...

Bah humbug

2011-12-02T19:39:00.001-05:00

Don't get me wrong, this little flash-mob at Vancouver International Airport has its charms. They even have a live band! However, it has "spin doctor" written all over it. (Our national airline has been struggling with cut-backs, financial crises, strikes, and rather lack-lustre service for years.)

Then we note the date this took place: December 18th, 2010. Oh dear. Were any of those passengers en route over the Atlantic, say, to Heathrow? I think there were thousands of people who didn't even manage to get where they were going. Then, a huge storm hit the eastern US just after Christmas, and those who had made it where they were going had real trouble getting back. It was not the holiday to be flying, unless you were St Nicholas himself. Maybe that's why no one really seems to remember this.

An Advent apple

2011-12-01T12:37:00.001-05:00

April may be the cruelest month, but for younger daughter, November is the loooongest month, with little to break it up but Remembrance Day which isn't even a school holiday in Ontario. Last Friday, she came home from school and rustled around furtively in her DVD collection. I heard Christmas music and realized that she had noted that it was a month until Christmas and it is now permissible to break out the holiday movies. For someone with memory challenges and a radically different sense of time than the rest of us mortals, this was huge.

This morning, to younger daughter's intense relief, the Advent calendars came out: the permanent one that we set up in the living room, with books to be read aloud, then hung on the Christmas tree (when we set that up a week before Christmas); an online one this year sent to us by an Albertan cousin; tiny Christmas-card-size ones sent by Demeter, and the morning ritual of opening the large cardboard ones, in our bedrooms.

As a child, my very favourite Advent calendars were the ones where the doors opened to show what was happening behind; a meal being cooked in a kitchen, an animal hiding a present under a bush. I haven't seen those kinds in years, although this December I have a very traditional German calendar with rabbits and hedgehogs exchanging gifts under a brilliantly lit woodland tree and huge double-doors for Christmas Eve which will almost certainly reveal the Holy Family in the stable. Door Number One was an apple, which seems appropriately Lutheran somehow. (A casserole, perhaps, for American Lutherans?)

My shopping is only partially finished, and when I think ahead to the extra cooking and cleaning, I could almost wish November back -- except when I see the glow from the corner where younger daughter is. These are the most precious days of the year, a month when she is truly happy. When December ends, we will have to let go of Christmas to allow it to return. However, for her sake, and hers alone, I would keep Christmas all year if I could.

They had us until the fish

2011-11-30T23:06:00.000-05:00

I wasn't sure if it was hair dye or a forest green fascinator.

There I was, passing the minutes before the ballet, training my bird binoculars on the audience below. If you're in the loges at the National Arts centre, it's always fun to do a crowd comparison. The kind of audience that shows up for a symphony concert (reserved and dressy) versus those coming to see a musical (mixture of jeans and flamboyance) versus the Vinyl Cafe aficionados (pullovers). The ballet brings out a distinctive crowd. Oh, you have the usual bun-heads, those humourless and skinny young girls accompanied by their equally skinny and usually blond mothers, but you see some pretty unusual garb in the ladies room, and some head-turning male fashions as well.

You can also pick out the boyfriends and husbands who came along; some sons too, I noted as I scanned the first row where you usually see the more rabid balletomanes. Someone had brought two preteen boys, decked out in plaid baggy shirts. They were in full slump, propping their sneakered feet on the edge of the stage.
"I'll bet their parents are francophone," I muttered to the Resident Fan Boy (who, to confuse other ballet-goers, turns up at performances in a pullover). Anglophone families, in our experience, don't bring their sons to watch dance.

Directly below our loge, I could see a rather ungainly girl taking her seat in the front row. Well, I could see the top of her head anyway, and the front part of her head looked forest-green and feathery. I watched her with interest as I tried to decide, peering through my binoculars, whether she'd dyed half her head, or was wearing those fascinators that young Royals seem to think are nifty. She appeared to be clad in a rather shapeless dress with short sleeves and as she fidgeted with a sheer scarf which she kept smoothing out over her knees, I noticed she was wearing over-sized beige gloves. Well, I thought. It's for a Pina Bausch, after all.

We included this performance of Danzon in our subscription because I recognized the name. It turns out that these two Ottawa performances by Tanztheater Wuppertal were the only Canadian ones on this tour, and we had something of a hot ticket. I've seen bits and pieces of Pina Bausch works on television, so I was prepared for quite a bit of surrealism.

No disappointments there. We started with two women in white shifts struggling on their backs like overturned beetles while a man in an large diaper rolled stones at them, then, like a child, experimented with pinning them down with the rocks. Then a lady in an elegant swirly summer dress strolled across the stage ("I am here and you are there!") and plucked someone from the audience to share the view. It was, of course, the fascinator-lady I'd been studying earlier, and she turned out to be a man and clearly a member of the troupe.

Things got weirder from there. It was rather relaxing, as I learned long ago not to labour on attaching meaning to modern dance performances. It usually emerges on its own, and if not, so what? We saw naked women in bathtubs being slowly removed, one by one, by a blindfolded man. Couples literally rolled in the hay. A cross-dresser in an evening gown and full-blown Bette Davis mode, drawled through a meandering monologue. Tents were set up and campers listened to excerpts of Bambi and long jokes, roaring with laughter. Nude people behind a translucent screen showing flowers and crashing surf, chased each other, piggy-backed each other, and appeared to frolic in the waves. (The Resident Fan Boy told me later that younger daughter shielded her face behind her programme during that bit, but as you can see from the photo, we couldn't see much. I bet those preteen boys in the front row were straining their eyes.)

It was, as elder daughter might say, random, but in this small company with a pleasing family mix of young and old dancers, it felt as we were getting to know each individual character.

Then, out of nowhere, we were confronted with a large screen featuring close-ups of schools of various tropical fish. In front, a very young man in black, whom we'd not seen before, stood and fluttered his hands. This seemed to go on for a good ten minutes. That's the first time during the evening that I found myself trying to see my watch in the darkness. The other dancers returned and did various odd things with dirt, but it felt as if the spell had been broken.

At the end, the company came out for their curtain calls to rapturous applause. (The preteen boys in the front row were in a non-clapping slump.) The dancers clung to each other in a long line, with the young man who had been fluttering with the fish looking closed down and rather out-of-place.

As we descended from the upper levels to find the exit, the Resident Fan Boy commented: "I was fine until the fish." I giggled. I had been thinking almost the exact same thing. Younger daughter, however, declared she had liked the part with the fish, especially the one which reminded her of Dorey from Finding Nemo. So I guess it was a win-win, seeing as we had enjoyed the rest of the performance.

It being the one Canadian venue of the tour, there were detailed reviews from both the Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail, both reviewers singling out the moving tribute to the late Pina Bausch. Apparently, she had choreographed the fish solo for herself.

I guess, then, if you were "in the know", that would be your reward. I think, though, that being unknowing isn't always a bad thing when watching dance. I'm certainly glad we didn't miss this.

Hallowe'en at fifteen

2011-10-31T21:22:00.002-04:00

When I felt the egg yolk oozing down the back of my head, I probably should have headed home. I could have stayed out of a lot of trouble. I would have missed my most exciting Hallowe'en ever, but excitement and danger are over-rated. Aren't they?

Back in the days of my misspent youth, the cut-off age for trick-or-treating was generally thirteen, the age I happened to be when we moved from View Royal on the outskirts of Greater Victoria to Esquimalt, a municipality closer to town. When I was fifteen, my best friend Julie suggested I come back to my old neighbourhood for the bonfire. There were Hallowe'en bonfires throughout the city in the community parks, usually run by the local Kiwanis. Nothing special, but it beat the prospect of staying home watching television and shelling out candy.

I turned up with Mindy, another friend from our junior high. Mindy was wide-eyed and energetic, and dated boys five years her senior. In fact, I'm not sure how she happened to be free that evening to join us.

We entered the dark playing grounds, and tried to pick out Julie, a husky-voiced and high-coloured girl with permanent turn-out. To our horror, Julie was in the company of two other fellow Grade Nines: Rudi and Mick. Like Julie, I had been at school with Rudi since Grade Six, so he had been the buzz-cutted, bespectacled bane of my existence for three years. Mick was Rudi's constant companion. His chief identifying characteristic was his strangled voice, which was in continual adolescent flux. The poor boy sounded like Gonzo the Great until university.

It was when we girls were huddled in conference about our plans (there were none), that Rudi broke the egg on my hair. This was apparently his declaration that he and Mick would be passing the evening with us. I really should have gone home.

Since nothing was happening at the bonfire, we got the brilliant idea to seek out the house of our much-hated French teacher, a woman who had made the fatal decision to spend what very few years remained of her career teaching middle-teenagers, a task for which she was spectacularly unsuited. The unfortunate woman lived on the other side of the Trans-Canada Highway, not far from my old house.

Her home was dark when we got there, so Rudi and Mick scrawled witty epithets on the windows, mostly on the theme of the French teacher's rather old and very ill-fitting wig. We made our way back, passing my old house, crossing the disused railway where I used to go on long walks with my dog. There was a short slope leading down to the highway, and Mick and Rudi, for reasons comprehensible only to teenaged boys, lit one of the fireworks they had brought along and tossed it into the oncoming lane of the busy road. A car screeched to a halt and a man leapt out.

Thinking it out from a rational distance of several years, the smartest thing for Julie, Mindy and me to do would probably have been to stay our ground. We hadn't tossed the flaming thing, after all. But panic hit us in a wave, and carried us up the hill, then along the railway tracks, the man roaring at us to come back.

Running along railway ties isn't easy in daylight, let alone in the dark. As we scrambled and tripped, Rudie looked back and swore: "He's coming after us!" I glanced back and saw a swinging flashlight. I faced forward just in time to spot my companions disappearing down the side of the embankment. I wondered where they thought they were going, plunging down a steep slope of loose gravel dotted by clumps of bushes, but I was now the sole quarry on the track, so I plunged after them, and in the struggle to stay on my feet didn't realize that I had lost sight of them until I was more than halfway down.

I had no time to wonder where they had gone. I found a space between two scraggly bushes. My one thought was how to blend in, because I knew our pursuer had a flashlight. I was wearing a light-blue coat, which I ripped off and stuffed underneath me, I shoved my glasses in my pocket and pushed my hands into the sleeves of my dark sweater. Pulling my knees to my chest, I buried my face in them, praying my long dark hair would cover the white nape of my neck. I willed my shuddering breath to slow, and kept as still as I could, not daring to look up or out.

An eternity seemed to pass. I could hear nothing but the distant swishing of passing cars on the highway. I wondered how long I would need to stay there, how long I could stay there and how on earth in the dark, in my near-sightedness, in my inability to look, I would ever know when, if ever, it would be safe to move.

Finally, hissing voices called to me, guiding me to a culvert tunneling under the embankment where the others had crouched, watching in terror as the beam from the flashlight swept the slope. I had been just a few feet away.

Mick's state of agitation had wedged his wobbly voice up several octaves to a semi-permanent state of boy soprano.

"He was gonna kill us! He was gonna kill us!" he kept repeating, as the others tried to shush him.
"He had his flashlight on you the whole time," Mindy informed me. She really seemed to be enjoying this.
"I think he couldn't decide if you were really there, or not," said Julie in grave quietness. She was the grand-daughter of an Anglican priest and hadn't been enjoying this quite so much.
"Okay," said Rudi, "We'll head out the other end. We can get to Helmcken Road from here."

So we crept out of the culvert, scanning the rails above and the roads below us anxiously, but our stalker had evidently given up on us. Chattering excitedly and breathing easily, we dropped Julie off at her house opposite the bonfire and followed Rudie to his house on the crescent behind the park where his mother offered to drive Mindy and me home.

Rudie's mum, a relaxed (and possibly oblivious) lady who had adopted Rudie and his brother and sister, but managed to look exactly like them, chatted easily in the car, asking questions about our evening and ignoring our muffled giggles, exchanged looks, and overly nonchalant replies. Looking back, I'm rather glad I had no clairvoyant powers as I sat in the back seat, marveling at our survival. Within the year, Mindy would be packed off to private school after an abortion, and within five years, Rudie's kindly mother would be dead from cancer. Rudie himself married a pal of mine straight out of high school, had a couple of kids and got divorced. Julie married a much older man and had step-kids her age. She was widowed in her thirties. I don't know where Mick is now; I heard his brother died.

I got out at my house, thanked Rudie's mum, gave my mother a sanitized account of the evening, and went upstairs to wash the egg out of my hair. The next morning, my hair seemed particularly shiny. I suppose it was the extra protein.

When we alteration find

2011-10-30T20:35:00.000-04:00

"Samhain", I just learned today, translates roughly into "summer's end". As cold as the last week has been (I've been finally driven into wearing coats and capes), this afternoon was sunny and warm. I popped down to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for our infamous "Witches' Fingers". The store was a zig-zagging of carts, each with at least two pumpkins in them.

As has become my tradition in NaBloPoMo's, I've spent a bit of the month going through past journals and checking ancient Octobers. As when checking past Februarys, Septembers, Marches, etc. (October is the seventh month I've NaBloPoMo-ed), this has been an ambivalent exercise. They don't call it "nostalgia" fer nuthin'. It can hurt to look back. So much has vanished forever.

Each time I go diary-diving, I check to see if a theme emerges. It turns out that October is a complicated month. Several possibilities ambush me: "stress", "momentum", "in progress", "aftershock", even "haunted".

I've always thought of October as the month when we establish equilibrium; after the adjustments of September, we hit cruising altitude.

My journals tell a different story. I look at samples of our schedules, particularly when the girls were in preschool and elementary school and wonder how on earth we coped. I see myself sinking under the load of keeping things up and running by myself when the Resident Fan Boy was in another province. And I see worlds crumbling around us: someone close to us had an abortion in a bygone October; another friend lost her pregnancy in another October. A baby born next door died in less than twenty-four hours; we received word that a marriage we had thought impregnable had fallen to pieces.

A theme for October?
Shift?
Careen?
Lurch?

It's not all bad, of course. October is cool and colourful and there's the thrill of a long line of Hallowe'ens: my childhood ones and those of my children.

And the sweet, long-lost memories of my girls as very small children. Elder daughter was, at age two, having such a good time at Sunday school that she ordered me to "Go home!" She then decided to soften the dismissal: "Go home, dolling..." Younger daughter in a past October when she was about four or five, snuggled into a towel that had been warmed up for her in the dryer: "Mmmmmn...you love me!" Seeing me looking thoughtful that same month, she tucked herself next to me on the couch: "Don't worry, Mum, it will be all wight..."

And as this present October slides away forever, I find myself thinking of one of my favourite poets, Phyllis McGinley, musing about her own teenaged daughters many years ago:

Neither my friends nor quite my foes,
Alien, beautiful, stern and clannish,
Here they dwell, while the wonder grows:
Where in the world did the children vanish?
Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
These are my daughters, I suppose.
But where in the world did the children vanish?

Phyllis McGinley: I should write a post about her, some time...

Nice day for a black wedding

2011-10-29T22:57:00.000-04:00

These skeletons in a medieval woodcut style (actually styrofoam) appeared last week around the shared entrance to our local bookstore and SconeWitch. If you can't quite make it out, the five skeletons to the left are clutching books and those to the right have scones and mugs, although if you click on the picture, you may get a larger version. I think it rather gives the impression of entering a Gothic cathedral, possibly a Spanish one.

I quickly snapped a few shots, then boarded a bus with the Resident Fan Boy to accompany younger daughter to a voice lesson.

Our route took us past the former St Brigid's Church. Well, I guess it is still St Brigid's, but I believe it stopped being a church about five years ago, to great outcry from the faithful, of course. I saw a knot of people out front, lots of deep purple stockings. I thought it might be some sort of art gathering, as that's what St Brigid's is used for a lot these days, but a closer look revealed that it was a small wedding, the members gathering on the steps for a group portrait. I figured out who the bride was by her bouquet; she was draped in a black dress and her attendants were clutching individual and simply huge blood-red gerbera daisies.

Well, I guess you can still get married at St Brigid's even if it's deconsecrated, provided you have a marriage commissioner to perform the ceremony, or clergy from one of the more liberal faiths. However, given the colour scheme of this wedding, the SconeWitch, particularly as it looked today, would have worked too.

More things in heaven and earth

2011-10-28T19:29:00.001-04:00

The evening is crisp and cold, the twilight sky a deepening blue. The Resident Fan Boy throws on his jacket, and I follow, enfolding myself in my cape and slipping on my glow-in-the-dark skeleton gloves.

No, we're not going out Hallowe'ening; I wear a cape and skeleton gloves every autumn. (This may be why people hesitate before sitting beside me on public transit.)

The RFB has just read in the paper that the space station will be passing overhead in a matter of minutes. We've seen the space station before, stepping out in a freezing February twilight two and a half years ago in aid of younger daughter's science homework. Younger daughter doesn't have space homework tonight, and elects to stay inside and watch Anne of Green Gables.

Knots of people scuttle by on the street; mostly under-dressed, probably in quest of Friday night frolics. We scan the northwest sky and glance at our watches.

"There it is!" shouts the Resident Fan Boy. I can't see a thing and look at him warily.

"You can't see it?" He's incredulous. "Look! Just above the telephone wires."

And I gasp. It's suddenly there, just like last time, a bright ball barrelling eastward across the northern part of the sky. We run up to Putman and track it.

"Are you sure it's not a plane?" I ask, but I know it isn't. It's too high and too fast. As our eyes are drawn to the east, I exclaim and point: "Look!"
"What?"
"There, between the trees!"

A bigger and brighter point of light has appeared. It's Jupiter. The paper warned us about that too. It looks like the two brilliant pin-pricks are going to collide, but they're not. They're impossibly far away -- from each other and from us.

Shivering, we hurry back inside. The Resident Fan Boy has brought eclairs and vanilla slices from la Pâtisserie de Gascogne in Westmount in Montreal.
They're pretty heavenly too.

A matter of time

2011-10-27T20:22:00.001-04:00

This picture was taken in October.

October 19th, 1910, to be exact.

I love the timelessness of it, although the rain of that long-ago day has ceased, the pavement dried, the leaves rotted, and actually, the building itself, built in the eighteenth century, was demolished in London in 1960. In 1850, a seven-minute walk away to the west, was the last residence of the Resident Fan Boy's great-great-great-grandmother Harriet Hammond Croose Pasquier where she lived with her second husband, an artist. Between 1820 and 1825, a six-minute stroll northwards from Queen's Square (would it have been called Queen's Square then?) would take you to the house of the RFB's great-great-great-grandparents in another branch, solicitor Matthew and Ann Begbie. This is where they lived briefly with their young, large family and where two of their small boys died. (The Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, which borders Queen's Square, was not yet built.) And a twenty-minute walk to the east, in 1826, my great-great-great-grandparents Richard and Virtue Hales were living in Jerusalem Passage. After a rather disastrous foray into innkeeping in the Barbican area, Richard was back to being a printer and book-seller.

I know about where our ancestors were because I've been plotting them in one of several Google Maps, after being inspired by a British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa lecture a few years ago by John Reid. I now have some idea of what our ancestors in London may have passed on a daily basis because I stumbled upon Lost London: 1870-1945 by Philip Davies in a Chapters bookstore last week. It's a coffee table book, chock-full of gorgeous plate photographs of a London demolished to make way for new structures -- or bombed all to blazes during the Second World War.

The row of buildings in the second picture (taken September 1908) used to stand on Aldgate High Street and are now where The Hoop and Grapes pub is located, one of the oldest taverns in London, with cellars dating back to the thirteenth century. If you walk for six minutes to the north, you'll find yourself in Petticoat Lane, where, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, my great-great-great-great-grandfather William Hales ran another public house, and where his children, including my three-times-great-grandfather, were born. Steps away from the houses in this photograph is St Botolph Aldgate where many of my ancestors were christened and married, probably buried too.

This bleak block of houses (taken just before its 1931 demolition) is Provost Street, Shoreditch where my great-great-great-grandfather James Janes lived with his wife Sarah and my great-great-grandmother Jane was born in 1827, the youngest of five. James worked as a tailor and was still living here at the time of the 1841 census. Did Provost Street look this forsaken at that time? I sincerely hope not.

So many others: the Strand as the Resident Fan Boy's grandmother may have remembered it; the busy streets around St Paul as the RFB's great-grand-father may have recognised it (although he probably would have been shocked by large advertisements cluttering up the surroundings just before the First World War -- he died in the 1890s); sights south of the Thames no doubt passed daily by some of my more recent ancestors.

There were several copies of this lovely book at Chapters, at a rather reasonable price....

Sudoku and the inner bitch

2011-10-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

Three years ago, I took up Sudoku. I was warned sternly against this by Jaywalker, author of the deliciously desperate Belgian Waffle, but I persisted. The most dire of her warnings did not come to pass, I do not do more than one or two a day, but there has been a side effect that makes me uneasy. Sudoku is just mindless enough to permit my own mind to wander while I fill in the squares, and my mind really shouldn't be going out unaccompanied. It strays into all sorts of nasty areas.

I blame this on my "inner bitch", and the unpleasant idea that my nice (ie, innocent, clueless, much happier) self is being drained away by the encroaching years, leaving a dried-up, toxic smear of witchiness with a 'b'.

Among my malevolent mullings of late have been a series of messages from a woman who first contacted me through Facebook last spring. It came in the form of "friend request" with a message saying she didn't know how to send messages through Facebook, but she named my late father, wondering if he was my father and was I his only child? If so, she said, she had information for me, and she gave me an email address. Her profile picture showed an attractive lady of indeterminate age on vacation somewhere tropical. I was puzzled that there was no way to send her a message back through Facebook, nor did she turn up in a Facebook search. I discussed this with the Resident Fan Boy. I didn't want to "friend" her because then she could see all the information on my profile, nor did I want to answer by email because that would give her my email address, and she really had told me nothing about herself.

I decided to create a "gmail" account for myself, and respond to her through that. I kept my message minimal. I told her only that I was the fourth of my father's five children. Yes, she said, giving his birthdate; she had information she didn't "think should be shared on email" and would I give her my phone number or phone her? That's when my inner alarm bells started going off. I could tell from the email address that she was in Canada, and by her phone prefix that she was in British Columbia. When I checked a reverse look-up, I found her house in the southern part of Nanaimo. (Coincidentally, she was about 5 km. from where we lived for three months before moving to Victoria when I was nine.)

Again, I checked with the Resident Fan Boy. He shook his head. "She sounds like a debt collector," he said, with his lawyer caution. (This is plausible, as my father ran up huge debts in Canada with his numerous failed businesses.) I also checked with my mother on Skype; she'd never heard of this woman, but wondered if it was someone who had known me at elementary school in Nanaimo. I pointed out I'd been there for less than three months at the tail-end of Grade Three, and besides, Dad hadn't been with with us in Nanaimo; that was after he ran away to Boston with his girlfriend.

I hemmed and hawed, suspicious that the little information she had seemed to come directly from my online family tree (which she never, at any point in our communication, mentioned). I'm the only descendant of my father on it; I had omitted any information on my siblings because this is basic family history etiquette; it's also illegal to publish people's names on the internet without their permission. I suspect that's why she thought I was an only child. I was also brought up to believe that if you contact a stranger by phone, letter, or other means, the impetus is on you to identify yourself. This woman had not revealed who she was, and I had to wonder why.

I finally decided not to respond, and to block her on Facebook. I left the gmail account to rot in cyberspace.

About a month age, I was checking Facebook one morning and noticed some numbers beside "messages" on my home page. When I clicked on them, there were messages that had been sent to me last spring. Normally, I'm notified by email when I get a message in the Facebook inbox, but after all, I had blocked her:
"I've thought and thought about this, the proper way to do it, or to do it at all..... do you have the right to know? do I have the right to tell you? I am (his) daughter too - on Father's Day it tugs at my heart...."

Oh, crud. Well, hardly a surprise, given my father's track record. I wasn't unsympathetic, but I found her Harlequin Romance prose a bit hard to take, and I still thought it would have been politer to say who she is (or who she thought she is) right up front, don't you? I tried being right up front myself:

I was not notified of the third message and only saw it today. I'm afraid I was so put off by the tone of your first messages, that I blocked you on Facebook after your cryptic contact last May. I checked around with other family members and the general consensus was that you might be a debt-collector. (Dad left a lot of debts behind when he left Canada.) May I ask if you have documentation that you are my half-sister?

Oh goodness no, not a debt collector, she replied airily. And yes, Dad's birth date matched with the information on her birth records. - Wait a minute, I thought. Since when does the father's birth date appear in the child's birth records?

She said she was adopted. Maybe that's when a father's birth dates appears, in adoption records? The only problem with that is that my father pretty consistently lied about his birth year until very late in life, the simple reason being his parents had been married only six months when he was born.

She was just a "regular gal", she said; didn't want to cause anyone any grief: "I apologize if the first messages sounded 'cryptic', it's hard to put down on FB or email whopping information like that, so I was trying to remain respectful."

- Respectful? I thought, incredulously. I was losing patience.

"The information is not as whopping as you might think," I retorted. "Dad was a busy boy. Eight years ago, I was in the position of explaining who I was to Dad's first family in England. They'd never heard of me; Dad had neglected to tell them he had a family in Canada. And guess what? I did not tell them I had information to share and could they get in touch with me? I did not write two more times without revealing the nature of my information. I said at the very beginning: 'This is who I am, and how I believe I'm related to you. I just want to wish you a Merry Christmas. If you don't wish further contact, I will understand.' They, of course, required proof of who I was . . . .Since you initiated this, the onus is on you to prove who you are. If you feel that is too personal, that is your privilege, and we can let this rest. I'm curious of course, but not that curious."

She replied that the way I'd handled the situation with my father's first family had been the right way for me, while the way she had handled the situation with me had been right for her, that she was only seeking information for her "little guy" who had a "profound syndrome" and that as "his mommy", she had had to seek what family information she could find. She told me to take care. I took this as "goodbye", and have not responded.

I sit with the Sudoku, and the sense of falseness and the feelings of being manipulated nag at me as I fill in the little squares. I'm not sure why I feel so irritated with this woman, but I have learned, time and again, that if I don't listen to those inner alarm bells, I will regret it. Something is telling me this woman is bad news.

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast of BBC Four's Tracing Your Roots. It was full of half-sibling reunions. The resident genealogist recommended writing, rather than emailing or phoning suspected relatives, to send a picture, to furnish proof, and be prepared for rejection. When I screwed up the courage to contact my half-brother, and my first cousin, I sent a Christmas card with a family photo with my email and with the assurance that they did not need to respond. My Christmas card list has doubled. They have been open and generous, despite the genealogical bomb that I dropped on them nearly ten years ago.

I am not prepared to be as open with this woman claiming to be my half-sister. Something is telling me not to. Is it my inner bitch, or something deeper inside that knows more than I do?

Maybe I should switch to crossword puzzles.

Cantaloupe tonight; dad's gone afar...

2011-10-25T19:33:00.001-04:00

The Resident Fan Boy is not resident tonight; he's off to a conference in Montreal until Friday, which means three lonely nights and four lonely days as a grass widow for me. Still, it could be worse, and it definitely was, a baker's dozen of years ago, when the RFB decided to take on a six-month secondment in Ottawa, leaving his wife and daughters (then 2 and 6) in Victoria.
Oh, he came home every three weeks, for three fun-filled jet-lagged days. This had started in September and by mid-October, younger daughter had started having night terrors. I tried to cope by transforming myself into some kind of highly organized and crafty earth-mother, trying out recipes for stews and tackling crafts to distract my daughters from their fatherless existence. For instance, one parenting magazine brightly suggested that cantaloupes would be a fun and exotic jack o' lantern variation.
Interesting, yes.
Flimsy, too.

These days, I pick the simplest food preparation I can without resorting to pre-packaged food, and keep projects to a minimum until the RFB comes home, in time for Hallowe'en, as it happens. We'll be carving pumpkins this weekend, but you're welcome to try cantaloupes, if you dare.

A cloudburst doesn't last all day (even in Ottawa)

2011-10-24T18:04:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned in my blog before that I've been reading a couple of "A Poem a Day" anthologies. I've also mentioned that several times, the day's poem has an eerie significance to the week's events.

So yesterday, as you may recall (or not), I was remembering U2's song "Stuck in a Moment" which ends with: "It's just a moment/This too shall pass."

The poem for Saturday, when I was gearing up for yesterday's post and recovering from the trauma of the previous week's miscommunication crisis with younger daughter's school, was Timothy Leary's adaptation (from several English translations into "psychodelese") of this 2700-year-old poem by Taoist philosopher Lao-Tsu:

All things pass
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night
All things pass
What always changes?

Earth . . . sky . . . thunder . . .
mountain . . . water . . .
wind . . . fire . . . lake . . .

These change
And if these do not last

Do man's visions last?
Do man's illusions?

Take things as they come

All things pass

And I recognised the words immediately, and thought of one of the most touching moments during the Concert for George, put together by the late George Harrison's son, wife and famous friends, when Paul McCartney sang "All Things Must Pass". What makes this just a tad more bitter-sweet is that the 1970 album "All Things Must Pass" contained a backlog of George Harrison compositions rejected for inclusion in Beatles albums. I wonder if this one was one of them.

Happy times pass away. Luckily, the same goes for sad times.

Stuck in a moment

2011-10-23T14:17:00.002-04:00

I can remember exactly where I was on the morning of September 14th, 2001. Yes, I said the fourteenth of September, although I could tell you where I was and what I was doing on the morning of September 11th, 2001 -- if you really wanted me to.

Nevertheless on September 14th, I was walking doggedly up Sussex Drive to see an exhibition at the National Art Gallery while crowds of people surged in the other direction, past the American Embassy, then choked in flowers and notes. Across the street, the headless mannequins displaying Justina McCaffrey's wildly expensive designer wedding dresses (you can just see one in the extreme right edge of the photo) were draped in sheer lavender veils of mourning.

Three days after the incinerations in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania had felt more like three weeks and the orgy of grief was set to continue in "a show of support for our American friends and neighbours" on the lawn in front of the Parliament Buildings.

I'd had enough. Sitting in a pub having breakfast three days before, I had been horrified, sickened and terrified along with everybody else, but part of me was now deeply upset that this level of outrage and hysteria had never been demonstrated when word of atrocities in, say, Bosnia or Rwanda, had reached Canada. Granted, two dozen Canadians had died on 9/11, so it seemed, I suppose, a bit more personal. However, I couldn't help thinking that the reason everyone was so devastated by this was that the victims were mostly white and relatively wealthy, the very people supposed to be exempt from this kind of thing. Not long after the attacks, one of the victim's children gave a heartfelt plea to the Canadian press to consider the sufferings of her widowed mother.

In the financial losses resulting from her bereavement, she'd had to give up her summer house.

In the intervening years, 9/11 has become something like an annual festival, like Christmas or Halloween, complete with television specials, many of them repeats, year after year.

This year being the ten anniversary, I decided to keep away from the television, but one night, about to drift off asleep, I stumbled across a Frontline Documentary on PBS entitled Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero and, being too tired to change the channel, blearily began to watch it.

At first glance, it's like any other 9/11 special, the same shaky-camera shots, the same screams, the same re-tellings. However, the focus of this documentary is on the topic of how faith, or indeed, the lack of it, figured in the engineering of this horror, and what role faith, theist or atheist, plays in trying to make sense of the ensuing suffering and in the very nature of evil.

We start with friends and families of victims of the Twin Towers. We hear from Christians of various stripes, Jews, Muslims. This documentary was made about a year after the attacks. They are still clearly reeling from the shock and the statements of faith are simple:
"God didn't do this."
"God knows best."
A grieving Muslim father who lost his daughter and son-in-law, reports that his prayer at the time was that if they could not be saved, "Let them both go to Allah together."

Others are angrier. A writer (for Martha Stewart magazine, as it turns out) who lost her firefighter husband speaks of coming into a crisis while in vacation in Hawaii of all places, questioning why God would "turn this loving man into bones. . . . I just can't bring myself to speak to (God) anymore; I feel so abandoned."

A security guard who lost scores of friends says: "I'm losing respect for him (meaning God the Father - apparently Jesus is just alright with him). I look at God as a barbarian. That wasn't mercy."

Canadian Brian Clark who survived the Twin Towers and saved another man's life, resulting in a life-long close friendship says: "God intervened in our lives," but adds: "Others didn't have that experience -- I can't question it."

Here we're moving into the sticky area, aren't we? I can't fault these people for speaking honestly in their raw pain and grief, but there's that strange sense of entitlement. God should have spared them because... Why? Because they were good people? Good people are slaughtered every day.

The clergy begin to weigh in. An orthodox Rabbi declares: "If the Plan saved you, you better be ready to say how the Plan didn't save others. If you can, at least you're honest, but we don't worship the same God."

And the discussion continues: a rabbinical scholar, a atheist professor of Middle Eastern studies who says he was confirmed in his atheism by 9/11, a French photographer, a conservative Rabbi who sings the transcripts of phone messages left by the victims to their loved ones as prayers (it's odd, it's uncomfortable, but it's moving); novelist Ian McEwan, opera singer Renée Fleming, a professor of Islamic studies, a Catholic priest. The list goes on, a roster of articulate speakers struggling with the unspeakable.

Highlights for me:

1) A Holocaust survivor puts the whole subject of the existence of evil into perspective. As a child, she lost her entire family during the Nazi atrocities: "I've seen hangings, shootings... (wry, bitter smile) You want to hear more? ....Were they, too, created in the image of God?"

2)Margot Adler, an National Public Radio reporter who is also Unitarian, tells the story of Vladimir Putin being interviewed for NPR, and how Adler was struck by something Putin said that was not, as far as she knew, quoted anywhere. They were asking him about Reagan's remarks about the Evil Empire, and Putin sort of shrugged it off, saying it was an exaggeration. But then they asked him about George Bush's definition of Osama Bin Laden as evil personified: "Putin says, 'No. That is mild language.' And then he says: 'We are as dust to them.'"

Adler goes on to emphasize the impact that remark had on her, with evil, you "lose your sense that a human being is a human being" -- it's an estrangement, the jumpers are not just like you. Here's where I found myself nodding, but then, I'm a lifelong Unitarian-Universalist and that's what I was brought up to believe.

3) The disturbing story of a high-ranking Lutheran clergyman who participated in a service in Yankee Stadium shortly after the attacks, and was stunned to find fellow Lutheran clergyman calling for his resignation and defrocking because he, as a Christian minister, had stood on a podium and prayed with clergyman of other faiths.

The documentary ends on an odd postscript. Jarring, I suppose, because it's based on something that it is assumed everyone will have seen -- and I hadn't. It's various interviewees responding to a photograph of two Twin Towers jumpers, remarkable because they are plummeting to their deaths clasping hands. Ian McEwan is one of the few dissenting voices, saying he finds nothing in this but despair. I googled the photograph, but think it serves little purpose in reproducing it here. I'm not sure if it serves any purpose in providing this link to Brian Doyle's brief essay Leap, but you can go look if you like.

I do recommend Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, which is archived and viewable on line.

In the weeks and months after September 11th, 2001, it felt sometimes as if the whole world had sunk into a blue funk. A song getting airplay was U2's "Stuck in a Moment" which, I think, was actually about the recent death of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, but, for me, captured the mood of that autumn and winter:

Bono, Edge, and Elvis Costello performed this recently on Costello's television show "Spectacle".

Dealing with the dark and light on Elgin

2011-10-22T23:48:00.001-04:00

I guess I'm not a resilient as I used to be. All week I've been struggling against what seems like a sort of emotional flu. It's only today that I've feel somewhere within striking distance of my normal energy level which, let's face it, never was that high.

Today was overcast, and the day turned out to be flashes of colour against the grey. We had business along Elgin Street which is my favourite downtown street in Hades. We stopped in at Leading Note because younger daughter will be tackling sight reading this year. (Gulp.) We had brunch at the Elgin Street Diner where I had a waffle totally obscured with brilliant slices of strawberry, kiwi, pineapple and banana. We stopped by Boushey's Fruit Market which always has a surprise. Today, the surprise was chocolate and raspberry liqueur spread. We didn't buy any, but it's nice to know it's there. Then we made our way down to the Byward Market, past Oktoberfesters in Bavarian type garb (does this give the Jewish community nasty flashbacks, I wonder?) and picked out a trio of pumpkins so bright, they might not even need candles come Hallowe'en night. Younger daughter carried hers home with great reverence and pride.

By late afternoon, my spirits were flagging. In the tradition of other NaBloPoMos in which I've taken part, I've been reading through past Octobers in my journals, which is a double-edged sword. Even as I encounter happy memories I'd long forgotten, I keep being haunted by the line in "Stockton Gala Days", one of the songs I'd saved to my iPod this past week:
"What I've learned to hide
What I've lost inside
You'd be surprised if shown
But you'll never, you'll never know..."

(Also, we learned today that younger daughter's voice teacher has bought a two bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom condo, not far from Elgin Street. The maintenance fees, just the maintenance fees, mind, are twice what the Resident Fan Boy and I paid as rent on a two bed/one-and-a-half bath condo when we were first married.)

One of our stops this morning on Elgin Street was at the National Arts Centre for rush seats to tonight's Pop Concert, shamelessly using younger daughter's student discount, so this evening we headed out under a sky which had cleared to reveal faint stars straining to twinkle over the street lamps and headlights. The rather drab Indian High Commission on the corner of our street was festooned with coloured lights; it must be Diwali this weekend.

The conductor led the NAC orchestra with large fluid movements and an earpiece; the orchestra had to keep up with the soundtracks of selections from seven films of Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. The orchestral bits had been deftly removed, so the these living musicians could play along. ("It's sort of karaoke in reverse," commented the Resident Fan Boy at intermission.) Occasionally, they got a little behind -- "There is Nothing Like a Dame" seemed a particular challenge. However, for the most part, they got to rather seamlessly accompany the likes of Shirley Jones, Joel McCrae, Mitzi Gaynor, Julie Andrews, Pat Boone, Bobby Darin... (Okay, the last two were a bit of shock; they were in the second film version of State Fair.) And in the dark, I could see younger daughter's face glowing with delight and pleasure.

I keep having to remind myself that you need the dark to understand what light is.

Lost for words

2011-10-21T18:58:00.000-04:00

Dictionary.com is a web site with (at least) two nifty features for word-lovers. First, they have a "word of the day" which you can have emailed, and is light-years ahead of a similar service provided by Google. (Today's word from Google is "deadpan". I ask you...) Secondly, you can save words to your account. Currently, I have forty delightful and exotic (to me) words on my "favourites" list.

However, it's been a long time since I perused my collection, and I have an uneasy feeling that my subconscious is telling me something:

dil·a·to·ry [dil-uh-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee]
adjective
1.
tending to delay or procrastinate; slow; tardy.
2.
intended to cause delay, gain time, or defer decision: a dilatory strategy.

lucubrate (ˈluːkjʊˌbreɪt) —vb (intr)
to write or study, esp at night
[C17: from Latin lūcubrāre to work by lamplight]
'lucubrator —n

pro·lix [proh-liks, proh-liks] adjective
1.
extended to great, unnecessary, or tedious length; long and wordy.
2.
(of a person) given to speaking or writing at great or tedious length.

cacoethes (ˌkækəʊˈiːθiːz) —n
an uncontrollable urge or desire, esp for something harmful; mania: a cacoethes for smoking
[C16: from Latin cacoēthes malignant disease, from Greek kakoēthēs of an evil disposition, from kakoscaco- + ēthos character]
cacoethic
—adj

am·bi·sin·is·ter [am-bi-sin-uh-ster] adjective
clumsy or unskillful with both hands.

mump·si·mus [muhmp-suh-muhs]
noun, plural -mus·es for 2.
1.
adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language, memorization, practice, belief, etc., out of habit or obstinacy (opposed to sumpsimus).
2.
a person who persists in a mistaken expression or practice (opposed to sumpsimus).

Oh dear.

Not only that, while writing the past few posts, I have missed the opportunity of using such words as "chatoyant" and "caliginous".

All is not lost. With Hallowe'en coming up, I may be able to use "horripilate"....

An awkward October memory

2011-10-20T20:27:00.000-04:00

In all my years of living in Victoria, the thing I probably knew best was that I had to allow myself an hour to get anywhere. It's a good rule in Hades, too. In Victoria, it was because you had to travel as if you were running along the spokes of a wheel; you had to go downtown to make a transfer, then head out again to your destination. (In Hades, it's because you're battling with delays and what is essentially a tangle of milk routes.)

The Resident Fan Boy's mother died in the early years of our marriage. She was, uh, not exactly my greatest fan, but I understood the very basics of in-law etiquette as set out by Judith Martin, aka "Miss Manners": 1) feign affection; 2) show up for state occasions.

The interment of Late Mother-in-law's ashes certainly qualified as a state occasion, even though only six people were to be present: Resident Fan Boy, Bereaved Father-in-law, Far-flung Sister-in-law (the reason for the interment taking place a month after LMIL's funeral which FfSIL had been unable to attend), Rector of BFIL's current church, and Rector of BFIL's former church in whose churchyard the said ashes were being interred. And me, who was not particularly welcome, but definitely expected.

I had a teaching assignment at the university that morning and the brief ceremony was scheduled for one o'clock that afternoon. I knew I could be home well before noon, allowing myself to change into appropriately somber garb, setting off by public transit with more than an hour to spare.

Except the bus that took me down the spoke, so to speak, to downtown Victoria dropped me off just in time for me to see the bus I needed disappearing around the corner.

I didn't panic. The next bus, a variation on the bus I'd just missed, was due in half an hour. It would reach the churchyard by a slightly different route, from a slightly different direction. It would be cutting it a bit fine, but I should arrive with a minute or two to spare.

The bus in question, as is the unwritten rule in bus-scheduling, was a few minutes late, just as the previous bus had been a few minutes early. I kept a calm but steady eye on my watch as we approached the street leading to the church. I had about ten minutes.

To my horror, the bus continued past my street, barreled to a timing point several blocks behind my destination and turned off its motor. In the two years since I'd last taken this particular bus, there had been a route alteration. I now had seven minutes and was considerably more than a five minute dash away, even if I hadn't been wearing black pumps.

The bus started up after the driver had had his coffee and to my despair, headed back the way it had come. This time, it made the expected turn, and standing by the exit, clinging to the rail, I gazed out over the approaching churchyard and could make out the small knot of mourners standing with heads bowed. For a few depressed seconds, I seriously considered staying on the bus, but got out and hobbled along the gravel path.

The Resident Fan Boy filled me in later. Both he and his father are notorious for showing up places early. The RFB had got it in his head that six people were attending, and in the emotion of holding the urn with his mother's ashes, did a quick mental head-count, got the number six, and when asked if he was ready, nodded. It was only at the end of committal that his father sighed heavily: "I guess she isn't coming, then?" Looking up wildly, the RFB realized that the sixth person was the assistant rector. Not me. His wife. The woman dashing up the path with a rather flushed face.

He believed my story, of course. I'm sure his father and sister didn't.

Music for self-respecting and wistful drag queens (but no spanish techno)

2011-10-19T20:16:00.001-04:00

Last week's school crisis seems to have taken rather a lot out of me. I've been working on some better-thought-out ideas for posts (or maybe I'm deluding myself again; maybe they're really bad ideas...), but find myself lacking energy and courage. This morning, I decided to download some more music on to my iPod, using a wish list I keep for that purpose. I got myself about a dozen songs off iTunes, so I thought I'd share half a dozen with you. There's no unifying theme other than they each roughly represent a decade.

For the sixties, "Pata Pata" with the late great Miriam Makeba. My strongest memory of this song is of Folk Dancing Club in university. (Yes, I did. You can stop laughing now.) Several of the other girls already knew a set dance to this which involved swinging the knees and elbows out from their bodies. Maybe that was the original "Pata Pata". I wouldn't know.

For the seventies, another powerful lady, Mavis Staples with her dad Roebuck and sisters belting "Respect Yourself". This is a song that could be aimed at most arrogant young men, no matter what their colour:

Here's one of my favourites from the eighties. "If We Never Meet Again" has been covered by a number of singers, but here sung by the songwriter himself, Jules Shear with his group The Reckless Sleepers:

And this wistful number from the nineties, "Stockton Gala Days" sung by Natalie Merchant just before she parted company with 10,000 Maniacs:

The "aughts" are represented with this arresting video for "Sing Me Spanish Techno" by The New Pornographers, featuring well-known (in their field) drag queens Juanita More from San Francisco and Michael Venus from Vancouver. (Michael's the tall blond, if you hadn't figured that out already.)

Finally, "Weightless One" by Prince Edward Island group Two Hours' Traffic, a song that's been getting a bit of airplay this year, although the album it's from is two years old. The only video I can find of it is this rather shaky and talked-over club version.

That's it. I'm going to bed now...

The un-de-friended mother

2011-10-18T19:46:00.002-04:00

Elder daughter unfriended me on Facebook when she was fifteen. No offense, she said defensively. She couldn't think of a single one of her friends who had parents as Facebook friends. Facebook was private, she said. Facebook is the polar opposite of private, I said. No dice. Her grandmother, her father and I were out.

Sometime last spring, her name quietly re-appeared on my Facebook list. Rather like a zoologist sighting a rare and shy species, I moved cautiously. I didn't put messages on her wall. I didn't even mention the re-friending. Hesitantly, I would occasionally ask about something I'd seen at her profile.

I soon stopped.

"Mu-u-u-um... Quit stalking me!"

Stalking? Looking at a Facebook profile is stalking? Oh, okay...

I continued to look, but silently. Until this fall when an uncharacteristic note appeared: "(Elder daughter) is attending: I'm getting dru-u-u-unk!"

It seems some friend of hers was celebrating the end of some sort of physical training in which she'd been engaged all summer with a party which wouldn't include "everyone at Dal", just some close friends of her and her flat-mates.

Right. So this was why she was listing it as a "Public Event". One of the said roomies piped up: "In case this isn't clear, it's at our place!" while helpfully supplying the address.

I thought about it all day before typing a comment below the lengthy description of this event: "My daughter's going to kill me for saying this, but if you don't want all of Dal to come, should you really be publishing your address on a public event?"

Elder daughter was in touch with me within half an hour, leaving a "MOTHER!" on my Facebook wall, followed by a winking and bobbing Skype icon. I removed my comment, even though someone had "liked" it. Elder daughter informed me that this was because I'd left the "l" out of "public". I was pretty sure I was going to be unfriended on the spot, but elder daughter fixed it. She informed all her friends that I was crazy.

I guess that's what you call "saving face".

What makes me tic

2011-10-17T18:42:00.001-04:00

"Is there such a thing as late-onset Tourette's Syndrome?" I asked the Resident Fan Boy as we trudged along the street that leads to younger daughter's school, girding ourselves for a confrontation. In the tortuous week leading up to this morning's showdown, I've been beset with a host of unpleasant physical manifestations of my inner tension, including an unwelcome new one: a twitch at the lower corner of my right eye which wasn't quite a tic. Briefly, I toy with visions of myself sitting on buses beating out rhythms on my thighs, exploding in expletives.

But it turns out that curfew shall not ring tonight. We had a pleasant and productive encounter with the head teacher who, it turns out, has been rather distracted by a wedding this past weekend -- her own. Also, the teacher that has really been worrying us is not in until Wednesday. The Resident Fan Boy and I made our way to the bus taking us for a coffee break downtown before the RFB goes back to work, and I collapsed briefly on his shoulder.

This calls for music, don't you think?

First up: Bohemian Rhapsody on a ukulele.
No, really.
This is amazing:

Next up, something I have shamelessly stolen from the eclectic blog Eine Kleine Nichtmusik:

Perfect. If you hear some extra thumping, that will be me beating out a rhythm on the computer tower. I may even swear a little...

Melinoe on a half-shell

2011-10-16T18:21:00.002-04:00

Oh, ouch. The tensions of the last week have found their way into my middle and lower back, into my jaw. Sometimes my hands shake. Tomorrow, we confront the teaching staff at younger daughter's school. We only plan to deliver the hereunto undeliverable homework, along with a reminder of our phone number and respective emails, but it may be an indication that things have already gone too far.

I comfort myself with music, with books, with movies, with memories. On one of our last nights in Victoria last August, my friend-of-the-right-hand offered to take us to Mount Tolmie to watch the sunset.

"Oh, could we go to a beach?" I asked. Six weeks had passed, and I had failed to stroll by the sea.

So she drove us down to Willows Beach. The sun had already slipped behind the park, and the mountains were mauve and misty. The water rippled in lines of silver and lilac. Younger daughter took off her shoes and waded into the gentle pearly ripples, while we filled our shoes with fine grey sand. A seal poked up her head, then slipped away unseen.

And I didn't have a camera with me. But I do have this picture of an abalone shell. That's something what it was like.

Eureka!

2011-10-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

In the midst of a miserable week full of crying jags, rage, injustice, and possibly even cruelty (I've been trying to pluck up the courage to blog about it, but who the hell would want to read it?), I have this small triumph.

Google Images has a new feature called "Search by Image" which allows you to drag-and-drop, or upload an image into the search field. Remember a little while back, I was ruminating on my eleven-year bedazzlement and befuddlement on the origins of this photo which I see every time we have lunch in the Elgin Street Diner? Well, I uploaded the image and the one, single match took me to a French site which informed me that the photographer was Sam Tata, born in China in 1911. From there, all I had to do was "google" Sam Tata and among the many hits was this link:
Coolie Woman, Monsoon, Bombay, India

....to the National Gallery of Canada. It turns out that the gallery has an 1987 print of the 1948 photo, and that Sam Tata died a mere six years ago --- in Sooke, British Columbia. Sooke is 39 kilometres (24 miles) west of Victoria!

Tonight, when the troubles looming on Monday fly in my face like gnats, I'll conjure up this image and hold it against the dark...

Dressed in morning

2011-10-14T16:19:00.003-04:00

Every October I feel the pull to go to graveyards and catch wishes.

It's not as ghoulish as it sounds.

I read in a children's book some years ago that if you catch a falling leaf before it hits the ground; you can make a wish on it.

Leaf-catching is a rather strange thing to be caught doing, particularly if one is a grown woman.

Not having a car, I can walk to Beechwood Cemetery in about twenty minutes. This year, I was determined to go early in the morning, as nearly all of my past expeditions have been in the afternoon or at sunset. I set out on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving Monday, taking advantage of the fact that younger daughter has had a lift to school these mornings.

Beechwood Cemetery was not altogether deserted, even before 9 am. The groundskeepers were roaring about in their lawn mowers, vans, and earth movers. An occasional coffee-clutcher made his or her way en route to school or work. Down near the chapel, people were parking their SUVs. A long-limbed lady in black picked her way through the markers.

However, most of the time, I was on my own, snapping pictures, trying to capture the barely-used morning light. Every now and then, I would glimpse a golden shower not far away and plant myself beneath it. You really have to spot a leaf while it's still very high in the air and swoop with it. That morning, I caught seven. That's a record for one autumn, let alone one morning! I made seven wishes, three of them for younger daughter. (Judging from the events of the past week, the wishes are either coming true in a way I don't yet understand, or were poorly phrased.)

As I made my way back, I saw a man engraving a headstone, apparently sand-blasting through a plastic stencil. Wearing a hood rather like an old-fashioned hairdryer completely over his head, he crouched like Gollum on the edge of Middle Earth, surrounded by tombstones in the shape of open books, all blank, all waiting for sad stories in the drifting cloud of mist and dust.

Variations on precarious

2011-10-13T18:32:00.002-04:00

Ever had a song that has always meant one thing completely change its meaning in the course of events?

I've always enjoyed Blues Traveler's "Most Precarious", in spite of an unbelievably lame official video where a handsome young man pursues a dazzling young woman while the camera focuses on her exposed belly button.

However, I'd dropped Demeter off at the airport, and while there will be a certain relief in having our house back to our accustomed level of privacy, I was looking out the bus window, assailed by darker thoughts because when your mother reaches a certain age, you have to wonder which separation is the final one. (I hasten to add that Demeter is in excellent health.) To drive away my melancholy, I stuck in my ear-buds and hit "Song Shuffle" on my iPod. "Most Precarious" was among the songs cheering my soul. This lasted until I picked up younger daughter from her independent school (consisting of 25 students) and discovered that for the third time this week, her teachers have failed to look at her assignments and the notes I enclosed with them.

We're having a battle of wills with the two head teachers who, despite younger daughter's having been at the school for two years, are convinced that her inability to remember the different items required for each class (a big change from middle school to high school) is some sort of adolescent stone-walling and not a result of her memory deficits and autism. Apparently, they think refusing to help her retrieve what she needs from the cloakroom, including the homework assignments which have taken hours of family time, will teach her responsibility.

I came home unutterably depressed and close to tears. Younger daughter, of course, became convinced I was angry with her.

And all of a sudden, "Most Precarious" is not a song about taking a chance on romantic love; it's a song about struggling for a daughter's education.

Music & Lyrics: John Popper

Don't you give up don't allow disaster
Don't you give up don't you let her win
We're talking about a "forever after"
Don't you give up don't you dare give in
Don't you give up don't you dare give in

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?

Please understand and hear what I'm saying
The time is now and you don't have long
She could be oceans away tomorrow
So soon your chance will have come and gone
So soon your chance will have come and gone

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?

The tight-wire's strung and you're out in the middle
All eyes upon you no net below
Inches to go and you're almost home free
Feel the wires swaying to and fro
Feel the wires swaying to and fro

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like it would be a damn shame?
Would be forever if it meant a day?
How stoically I exclaim
As she turns from me and walks away

The light in her eyes explanation escapes you
Longing to please and not feel alone
And she doesn't know it but really she loves you
Some day so soon you're gonna make it home
Some day so soon you're gonna make it home

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?

We've left the school a stern voice message. Heaven help us...

My day in haiku

2011-10-12T23:49:00.001-04:00

Day dawns and pounces.
Daughter is misunderstood.
Compose note to teacher.

Shop with Demeter.
Mall coffee near shoe repair.
Special hell in Hades.

Carefully composed
Note to teacher with homework
Is returned unopened.

Late afternoon is
Grey and spent in crammed transit
Anticipating

More goddamned homework.
Guidance and suggestions still
Much like pulling teeth.

Was today that bad?
Okay, it had its moments.
Nice pasta for lunch...

Leaving no quarter

2011-10-11T21:59:00.001-04:00

In October, the wasps are dopey and cranky, and the spiders come in to get warm. When we lived in Victoria, the October visitor was usually a hobo spider. They're quite large and an unsettling and unwelcome sight crossing one's living room in the lamp light.

Although nineteen, elder daughter has somehow managed to never be in a house alone at night before (except for baby-sitting and that's not alone by definition). She spent her first year in university in residence, and when home, one of us is usually there. During a long distance chat, when she breaks off in a panic: "Mu-u-um! There's a spider in the kitchen!"
"A spider?"
"It's HUGE! It's right by my foot!"
"Okay, grab a glass and put it over the spider, then you can slip a piece of paper underneath..."
"But it's HUGE, Mom! It's the size of a QUARTER."
"Now, calm down. It doesn't want to hurt you. Besides, remember the spiders in Victoria. They were much bigger..."
(They were, too, the accompanying photo notwithstanding.)
"Mu-u-u-u-um!!! I was eight; it wasn't my problem! And it's eleven o'clock at night and it's dark...."

I hand the phone to the Resident Fan Boy who talks her through the spider eviction.

This evening, as an enormous harvest moon fights its way free of the clouds on the eastern horizon, it occurs to me that she knows something important: when you're eight, it isn't your problem. When you're nineteen, it's becoming your problem although you may have parents to give you step-by-step instructions over the phone. Time enough to discover the depressing next stage. Yep, she's growing up, and I guess these will be cold nights for spiders.

Post prandial (see what I did there?)

2011-10-10T10:29:00.002-04:00

Breakfast options this morning: warmed up garlic bread, cold chicken, left-over (made from scratch) pumpkin pie...

An appetite suppressant may be in order. This YouTube gem features Ellen Page who was born in Nova Scotia and nominated for an Oscar for her role in the quirky flick Juno. For the record, practically nothing in this video is true of Canadian Thanksgivings. Well, except maybe for the Canadian Club...

Tabling

2011-10-09T07:56:00.004-04:00

Woke up in a sweat this morning, worrying about homework and schoolwork issues at younger daughter's school and remembering I need to cook today because we're having Thanksgiving dinner on the Sunday because elder daughter flies back to Halifax tomorrow, and Demeter is going to have all sorts of ways of trying to help....

So this video is a tad misleading, but it is also an aspect of the Canadian Thanksgiving experience:

A First Nation Summer?

2011-10-08T17:17:00.000-04:00

The first frost warning appeared on the Environment Canada web site this past week, and the temperatures have risen this weekend to a steamy (for October) 26 degrees Celsius. I guess this is, to use a politically-incorrect phrase, an Indian Summer.

Early this morning, I stood at the bus stop en route to this month's BIFHSGO meeting in a summer-weight cotton blouse, marveling at the warmth. A fellow in a reflective vest moved from public planter to public planter, methodically uprooting the scarlet hibiscus that have bloomed there all summer. He spent some time knocking the dirt off the roots into the large stone pot, then stuffed the bush into a large black garbage bag. I felt rather sad for the doomed plants, still glowing prettily from the dark plastic depths, so when I got home after the meeting, I showed Demeter a picture I'd taken last summer at the house-sit in Victoria, to make sure I had the correct name for the flower.

Yesterday, I heard from a cousin asking me about our family history. He seems to do this every year or so. Each time I hear from him, he has basically the same questions which I answer patiently each time. He always seems to ask in October. His dad's 77th birthday is next week and they haven't spoken in years; his younger son has never met his paternal grandfather. I send a link to my family history map of Wales and a copy of a 116-year time line I did for my mother, but he really wants to look at a family tree chart, to see the names and how they connect to him and his sons. That's what we try to do in family history, to find where we fit, where we belong, and to say to those shadowy figures in the past, "I know your name; you belong, too." I send my cousin a link to my online tree where he can gaze at charts to his heart's content.

I know your name; you are not forgotten.

Keeping track

2011-10-07T15:13:00.001-04:00

When my father departed for Boston with another woman, my mother decided to scrub around her life, make a fresh start, and move to some place warmer. She splurged, booking two "roomettes" on the train from Edmonton, Alberta to Nanaimo, British Columbia. I was eight years old and charmed by the beds which slid out of the wall like drawers. To this day, I can't recall having a better night's sleep, rocked through the Rockies. I was woken only once, as the guard in Jasper paced the platform calling out to those who could hear him to change their watches back one hour. Early in the morning, I lay on my stomach in my drawer-bed head-to-head with my six-year-old sister, gasping as nearly bottomless canyons opened up beneath the train as it sped over trestles. By breakfast time, we sat watched the sunny Okanagan orchards flash by the dining car. As an introduction to a new life, it was pretty hard to beat.

Recapturing that perfect sleep was one of the goals on my mind when we decided to take Demeter and younger daughter to Halifax by train last year to see elder daughter at her university and spend the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend. Other considerations were Demeter's life long dream to travel completely across Canada by rail (this seemed a reasonable compromise), and the idea of traveling through the Maritimes in autumn.

We started the 26-hour journey with the dayliner jaunt from Ottawa to Montreal, moving in and out of the shadow of rainstorms and reaching Canada's second largest city with its mad inter-weaving of La Metro subway, VIA rail, Amtrak and commuter trains at La Gare Centrale, to say nothing of the shoppers. After nearly forgetting my suitcase on the platform (I was shepherding Demeter and younger daughter while the Resident Fan Boy charged ahead and disappeared down the train corridor), we glided slowly across the dark river surrounded by the blazing lights of the city, and made our way down the south bank of the St Lawrence before veering away south from the Seaway just past Rimouski and crossing into the province of New Brunswick at daybreak just at the innermost tip of Chaleur Bay. From there we headed steadily south, rumbling across the Miramichi River about mid-morning, entering northern Nova Scotia sometime after lunch then making a long circle around the south-west edge of Halifax, arriving in the late afternoon, steps away from the famous Pier 21 where so many new Canadians entered the country, including Demeter many years ago.

When we took Demeter to the Pier 21 Museum the next day, a brand-new Cuban-Canadian tour guide greeted her with an enormous "Welcome ba-a-a-a-ck!" and a gold alumna sticker for her coat. She remembered her fellow boat passengers, Germans en route to Wisconsin and Italians en route to Toronto, being put in holding cages, while she, a British subject, was waved through to the waiting train to Edmonton. (We also learned there had been a young man, a Haligonian, on the boat...)

And we visited with elder daughter at the University of King's College, ate two Thanksgiving dinners (one of them cooked by us in a student residence kitchen), saw the sights, including the ancient (by Canadian standards) Old Burying Ground in the centre of the city where they stopped burying people in 1844. And I wistfully watched elder daughter striding through the streets of a city that will be hers and never mine. And I watched Demeter wonder about the beautiful boy from Halifax and what might have been. And I was grateful to have seized the chance to come this way, even though the train bed, not a magic drawer, but a shallow fold-out shelf, was lumpy and jumpy and I never did much more than doze, or peer out into the darkness at ghostly white cottages, paddock fences, and flashing poles.

We flew back home. Train travel, alas, has long ceased to be the economical option.

Rideau River Rorschach

2011-10-06T23:53:00.002-04:00

It's five minutes to midnight. I took this in October, but not this October. Gosh, I hope I haven't posted this already....

If I had a hammer (write of passage number twenty-two)

2011-10-05T23:52:00.000-04:00

He has one of those tool boxes you see workmen with nowadays: it's white and blue plastic, about three feet long and a foot deep -- looks rather like those cases hospitals use for transporting organs, if organs were three feet long and a foot deep. He's placed the tool box across the aisle and is standing behind it grasping railings on either side. He's wearing a dark tee shirt that says something about carpentry across the back. I have a good view of it because I'm standing behind him and I need to get off the bus.

Crowded bus etiquette is tricky. You don't want to ask someone to let you pass if they're getting off too, so I tap him on one broad shoulder and ask: "Are you getting off?" Unfortunately, he seems to think I'm angling for a seat that has just become available ahead of him. By the time we've established I'm trying to get out, the bus has taken off again.

"No," I say in despair. It has been a long day with too many crowded buses. "That was my stop."

"Well, you should have got ready two stop sooner," he tells me.

This is too much. "I got up in plenty of time," I protest.

He snaps.

"WELL WHAT THE *&^%@# DID YOU EXPECT ME TO DO, LADY? WHERE WAS I SUPPOSED TO GO?"

Now, in several years of taking transit, many of those weighed down with any number and types of bags and containers, I have never yet made someone miss their stop by blocking the aisle. It seems impolitic to say so, seeing as he's still yelling at me. By this time, I've to slip down to the exit, and while he continues to bellow, give him my best "Oh, are you going to go on like this?" look before turning to find younger daughter, who in the crush of getting on had found a seat further forward.

"I'm sorry about this, Mom," she says in a little voice.
"It's okay, sweetie," I tell her. "It's not your fault."

Angry Carpenter has sat down in the seat he thought I wanted, so has a good view of this tender little scene. He leans forward.

"Ma'am, I apologise for losing my temper."

Like his previous outburst, this is completely out-of-left-field, and scores of responses flash in my brain. However, it's an apology and how many of those do you get these days, even in Canada?

"You have yourself a good evening." I say, with all the sincerity I can muster. Then younger daughter and I get off.

"Mind if I swoop?" "It's your place..."

2011-10-04T23:07:00.000-04:00

Demeter flew in for a ten-day visit that encompasses Thanksgiving, so I'm cheating today. I hope I won't have to cheat for the whole ten days, but we'll see. This is my absolute favourite skit from The Kids in the Hall. I find both the characters here rather endearing, but especially the quintessential hockey fan played by Scott Thompson who, ironically, was the first openly gay actor I recall encountering on TV. Mark McKinney, the would-be gay vampire, is actually straight in real life and, I feel compelled to add, co-wrote and starred in one of my favourite television series of all time Slings and Arrows. Also, I grew up knowing guys just like Brad. His caped companion, not so much, but I led a sheltered life and didn't go to hockey games...

Who-bris?

2011-10-03T22:07:00.001-04:00

Okay. I've watched "The Wedding of River Song" twice. Trouble is, I need to watch Steven Moffat's episodes at least three times before I have the slightest idea what's going on. This episode was like the Silents, the creepy slimy things in business suits who hang from ceilings like bats and are instantly forgotten the minute you look away. Every time I try to recall what happened in the first fifteen minutes --- I can't. I just can't. There were pterodactyls, weren't there? And Winston Churchill as Caesar. Oh yeah, and a Noel Fielding look-a-like in a Star Wars bar.

My head hurts.

My understanding, from a very quick look around the Doctor Who sites I can stand, is that opinions are sharply divided on this one, between those that were dazzled and those who were bored (which is difficult to imagine) and have decided that Stephen Moffat has ruined Doctor Who.

Oh, here we go again. Even at his most preposterous, Russell T Davies didn't ruin Doctor Who. (I've gone on about this before; if you care, just type "Russell T Davies" in the search box, but only if you must...) Steven Moffat, another highly talented and brilliant television writer, won't ruin Doctor Who. Most of my favourite episodes have been penned by Steven Moffat. So why do I feel oddly deflated?

I like Matt Smith as the Doctor. I like Amy Pond. I'm very fond of Rory. And I love-love-love River Song. (I've gone on about that before too.)

Y'know, I think the problem is that I really don't care for this split season thing, with half-a-dozen episodes airing last spring and another bunch airing this late summer/early autumn. If we're going to go with this story-arc thing, best have all the episodes close together, so lame-brains like me can keep up. Also, frankly, two short seasons just make me feel twice as cheated when they end.

My contribution to the obsessive arguments now dominating the Who-niverse: It seems to me that the Silents have taken upon themselves the task once overseen by the Time Lords. The Resident Fan Boy thinks I'm on to something and that the Silents are the Time Lords. Discuss.

The ten suggestions

2011-10-02T18:59:00.001-04:00

The door is always open, says the current billboard in front of the Resident Fan Boy's church. "Except when it isn't," says I, making my way across the crosswalk from where the bus has dropped us off. The Resident Fan Boy dissolves into manly giggles. The front door of the church is always locked except for Sunday morning services. "Sometimes," he intones, "you need to sneak around the side. There's a metaphor in there somewhere..."

We're here early because younger daughter has her final rehearsal before her solo in this suddenly chilly morning's "inter-generational" service. There will be bongos, bells, and inaudible Bible readings by coerced pre-adolescents. Younger daughter has been carefully preparing an ugly duckling of a little song entitled "Beautiful". I've been listening to her prepare over the past few weeks; it's devilishly difficult to sing, with an odd meandering melody. Then there's the lyrics:

Beautiful is a flow'r, the sea; and sometimes beauty is me
Beauty is summer, the grass or the snow; or even seeing animals, a fawn and the doe.
Beauty is the prairie, the forest, a bird; and sometimes beauty can be just a word.
Beauty can be a sunset that rises; Beauty can be many colours, shapes and sizes.
Beautiful...Beautiful...Beautiful.

Wait a minute. A sunset that rises? Fortunately, the Resident Fan Boy explained to me that it was poem by a girl who died at age eleven. Oh. Okay. He also pointed out that only a child raised on the Canadian prairie could come up with "Beauty is the prairie, the grass or the snow...." Every Prairie kid knows that snow can show up anytime.

Younger daughter will not sing, as it happens, until an arts-based "reflection time", based on "God's Loving Ways" (the ten commandments, but that made God sound way too bossy). Each "Way" has been carefully rephrased: "Honour thy mother and father" has become "Pay attention to your parents and other adults who love you." Not quite the same thing, is it? Anyway, the congregation has fifteen minutes to cut out images from magazines and clue them to the appropriate ~~commandment~~ Loving Way. I decide this is an ideal moment to accompany younger daughter to the washroom and notice several other people have the same idea.

When we return, the Resident Fan Boy is gleefully snipping something out. He's discovered an ad for Genesis Compost which declares: "Your tomatoes will be the envy of your neighbours!" Oh, the irony. He's gluing it under Loving Way #3: "Be careful how you use my name, whether you are speaking in anger or joy." (Loving Way #10 is probably more appropriate but that's clear across the sanctuary.)

Younger daughter's task is to sing the congregation back into the prayers. And she does it.

Beautifully.

Dancing between the rain-drops

2011-10-01T18:25:00.001-04:00

When we first came to Hades in 2001, you could still smoke in restaurants. This was a bit of a shock to us because in Victoria, indoor smoking in public places had been banned for some time. Oh, there was a hullabaloo; restaurant owners and particularly pub and bar owners swore it would destroy business. Then everyone noticed that food tasted better and everything seemed cleaner and the fuss abated.

So we came to Ottawa and seemed to fall into a time warp, sitting in the so-called non-smoking sections and emerging into the streets stinking of tobacco anyway. We frequented the diners and delis along Elgin Street in those days, as we were living in a nearby hotel waiting for our house to be vacated. The Elgin Street Diner was one, and through the haze, I would gaze at a mesmerizing photo while waiting for my BLT.

It's still there, eleven years later. Poised like a ballerina about to take the stage, a lithesome lady in a veil hovers beneath a huge umbrella. Monsoon-like rain ricochets off the street around her beautiful bare feet. She makes the summer-suited men lined up across the street look ungainly and identical.

I've asked the diner staff about it; no one seems to know anything about it. I've googled and googled, thinking of every word combination to bring up the image, but am clueless about the identity of the photographer. Any ideas out there? Hello?

I can see the photo more clearly these days. A year or so after our arrival in Hades, smoking indoors in public places was banned. Restaurant and bar owners howled in protest, predicting economic doom. Everyone got used to emerging from eateries smelling of food and not cigarettes. We don't even need the rain to wash us clean.

The squeal of the Sciurini

2011-09-30T19:28:00.000-04:00

I've spent a chunk of this past month listening to the prancing and pawing of each little roofer. Well, they were actually very large sturdy chaps, the kind who probably do well picking up women at bars. Still, they were fairly loud: "Stomp...Crash...scrrrrape...."

They were redoing our roof, and reopening our hatch, so, instead of climbing a wobbly extendable metal ladder to do maintenance, we can climb a wobbly shorter ladder and haul ourselves up through a dark hole while attempting to push up the hatch-lid. I'm not exactly looking forward to the prospect of this as a yearly ritual, but I got a third of the way up the aforesaid extendable ladder one balmy evening last week before realizing that the hatchless option was not going to work for me. I retreated on shaky legs and in deep shame while the aforesaid sturdy chaps chuckled, not unkindly.

They're gone now, leaving a new roof and dead vines drooping down the front of the house, so I cleared away the obstacles barring the entryway to the dusty, drafty bedroom balcony we never use, shouldered a large pair of secateurs and set out to prune the dangling doomed bits of Virginia Creeper. I found myself eye-to-eye with an indignant squirrel who had been using several winding tendrils of dropped vine to create a large nest on a ledge next to the balcony. She flattened herself on the stucco and hung on the wall defiantly, chattering rodent threats. I didn't have the heart to shove her nest over the precipice, so trimmed away at any lifeless vegetable matter within reach.

I carefully shut all doors leading to the upstairs balcony and trotted downstairs to sweep the front path of debris resulting from my trimming and Ms Squirrel's housekeeping. I saw some trailing wilting ends within arm's reach and started giving them a good yank. I had to leap backward as the squirrel's concoction, a large tangle of vine, chewed up newpaper and what looked like a head-sized gauze bandage, plummeted down the side of the house. I looked up and the squirrel peered back at me from the edge of the roof, seemingly frozen in shock.

As I set back to work, the keening started: Skree (five second interval) Skreee (five second interval) Skreeeeeeee...

I'm a monster.

West of Eden

2011-08-30T15:25:00.004-04:00

I look out over the large garden that slopes down the hill below Lansdowne. It reminds me of a long-ago May, my first visit to London when I'd gaze out the back of a friend's house in Muswell Hill, south over the dipping garden and beyond to the red brick houses below. However, here, I see the Olympic Mountains rising in the distance on the far side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They've pulled up grey and white cloudy eiderdowns to their rocky chins, but the sky above us is clear and very blue.

Drifting through the clearing is younger daughter, hair cascading down her back to her waist. She's picked an apple from one of the surrounding trees and eats it dreamily, occasionally frowning to herself in the midst of her inner dialogue -- the only place where words come easily to her.

It's Eve, Eve in the morning, returned to Eden.

A flash of light

2011-07-31T22:03:00.002-04:00

I've known her since I was a teenager; she's in her nineties now. I remember the measured tones of a thoughtful accountant; now deafness cuts her off from most conversation and her carefully chosen clothes don't always survive the long ride to church. I'm in the passenger seat when we draw up to the apartment to pick her up, so I'm the one to ascend the steep steps and signal her through the glass where she's waiting in the lobby. I greet her, but she's concentrating on negotiating the transferral of her cane to accommodate the changing sides of the bannisters. In the car, the rest of us chatter and she is silent. I know better than to try and include her over the roar of the traffic and her hearing aids. She clambers out of the car as we pull up to the ramp leading into the church and she makes a beeline for today's greeter who embraces her and guides her to a seat.

In this Unitarian congregation where I grew up, it has become the custom over the past few decades for those who choose, to line up after the offertory and light small candles off the larger flaming chalice, planting them in one of two bowls of fine sand where they will burn until just before the closing song. I follow Demeter and light my own candle, thinking of loved ones in Hades. As I turn to move back to my seat, I see a hand reach out. It's my thoughtful deaf accountant glowing and smiling at me. I smile and grip her hand, then find my way back to Demeter. I tell her what happened, and she says, "She had just remembered who you were."

(I'm halfway through a house-sit where the computer is, oooh, roughly twenty years old. It's a dial-up. You may not hear much from me until the end of August when I'm back in the grip of Hades.)

Riotous indignation

2011-06-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

Can you remember your most embarrassing adolescent moment? You probably remember more than one, don't you? I can remember....several.

There was the time I... Ugh.

Then that day... *Cringe*

I've written of the gremlin attacks that have been known to assail me in the wee sma' hours. Often they take the shape of ill-judged sayings and deeds from my misspent youth. I pray I'm the only one who actually remembers these gaffes.

Fortunately for me, I blundered my way into adulthood before the advent of email, texting, and other computer-based forms of social media. Today, adolescence seems to stretch well into the twenties and sometimes beyond, with every misstep enshrined for all to see, often proudly posted by the agent him/herself.

Nothing illustrates this quite so well as the recent Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver. Briefly, if you were lucky enough not to notice this item, a hockey team from Boston (most of whose players don't actually come from Boston) won the final game of a seven-game final against the team from Vancouver (most of whose members are not from Vancouver). In fact, the Boston team actually has more Canadians in it than the Vancouver team. This was lost on the crowd inside Rogers Arena, who sportingly booed and threw things on the ice as the cup was presented to the Boston Bruins. Outside, those who hadn't got tickets were watching proceedings on big screens set up for their entertainment by the city, and decided the perfect ending for the evening would be tipping over cars, setting them on fire, and breaking into shops.

A similar embarrassing melée occurred in 1994, the last time the Vancouver Canucks got to the Stanley Cup finals and failed to win. Only that time, cell-phones weren't quite so ubiquitous and there was no such thing as Facebook. So, this time around, while the Vancouver police were declaring that the riot was the work of well-organized thugs and anarchists, and the Vancouver Canucks were declaring that the rioters were not Canucks fans, a bunch of furious and indignant vigilantes were setting up web sites and Facebook pages overnight, posting photos of kids rocking cars, overturning cars, posing in front of burning cars, smashing windows, waving merchandise and mannequin parts, and punching each other out. The response was immediate and visceral. Not only did acquaintances identify the subjects in the photos, they contributed screen-captures of Facebook pages where mostly adolescent males had boasted about what they'd done and for whom the warnings of frantic friends to take this down were either too late or fruitless. Several had their schools, phone numbers and home addresses on their profiles....

What quickly emerged was that the rioters were not professional thugs and anarchists but drunk adolescents and post-adolescents who lived in comfortable middle-class homes and who, judging from their reactions to the hate-mongering that ensued, had led rather sheltered lives. I was particularly struck by the television interview of a twenty-two-year-old carpenter who was called up to his boss's office the very next morning and unceremoniously fired. As far as I can tell, the most he had done was hang around (albeit illegally) after the riot act had been read, then post some rather silly status updates on his Facebook page about the city needing remodeling anyway. Breaking down in front of the television cameras, he wept that it was just a joke between him and his friends.
"My friends would understand that I was joking," he sobbed.

Gee, you mean your what? 500? 600? 700 Facebook friends? They'd all understand you were fooling around? That's when I realized that we were not dealing with "morons" or "idiots" as these targets were being described on the avenging web sites. We're dealing with really young, really naive, and not-quite-grown-up people.

I was as embarrassed as anyone by the behaviour of these Canucks fans (yes, they were Canucks fans -- they were all wearing the tee-shirts and jerseys). Some of them caused serious injuries, and many scared the hell out of innocent people who were trying to do their jobs. A hapless franchise owner of a coffee shop locked herself in a back room while the place was trashed. Those who struggle to run businesses in these times don't need the added burden of re-stocking and rebuilding.

However, is justice really being served here? Those whose riot photos were tagged have been vilified, embarrassed, and terrorized themselves. The family of a young man photographed trying to torch a police car (apparently he didn't even succeed) had to flee their house after receiving an avalanche of threats. This doesn't strike me as being fair, either.

Oh, thank goodness there was no Facebook when I was going through puberty. I didn't go in for drunkenness, vandalism or looting, although I did plenty of other non-criminal forms of stupidity --- which I refuse to discuss, thank you very much. I had friends and relations, though, who did break the law. As far as I know, they all grew up to be responsible adults and while they may remember what they did -- late at night -- there are no permanent public reminders. Times have changed, haven't they?

(The above photo appears in journalism student Matt Gibson's account of what he witnessed during the riot. While many Canadians decry this incident as not being typical of us, I think Matt's experiences are, in a way, quintessentially Canadian. Read it and see if you agree.)

Public transit for deities (write of passage number twenty-one)

2011-06-15T17:48:00.000-04:00

I could have sworn I was riding the bus with Isis and Ishtar today. Isis was seated sideways near the front. Her raven hair was pulled back with artful and deliberate hair-sprayed wisps sticking out from her bun. She wore a black scarf wrapped about her head very much as it is in the accompanying image of Isis and her eyes appeared to be rimmed with kohl, although that was probably the effect of her carefully applied false eyelashes. Her golden off-the-shoulder blouse revealed braided bra straps that hinted at a leopard-skin design. It was clear that under the golden folds, the bra itself was somewhat armour-like with sharp upthrusting edges. Old-fashioned brassieres used to "lift and separate"; today's seem to thrust and bunch. Isis was small-breasted enough for this to work.

In the centre of the aisle, hanging shyly from the overhead handrail, Ishtar stood, plump and rosy as a peach, her belly jiggling pleasingly as she radiated ampleness. When she moved down the bus and stood next to me, I saw that her morning toilet may not have taken quite as long as that of Isis, who sat with her legs delicately crossed in off-white cargo capris. Ishtar's purple empire line tunic top was covered in tiny white cat hairs and on the right side of her generous tummy was a dried splotch of something: possibly jam, possibly spaghetti sauce.

I've had many Ishtar mornings. I'm not sure I've had a single Isis morning....

Counting blessings (write of passage number twenty)

2011-05-30T18:35:00.004-04:00

I don't enjoy riding sideways on the bus. Besides, the side seats are usually in the "priority seating" (recently renamed "courtesy seats" in one of those futile re-branding exercises), so I move back if I can.

Last week, we couldn't. It was the morning of younger daughter's speech therapy appointment which means leaving the house at 8:15 rather than 7:20, which means more people. Someone offered me a side-seat, and it seemed churlish to refuse. The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter took seats further back.

About halfway into town, a very tall beefy young man thunked into the space between the elderly woman sitting behind the driver, and me. He spread his sizable knees and squared his broad shoulders and I found myself pushed to a forty-five degree angle away from him. I had time to catch an amused glance from the Resident Fan Boy before I noticed that Beefy Young Man was talking. The times being what they are, I thought he might have a cell phone which I wouldn't be able to see, given that I was leaning from my waist like a famous Italian tower. Then I noticed how rhythmic his words were:

"...Number two, she is walking toward me. Number three, her love is like...."

Across the aisle, a teenager in a khimār gazed at BYM, her jaw dropping open. Her eyes found mine and she gave me a mischievous eyebrow flash and grin.

"Number five, she looks at me..."

"What was that about?" asks the Resident Fan Boy, waiting to see younger daughter and me off at our transfer.
"Uh....I think he was rapping," I say with a shrug.
"Rapping or raving?"
"Well, he kept saying words like "love", so I don't think I was in danger."
"Well, no. Not unless he was saying: 'Number six, kill the white lady....Number seven, kill the white lady..."

I roll my eyes at my snickering husband, hand younger daughter her bus pass, and get on with our day.

Nearer my quad to thee

2011-05-29T17:24:00.005-04:00

The Resident Fan Boy looked out at the pouring rain this morning and laughed mean-spiritedly.
"It's raining on all those damned runners," he said.

We learned a long time ago to avoid downtown Hades on "Race Weekend". There are several. As Ottawa (and other cities) have moved away from church-going and temple-attendance, the weekends are being taken over by the Tabernacle of the Body, and the fact that other people may actually have places to go to is swept aside along with many transit routes and streets, to accommodate Saturday and Sunday morning jocks so they can get their endorphin fix and systematically destroy their joints. It's not like they are ever going to grow old, after all.

Early in our sojourn in Hades (please, please let it be a sojourn...), we forgot about the Race and attempted to attend the Resident Fan Boy's church downtown. After realizing our mistake and managing to disentangle ourselves from the big bus detour on Mackenzie King Bridge, we tried to cut through Confederation Park on foot, struggling to make our way up Elgin Street through a maze of bodies in shorts and leggings. All doing quadricep stretches without checking behind them. It was like zigzagging amid hundreds of mechanical dipping birds; you never knew when someone's Nike-clad foot would shoot up to a casually reaching back hand. Ouch.

That's right, just keep on with your single-minded pursuit of bodily perfection, folks. Don't mind us.

Better safe than sari (write of passage number nineteen)

2011-05-27T15:14:00.002-04:00

Wednesday is Hump Day. We all know it, that hurdle sticking up in the middle of the week that just has to be got over so we can slide down to Friday. In Hades, it's when the buses are crammed, presumably because it's the one day that everyone shows up at work or school because no one starts or finishes an illicit long weekend on a Wednesday.

We're delighted that younger daughter's voice lesson falls on Hump Day, because it's a bright beacon in the centre of her tempest-tossed week. However, this particular Wednesday, the extra legwork required had just about nailed me into the ground. The fact I'd been battling a strep throat for three days was not an asset. So I was a bit slow clambering into a back entrance of an articulated bus, and the lady hurrying behind me evidently thought I'd been waiting to hold the door for her.

I sank into a window seat and she joined me companionably.
"Crazy day," she laughed, her voice as delicate as egg shells.
I managed a reasonably friendly grimace as what felt like a razor slash somewhere in the region of my uvula began to throb painfully.
"I'm afraid I'm not very well," I began apologetically.
Her eyes widened. "You sick???" she squeaked.
I nodded, and suddenly the seat next to me was empty. Bewildered, I looked about. She was now several seats ahead in the lower section. Every few seconds she'd glance back at me, her face contorted with horror.

Feeling decidedly leprous, I got off the bus and dragged myself through the Rideau Centre en route to Shoppers' Drug Mart in search of throat lozenges. Within twenty-four hours, my throat would feel better, but I'd be struck with conjunctivitis and resemble a demented Ood for three more days. After that, I'd lose my hearing, give up and get anti-biotics.

Maybe my Sari Lady was prescient. Or perhaps she thought I was going to vomit on her. I'll never know.

The shortest season

2011-05-26T18:58:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago, it felt like winter does in Victoria: cold, damp, temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius. Along the Ottawa River Parkway, you could only see the new green fringing the branches of the trees if the sun shone a certain way.

Last week, I saw my first red-winged blackbird of the year. On the bus, a woman tucked partially opened lilac blossoms into the ponytail of her young daughter. By the end of the week, the I got a brief whiff of lilac blowing in through the bus windows, and looking out across the river to the province of Quebec, noticed that the white and silver slivers lining the opposite bank were now chartreuse. Further beyond, the Gatineau hills were banded in alternating lime and hunter green. Vivaldi was streaming in through my ear-buds. (No, not that one. This one):

The Victoria Day weekend came, which is the first weekend when Ottawans can safely put out their bedding plants. Thousands ignore this fact, to their detriment and disappointment. Black-thumbed persons such as myself spent the weekend ferrying the winter clothes into the basement and retrieving summer-weight cottons from bins.

When I stepped out onto the pavement last Tuesday, the spring green had vanished, replaced already by the colour of an Ottawan summer which can best be described as...sigh...office green. The air is heavy with moisture and the now inescapable stench of lilac. So begins the four-month summer, to be followed by three weeks of autumn, six months of winter and (if we're paying attention) two weeks of spring.

The not-so-soote shoures of Aprille

2011-04-30T16:23:00.003-04:00

I entered the chapter room of the cathedral with elder daughter (then six), pushing younger daughter (then two) in her stroller. My heart and stomach sank as I felt that old familiar suffocating pressure of barely repressed hatred emanating from Bête Noire (whom I've described in a previous post) who was studying the bookshelves. Demeter offered her hand to his wife who ignored her and greeted the cousins who had entered with us. We retreated to the other end of the room; Demeter was white with shock and hissing her indignation.
"Mama, please..." I whispered.
"They can't hear me."
"Yes, but the girls can."

That had the desired effect and in a mercifully short time, the little procession of family mourners made their way to the front pews. I brought up the rear, coaxing younger daughter along. The Resident Fan Boy sat on the aisle next to elder daughter's first godmother, then me with younger daughter, elder daughter next to her grandmother, the two cousins, and finally the Holy Family (the RFB's term for the Bête Noire, his wife and children). The body of my late father-in-law was escorted in by six of his brother priests clad in their black cassocks, their surplices left off for this Maundy Thursday. We rose, and I turned, then remembering it wasn't a wedding, studiously cuddled younger daughter, using her as a buffer against the hurt and the hostility. She leaned forward, gazing at the lit candles on the stripped altar, murmuring: "Birthday, birthday..." I prayed she wouldn't burst into song.

During the recessional, I held the Resident Fan Boy's arm as he followed the casket into the late afternoon sunshine pouring through the open west doors of the cathedral. Younger daughter held his other hand, goosestepping merrily to Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary. I glanced over my shoulder to elder daughter, whose tears glistened in gold rivulets down her cheeks as the sun caught her face.

Another uncomfortable hour at the reception. The Bête Noire's wife had set up court in one corner of the chapter room, while I flitted around chasing children and greeting whom I could. After a discreet message from First Godmother, who had been aware of the rift for years and who had never mentioned it to either party, awkward arrangements were made for the bewildered cousins to join the Holy Family for drinks at their hotel, then have dinner with us.

I escaped as the crowd dwindled and with relief, stepped out of the side entrance into a soft spring evening at sunset.

Godmother Two had left a casserole, a true sign of love from one who hated to cook to another who felt the same. When the cousins arrived, the talk was of the service, how father-in-law would have loved the theatricality and symbolism of the somber black guard of brother priests and the Maundy Thursday setting. The Resident Fan Boy told of elder daughter's reaction to the stained glass window in the modern chapel, a recent addition to the cathedral: "That's not what God looks like!" On hearing this, elder daughter made a bee-line for the study and emerged some minutes later bearing this portrait: "The good things come from his hands and the bad things come from his feet," she explained.

This is the sixth month I have "Nablopomo-ed", and for four of the previous five, I have gone through the rather painful "Mirror of Erised" exercise of leafing through old journals in search of a kind of unifying theme for the given month in my own http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflife. November is preparation, February limbo, September transition, and March crisis. April, since it comes right after March, seems to be a time when the crises blow up in my face, or I end up exploding myself. What shall I call this? Eruption? Outburst? Would "effervescence" do? Maybe not.

How about the "outpouring" of April? It's a time of the first thunderstorms of the year here in Hades, a time when, if I'm to learn anything from my journals, it's best not to take too much initiative, since there's that increased risk of being blown sky-high. My next Nablopomo month should be October. In the meantime, I hope to keep blogging, not in a steady downpour, but in intermittent showers.

The mirror of erised

2011-04-29T11:07:00.000-04:00

I love a family wedding, but only if it's happening to someone else's family. I wasn't as excited about this wedding, to tell you the truth. After the soap opera that the Royal Family became during the eighties and nineties, the sheen of the various ceremonies lost its gloss.

However, two billion viewers were supposed to be looking in on this, so how could I resist? I took to bed early and when I came to at 2:30 am, snapped on the television. We have learned the hard way that CBC is hopeless for a royal event; it just takes the BBC feed and natters misinformation and banalities all over it. Unfortunately, much the same was taking place with BBC World News. It was 7:30 in London and the commentators were reduced to babbling at parade-route campers on the Mall and wedding breakfasters in Cumbria. I clicked around and the American channels were going on about clothes and CBC were breathlessly informing us that the carpet at Westminster Abbey was indeed red and being vacuumed.

I turned off the set and went back to sleep, wondering how awkward all this would have been had Diana survived to attend this wedding. I dreamt fitfully of being in some sort of mini-bus, watching Kate Middleton climb aboard with a tinkling cell phone which she tossed crossly to someone. Her hair was in a complicated mass of curls and thatching.

I re-awoke at 4 am, just in time to see the Beckhams arrive. Meanwhile, white banners scrolled across the bottom of the screen, proclaiming that "The Royal Family are excited", "Kate Middleton's dress is still a topic of speculation" and "Prince Harry is to be best man".

All abruptly changed at 4:30 am, when the BBC took over from BBC World Service and suddenly started to tell us what was actually going on --- for example, who all these very white, very wealthy, mostly blond people were. The camera kept zooming in on a trio of identical blonds with rather vacant expressions. I gather these are Earl Spencer's daughters, only two of whom are actually twins, but the BBC didn't actually help me there; I had to work it out for myself. The commentary itself kept going on about the wide range of guests, but they all looked pretty similar to me.

Oh, but it was a wedding, and the bride was beautiful (with mercifully straight hair) although she looked damn tired, and the ceremony was beautiful, and the Queen actually looked rather relaxed and happy. Afterwards, they asked Andrew Ford and Simon Shama how this would be remembered and they thought it would be remembered as a happy day.

Well, maybe.

Someone posted Diana and Charles's ceremony at YouTube, and as I watched the cast of familiar players, so many of them dead now, and listened to the stirring music and the rather purple BBC documentary ("...groom casts a longing glance westward..." Strewth!), I was overcome with a feeling of sorrow for the expectations of that day, which, as it happens, were already crumbling at the edges. (Mind you, I should have avoided reading the hopelessly trite comments left after each video segment from people who have decided that Diana was saintly because she was pretty and Camilla evil because she isn't.)

Nearly fourteen years ago, I tortured myself after Diana, the Princess of Wales' funeral by re-watching a tape I'd made of the wedding of The Duke and Duchess of York in 1986, seeing William as a mischievous preschooler after the scenes of the the lanky teenager in mourning. Memories of happier times can be double-edged swords. I find myself unable to watch old videos of my own children. I just know too much now. I know what I've lost. These tapes have become my own Mirror of Erised, JK Rowling's painful reminder of the hazards of glimpsing our deepest and most desperate desires.

There's a wish for the happy couple (and for any couple heading out on the marital journey): May your happy memories be a balm and not a bludgeon.

André is a wimp

2011-04-28T18:26:00.000-04:00

I was planning other posts for today, but another post got in my way. Canada Post.

Canada, as one of my sympathetic friends has pointed out, is the only First World country with a Third World postal service. I mailed a package for elder daughter at 9:08 on the morning of April 18th, four days before Good Friday. It's right there on my tracking notice. On the Tuesday after Easter Monday, eight days after I mailed said parcel, I noticed that the package had been "processed". It was still in Ottawa, full of cupcakes, now over a week old. I filled out a "ticket", and they cheerfully reported that it had been delivered this morning, the very day elder daughter checked out of her dorm. She went to pick it up; no dice. It had been signed for at Dalhousie University. My daughter attends the University of King's College, next door. I phoned Canada Post, got put on hold, then some guy named André suggested that I had misaddressed the package. When I had the temerity to get angry, he hung up on me.

I didn't swear; I didn't call him names. He just hung up on me when I suggested that the situation arose from Canada Post making "mistake after mistake".

Clearly, I should wait for the Resident Fan Boy to get home before attempting such phone calls. Time to go to my happy place....
Sigh. My favourite Marx Brother movie (Monkey Business) with my favourite Great Big Sea song ("When I am King"). Thecoweyd,you're my hero.

And as for you, Andre, you're a wimp. May all your packages be misdirected. Go, and never darken my towels again...

For worms, airy...

2011-04-27T19:09:00.002-04:00

This afternoon, as I set out to fetch younger daughter from school, I paused on the porch to lock the door and felt a sensation on my cheeks that I haven't felt since September. The warm, wet, spongy feel of humid air. After a weeks of cold rain and temperatures around 0 degrees Celsius, it looks like this is yet another year when Hades will simply skip spring and plunge into the mugginess of an Ontarian summer. Some people blame El Niña; after reading about Krakatoa, I'm blaming Eyjafjallajökull.

With the warmer weather, Ottawans are talking to each other again, almost as if the removal of parkas was a prearranged signal that it's okay to speak to strangers.

"How's your day going?" inquires a chipper barista at the Second Cup where I take younger daughter for a pre-voice-lesson snack.
"Oh, okay," I reply.
"Is it cold out there?"
"Not at all. It's getting muggy and there's that smell..."
"Worms," she says, hitting the steamed milk. "The air is wormy."
"The sidewalks were full of 'em this morning," I agree. "I rescue worms, if I have the time."
"I missed a school bus saving worms when I was a kid," she says. (This was probably five years ago, I think to myself.) My mum couldn't believe it."

I've posted a few photos of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Hadean spring. In Victoria, spring starts in January with the first snowdrops, then lingers through the next three months with different streets breaking into a relay race of cherry blossoms. The daffodils come in March, and the tulips come in April. The air is soft as kisses and smells like the ocean.

This morning, when my nostrils were full of the scent of worms, I fancied I saw some daffodils. It's possible; it's late April in Ottawa.

Oh, and the Resident Fan Boy informs me that we just had a tornado warning...

A glancing blow

2011-04-26T20:01:00.001-04:00

I was writing some Easter letters last week. Yes, I write Easter letters. We do have some friends and family who are quite serious about Easter, so we send them cards and we might as well enclose a letter while we're at it.

In one of my missives, I was describing our February trip to Toronto which included a trip to the Ontario Science Centre. On Family Day. We deserve a medal.

We saw a special exhibit on whales and I sought to illustrate my letter with a picture of the pakicetus, the ancient land-living ancestor of today's whale. Only I couldn't recall the actual word "pakicetus", so typed "Whale Evolution" into Google Images. One of the images that came up was of a round young woman standing on a beach, and the photo was captioned with some adolescent joke about evolving hands out of flippers to hold Twinkies. And I sat there sadly, feeling a little sick, thinking of this girl, posing innocently on the beach for a friend or maybe a family member who presumably posted the photo to something like Flckr or PhotoBucket where some guy (it has to be a guy, right?) thought it would be a hilarious joke to paste this all over the internet.

The next morning, I glanced into one of my Poem of the Day books, and up came this famous triolet:

To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much? - Frances Cornford (1886-1960)

Frances Cornford was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and married to a classical scholar named Francis Cornford. This is supposed to be one of her most famous poems which is a pity, because she actually wrote some lovely stuff. This isn't lovely: it's mean-spirited, pretentious, supercilious, arrogant and inequitable. The sort of thing, in short, that might be written by a very young person, as I suspect that puerile photo-poster with the cruel sense of humour was. Cornford was twenty-nine when she wrote it, so I feel even less inclined to excuse her.

Fortunately, GK Chesterton gave Mrs Cornford a well-deserved literary smack:

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

Quite right. You go, Gilbert.

However, it occurred to me that I am guessing so much about both GK Chesterton, whom I really only recognise in passing, and Frances Cornford, about whom I knew nothing until now. So I've got a book about Chesterton out of the library and will now head off in search of more of Cornford poetry, because, as I've said, she did write some lovely stuff. I may even read it on the train. But a bus is more likely.

They didn't keep on killing Rory

2011-04-25T18:21:00.002-04:00

At last. Something to make Saturday evening television watching bearable. The Space channel has made this season's Doctor Who available for Canuck Whovians within hours of the episodes' airing in Britain. Of course, we have constant commercial interruptions and promos for Space's vast array of blood-spattering vampire shows, but at least we don't have to illegally download the series anymore, which saves us both time and bandwidth.

How does it look so far? Let's start with the stuff that I find distracting. (Note: anything that pulls me out of the willing suspension of disbelief is a liability):

1) We're starting with a two-parter. Now, I can understand why, because the plot requires that the Doctor has not seen his companions for a matter of months. (Or weeks. Or years. I probably need to watch this a third time.) However, every single other New Who season opener has had rather more levity to it. The world has always been in danger, that's a given, but the season traditionally starts with a light-hearted romp. Two-parters tend to be a bit more serious. This one certainly is.

2) Historical bobbles. Granted, these are petty, but they put me off. The hair is way too long for 1969, especially for government types. Long-hair really didn't become mainstream until the seventies. Plus, we have an African-American Secret Service agent issuing orders. Really? In Richard Nixon's White House? Kennedy hired the first black secret service agent in 1960 (he lasted about three months), and African-Americans make up something like ten percent of the Secret Service fifty years later, but I doubt there were many, if any, serving Nixon in the late sixties, and they certainly would not be yelling at Nixon about "engaging with the suspect". (Or whatever he said. I'll definitely have to watch it again.)

3) An American lady (played by an American actress, as it happens) says: "Hang on, didn't I just say that?" Wouldn't she say something like "Wait a minute"? Americans do say "hang on", but not in this context which is a British usage. Again, it's petty, but it knocks me out of the story, and I have waste time getting back in.

The good stuff:

1) Steven Moffat and his twisty-turny, timey-wimey complex plots. It usually means I have to watch his show several times to wrap my poor excuse for a brain around them, but he's also very, very funny, so it's not a hardship.

2) River Song. Gawd, I love River Song. River Song and Emma Thompson are the closest I've come to girl crushes. If we can't have Elizabeth Sladen anymore, can we have Alex Kingston in her own River Song spin-off series? Please?

3) I do like Matt Smith as the Doctor, particularly when he drops his voice. I'll never fancy him, but I didn't fancy Christopher Eccleston either and he worked, too.

4) They promised to kill off a major character in this episode and it wasn't Rory. Thank goodness. That really would have been over-kill.

I guess the "ayes" have it. Not one of my top ten episodes, but it passes the Persephonic Doctor Who Multiple Viewing Test. And by the way, I'm not promising to review each episode. Aren't you relieved?

Lamb-inated

2011-04-24T16:20:00.001-04:00

My mother, who came to Unitarianism after rather dramatically walking out of a Church of England service when she realized she didn't believe the Creed, tried to explain Easter to me when I was about five or six. Of course, the trouble with explaining Easter is that you have to start with Good Friday, so she kept it simple and said that Jesus was nailed to a cross. This was a tad too simple for me; I thought they had nailed his clothes to the cross, and couldn't figure out why that would kill him. Not long afterward, I noticed, for the first time, the crucifix on the bedroom wall of the Catholic girl who took care of us for her room and board. With a thrill of horror, I realized the nails had gone through Jesus' feet and hands. I started noticing crucifixes everywhere. Why? Why would they put up such a scary thing? And why did they call it Good Friday if such a bad thing happened on it?

After several years of living with a practising Anglican, I suppose I understand it a bit better, although I still get thoroughly disconcerted at the Palm Sunday service which features that disturbing hymn "Ride On, Ride On in Majesty": "In lowly pomp, ride on to DIE!" sings the congregation at the Resident Fan Boy's church with great relish. I can't help but think of a scene early on in the movie Gandhi where a minister is helped on to the top of a moving train by friendly Hindus, one of whom says conversationally: "I know a Christian. She drinks blood. Blood of Christ, every Sunday."

Christmas is a an easy concept; a baby gets born, lovely. Easter is a bit messier, isn't it? This might explain a couple of the downright creepy cakes that have recently appeared on the very funny web site Cake Wrecks: Oh dear. I guess this is what happens when you mix up the ideas of the end of a Lenten fast, holiday sweets, a sweet cuddly baby animal, and the concept of sacrifice. (And why would anyone want cake slices that look like lamb chops?) There's one that's even worse, but you can go look at it yourself, if you want the nightmares. It's the fifth photo down.

To confuse matters even further, Canada's Space Channel has been running an Easter Doctor Who Marathon since Maundy Thursday. Young daughter is particularly discombobulated because, along with the whole of Seasons Five and Six, they've included all the Christmas specials. "Isn't it Easter?" she asked.

Of course, the upside of this is that for the first time ever, Canadians have been able to see the brand-spanking-newest episode of Doctor Who merely a few hours after the Brits got to see it, so it's safe to surf the internet and not be spoiled. And since the Doctor is an alien with the ability to regenerate, it kind of fits in with the whole Resurrection thing, right?

I never feel qualified to speak of a new Doctor Who episode until I've viewed it at least twice, so maybe that will be my post tomorrow...

The song of the conduit

2011-04-23T23:35:00.000-04:00

The Resident Fan Boy has an ironic favourite saying: "Assume" makes an ass of U and me.
The irony is in the fact that he's the king of assumptions. This has got us into hot water on more than one occasion over the years, the most memorable being on this date nineteen years ago.

It was the Thursday after the Easter weekend that year, and the week had been busy: we had attended our penultimate Labour Preparation class that week, bearing home-made hot cross buns as it had been our turn to provide snacks. There had been a Hospice volunteer workshop that week, although I had finally given up my regular shift. I'd also given up our weekly Scottish Country Dancing lesson, much to the relief of my instructor (something I didn't find out until months later). I was as big as a house, and about three weeks from my due date.

This particular day, I took the ninety-minute round-trip bus ride out to the hospital for yet another ultrasound. The Resident Fan Boy was on the volunteer board of a church community centre and the monthly meeting was right after his work, so we had a brief rendezvous at the downtown bus stop, and I headed home to clean up after the hot-cross buns. I was just about to start on it, when I needed to go to the bathroom. Again.

I'll spare you the details but when I emerged, I added a few more items to my overnight bag before calling the doctor, knowing he would only tell me to head to the hospital. Then, I called the number the Resident Fan Boy had given me and got an answering machine. (This was nineteen years ago, remember?) The answering machine gave me three emergency numbers which led me to three more answering machines. I tried a co-worker of the resident Fan Boy who had offered to drive me to the hospital, but it was the office pub night; no one was there. I dialled the home of the volunteer board chairman and got his fifteen-year-old daughter who was as helpful as...a fifteen-year-old. I phoned my mother and got her answering machine. I think it was at this point that I began to cry. I called a taxi, then my mum rang back, having come home from work to catch the tail-end of my message. She told me she'd meet me at the hospital and leave a message on our answering machine for the Resident Fan Boy. I hung up and my waters broke.

The taxi driver was very nice, one kid and another on the way. He told me to breathe through my contractions and noted nervously that they were three minutes apart. It was at this point that we got stuck behind an elderly couple in a very old, very wide station-wagon. The taxi-driver grabbed his radio mike and called his company: "Listen, I got a pregnant lady here with contractions three minutes apart; call Emergency and tell them to have a wheel-chair waiting!"

The city was in the middle of a hospital work-to-order job action, so my wheel-chair attendant turned out to be a videographer who'd recently produced a how-to video on getting wheelchairs into elevators. It took him three tries to locate the elevator to Maternity, but his elevator entry was impeccable.

Meanwhile, the volunteer board meeting was taking a supper break at the community centre. They were ordering in pizzas. Other members were calling home, but the Resident Fan Boy had just seen me at the bus stop, so assumed he didn't need to check in.

I went into transitional labour minutes after arriving in Labour/Delivery. It was like being hurled into the open ocean in a gale, trying to relax and ride over the ever-increasing waves. Somewhere in another room, I heard the screams of a woman further along than I. I had time for three internal questions, before I switched my mind into self-preservation mode, that is, not daring to think of what lay ahead:
1. What possessed me?
2. What woman in her right mind would go through this more than once?
3. Why does that fixture on the ceiling resemble a cervix?

It was quite a bit later when Resident Fan Boy came home to a darkened apartment with the mess from the hot-cross buns still in the kitchen.
And she's gone out... thought the RFB irritably. Then he noticed my bag was missing from beside the door.

"That's funny," said the cab dispatcher. "This is the second maternity call we've had this evening."
"I know!" snapped the Resident Fan Boy.

When he got to the delivery room, he found me writhing on the bed, coaching myself: "Let it go, relax, oh God, let it go..." He dashed to my side, grabbed my hand and as he leaned over to reassure me, I told him not to breathe on me. I could smell the pizza. He has never let me forget this. I think, as a woman in full labour, I was remarkably civil...

After a couple of hours of writhing, breathing, and sounding, as my mother later told me, like a cow in calf, it was decided that intervention was necessary. My husband, who has been known to faint during blood tests, was looking carefully away when he heard a baby crying. Who, he thought in disgust, would be stupid enough to bring a baby in here?

Not quite nineteen years later, yesterday to be exact, I sat enraptured in front of the computer and watched a video that elder daughter had made for my birthday. She mimed to the Great Big Sea's "Consequence Free", dancing and emoting in clever editing cuts, complete with costume changes. And I thought back to the Resident Fan Boy, passing out chocolate cigars in his office the following morning, and taking a phone-call from his now-not-quite-so-shell-shocked wife who breathed, gazing at the infant stranger in her hospital room: "Oh....isn't she beautiful..." I was stunned that anything so lovely could have come from me, which is just how I felt yesterday, watching a bewitching young woman twirl and glide in her tiny dorm in Halifax.

And, really, it hadn't. We don't really make children; they are sent to us on loan, for safe-keeping. If we really had such a hand in their creation, they would be so much more similar, instead they emerge from the womb with their distinctive personalities already bundled, trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth put it. We can help a little, but we really have to try to not hinder. We are the conduits.

I really wish I could share my birthday video with you, but that's not possible so here's Great Big Sea's video of "Consequence Free". (My beloved elder daughter knows I love the band. Happy birthday, m'luv.)

♪I'm not goin' to a party, party...♫

2011-04-22T14:25:00.001-04:00

My claim to fame is missing being born on the Queen's birthday and Easter Sunday by four minutes. Not much of a claim, but there it is. Since then, my birthday has landed on Easter Sunday a couple of times; that's the nature of being born within swinging distance of a moveable feast.

My memories of the day I was born are vague, given my extreme youth at the time, but my mother remembers it quite well. She tells me the drive to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta was a nightmare, as she was well into labour and my father kept speeding up, then slamming the brakes at red lights in his effort to get there. I was my mother's first child, but my father's fourth, so I'm not sure what the panic was about, except I rather doubt my father was present for the births of his first three children, given his chequered military career.

My mum had trained as a registered nurse and in midwifery before going on to become a physiotherapist in England, and was appalled to find that Canadian women had little say in the manner of their babies' deliveries. Her room-mate in Labour/Delivery was terrified, and totally in the dark about what was happening to her, and my mother tried to coach her between her own contractions.

The memories of my actual birth are rather more vague, perhaps mercifully so, leaping ahead to my mother's first glimpse of me in her room in Maternity -- all she could see was a pair of frantically kicking legs. Being a typically Taurean creature of comfort, I imagine I was furious about being dumped out of my comfortable home of the past nine months.

So, today my birthday has fallen on Good Friday which has probably happened before, but I'm really not sure. These damn birthdays are really starting to pile up. I started this morning with my tradition of singing the Beatles to myself in the bathroom mirror, changing the lyrics:

I say it's my birthday/ It's my birthday to-day!
I say it's my birthday/ I'm gonna gave a good time!
I'm glad it's my birthday/ Happy birthday to me!
I'm not goin' to a party, party...

Rather pathetic, really.

Nothing's open, so I don't get my birthday cake today, but Ancestry.co.uk offering free access to Canadian marriage records, so, to use that rather disgusting expression, I'm filling my boots.

To give an illusion of a party atmosphere around here, I'll stick in this video (in somewhat sophomoric taste in bits, so be warned) of the Beatles singing "Birthday" and you can sing it to me, okay? I'll imagine you are, anyway...

You'll see us off in the distance, I hope

2011-04-21T18:57:00.001-04:00

I was going to write about something else today, a Maundy Thursday memory. But it's an unhappy one, and today hasn't been easy enough for me to return to an unhappy place and time. Remembering Elizabeth Sladen who died unexpectedly (at least to most of the world) and way too soon, may seem an odd way to avoid a sad memory, but I first came across this video two or three years ago and had never heard the splendid song "At the Other End of the Telescope" which was co-written by Aimee Mann and Elvis Costello. (Aimee is singing the lead with back-up from Elvis here.) This fan-vid was made before HD became standard, so it's a little blurred, but the song is very "Doctorish", I think, and could be sung by more than one of his companions, though it does seem to suit Sarah Jane the best. Oh, and just to make it clear, if I haven't already, this video is the work of "Blanca" :

Shall we agree that just this once
I'm gonna change my life
Until it's just as tiny or
Important as you like

And in time, we won't even recall that we spoke
Words that turned out to be as big as smoke
Like smoke, disappears in the air
There's always something smoldering somewhere

I know it don't make a difference to you
But oh, it sure made a difference to me
You'll see me off in the distance, I hope
At the other end, at the other end of the telescope

There was a time not long ago
I dreamt that the world was flat
And all the colors bled away
And that was that

And in time, I could only believe in one thing
the sky was just phosphorus stars hung on strings
And you swore that they'd always be mine
When you can pull them down anytime

There, there baby now, don't say a word
Lie down baby, your vision is blurred
Your head is so sore from all of that thinking
I don't want to hurt you now
But I think you're shrinking, (I think you're shrinking - shrinking!)

You're half-naked ambition
And you're half out of your wits
And though your wristwatch always works
Your necktie never fits

Now it's so hard to pick the receiver up
And when I call, I never noticed you could be so small
The answer was under your nose
But the question never arose

I know it don't make a difference to you
But oh, it sure made a difference to me
When you find me here at the end of my rope
When the head and heart of it finally elope
You can see us off in the distance, I hope
At the other end, at the other end of the telescope

Purgatory for fascists

2011-04-20T18:25:00.000-04:00

We're entering into what I think of as The Birthday Season at our house. My birthday is in a few days, followed immediately by that of elder daughter, then a host of friends' and family birthdays in early May, including that of younger daughter. Just before that, before we topple into the topography of Taurus, we trip over the hurdle of a troubling birthday which is today. I mean, elder daughter was born on Shakespeare's birthday (or what is assumed to be, based on the day of his christening three days later) which is nifty. I was born on Lenin's birthday which is considerably more ambiguous, but what about someone born today? Today is Hitler's birthday. I suppose you could concentrate on other much nicer people born today, but he's a heck of a person with whom to share your day, isn't he? Actually, one of my favourite songs is about Hitler, but to explain why, I have to back up a bit:

For some years, I was a volunteer at Hospice Victoria. Being a volunteer meant attending a lot of workshops, and we were well versed in the Kübler-Ross Model, otherwise known as the Five Stages (of Dying, of Grief, of Loss, etc.). We learned that the five stages didn't just apply to death and bereavement; you experience the stages every day, sometimes within seconds:
"I can't have lost my keys!" (Disbelief)
"Dammit! Where are the *&$%# keys?" (Anger)
"Please, not today..." (Bargaining)
"Well, this blows everything..." (Depression)
"I'll meet so-and-so from work, get his keys and then figure out what to do." (Acceptance)

I read somewhere a few days ago that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's model is now losing its hallowed status, as many people apparently recover from loss without the long period of "grief work" that the five stages imply. I don't know; the theory always made sense to me. Kübler-Ross went into a rather odd stage after she became well-known, where she was interested in the afterlife. Not that it's odd to be interested in the after-life, but she seemed to be under the spell of some character named Jay Barham who was one of those people who claimed to channel dead spirits. I remember reading a magazine article (I think it was in Mother Jones) where the interviewer was asking her questions about this and sounded very baffled and bewildered, as Kübler-Ross said how every soul is redeemable. Naturally, the interviewer came up with the old war-horse: "What about Hitler?"

Now, I'm trying to paraphrase this from memory alone, so I'll probably get it wrong, but she answered something like this: that Hitler would be brought to a place where he could see, and come to understand, the consequences of what he had done.

This fuzzily-remembered idea has haunted me for years. At the Resident Fan Boy's church, they used to have a pre-confession prayer. I say "used to", because churches seem to be phasing out confession and saying you're sorry. Anyway, they used to say: "Some sins are plain to us; some escape us; some we cannot face." So, try to imagine being made aware not only of what you've done wrong, but of what you've done wrong that you didn't know was wrong. Is that purgatory? Or is that hell? We all wound others without being aware of it. Oh geez...

Back in the days when I still had LaunchCast, I was sent a song by John Wesley Harding (who was born Wesley Stapes), called "Hitler's Tears". I've tried to find a way of embedding or linking the actual song here (it appears in Why We Fight, and in a slower more acoustic form in The Garden of Eden), but the best I can do is an Amazon sample that gives you thirty seconds.

I don't know if I understand the song at all, but whenever I hear it, I think of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who moved into the afterlife about seven years ago, standing with her hand on the shoulder of Hitler as he's made to look beyond the veil of unknowing that protects us all. And he's sobbing. I also wonder if you looked into the heart of every dictator, would you find the face of a broken-hearted little boy?

Hitler's Tears

One man's tears stain the pillow
Where he used to lay his head
She's left him for another man
So how come they're both sleeping in his bed?
He can hardly sleep for misery
You can hear him catch his breath
He grinds his teeth into the night
And God says "Hey, Adolf, are you all right?"

One boy's tears stain the paper
Where he writes his Christmas list
And he inks in broken German
"Send me the skill of a fine artist."
Then he wipes out half a continent
With a flick of his wrist
He's so lonely, so misunderstanding
As he pulls his blanket across the landing

You can hear them falling every day (Hitler's tears)
Just open up the newspaper (Hitler's tears)
You can hide, there's no escape from Hitler's tears--
Just what makes the Führer blue?
He's crying for you

One man's tears--he was fascist
Before it was cool
'Cause now it's so expected
Just accept it that power is cruel
So he'll apply for reinstatement
Using new reincarnation rules
'Cause he's the only man, most certainly
Who could claim to have learned from history

Hitler cries himself to sleep, alone in Brazil, no one calls
How must it feel to be the biggest loser of them all?

One man's tears--salt water salutes the final trip
A thousand naughty Nazis
A fraülein with a bullwhip
A lullaby of Über Alles
A shaking upper lip
It's all become a Whitehall farce
That's how we tear our fears apart
But you shouldn't take it straight to heart
So the rest of us can get some sleep tonight
-John Wesley Harding (Wesley Stace)

Birthday buddy

2011-04-19T12:39:00.001-04:00

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

- Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

While I was getting up this morning and preparing to take younger daughter to school, they were burying my half-brother five time zones away. They found his body almost two months ago, and the inquest must have finally wrapped up.

In the years that I thought my father was dead, I had visions of him lost, drunk, and alone. When the video for "Joey" by Concrete Blonde came out, I could hardly bear to watch it. It turned out that my father landed on his feet. My half-brother, alas, kept on falling:
My half-brother's birthday is on Saturday. It's the same day as mine.

A review of the audio book version of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

2011-04-18T20:18:00.002-04:00

Some time around 8:30 on the morning of May 18, 1980, I was reading in bed, it being the Sunday morning of the Victoria Day long weekend. Victoria Day is a big deal in Victoria, for obvious reasons, but most of the big events take place on the Monday, so I was mildly surprised to hear what I thought was the twenty-one gun salute down at the Inner Harbour. It sounded like a steady series of explosions: Boom...boom...boom.... I didn't count them, but remembered thinking it was an odd time to be having them; such a ceremony usually took place on the hour, a bit later in the morning. It was only when the news came through from Seattle that I realized that what I'd been hearing was the catastrophic eruption of Mount Saint Helen --- two hundred miles away. Some of my Esquimalt neighbours reported the same thing; others didn't hear a thing, but noticed their windows rattling.

On August 27th, 1883, where the western tip of Java nearly meets the southern tip of Sumatra, the volcano Krakatoa finally blew itself apart, and people as far as 3000 miles away heard what they thought were cannons. Since Morse code and undersea cables were a recent innovation, the news spread quickly. At least 32,000 people had died in the monstrous tsunamis and other horrors generated by this natural disaster, the first catastrophe to be so quickly and widely reported, as well as so deeply studied.

Those coming to Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded and expecting a grisly account of the disaster itself may be disappointed. Simon Winchester begins with the leisurely and detailed objective of placing the event in every context imaginable: historic, economic, geologic, sociological, political, meteorologic.... It's a long journey indeed before he gets down to a meticulous retelling of the events leading up to and those resulting from the series of terrifying blasts in the Sunda Strait.

While it's true the story is especially gripping at that point, I found the roundabout journey compelling as well. This may be because I was listening to the audio version of the book, read clearly and pleasantly by Winchester himself. I enjoyed his dry humour and his multifaceted approach.

I have a bone to pick with him, however. In passing, he mentions the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helen, comparing it with the unbelievable cacophony of Krakatoa a century earlier and stating that in Mount St Helen's case, the blast was not heard beyond the immediate surrounding mountain range. Evidently, Mr Winchester did not speak to anyone in Victoria, British Columbia....

For those hungry for the angst and agony of Krakatoa's death throes, you might seek out the 2006 BBC docu-drama on the subject Krakatoa: The Last Days, starring Olivia Williams and Rupert Penry-Jones, which I believe features interviews with Simon Winchester himself. I haven't seen this film, which is unavailable in Canada, but some lengthy excerpts are available at YouTube:

Show tune shush

2011-04-17T21:19:00.000-04:00

I'm not a violent person. I have committed acts of violence in my heart, but I beg forgiveness. Or, perhaps you want to join in the virtual bloodbath? Tell me, have you ever been to say, a concert, a show, or a movie where someone wants to have a chat? Let's have a show of blood-stained hands. Hmmn. Quite a few. (And you people to the right, this is pretend blood, okay?) Now,how about when someone wants to sing along with a performance you've paid good money to see?

I sat next to a sweet lady when I went to see the Dance Theatre of Harlem some years ago. Part of the programme included scenes from Sylvia. I don't have the DTH's version at hand, but here's the Royal Ballet:The lady recognised the music and started in: "Dit-dit, dit-dit, dit-dit, dit-dit, dit-dit, DIT DIT..." She did seem to clue in to my appalled demeanour, but seemed gently puzzled. I don't really think she knew she was doing it.

Do you think this might be the problem? That people genuinely are unaware that they're singing along (the couple who were delighted that they knew several tunes in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony), or banging out the rhythm on the back of your seat with their feet (that guy behind me who liked "Fat and Greasy" at Ain't Misbehaving):'Cause they sure seemed annoyed when I asked them to stop, as if I were the rude one, or some sort of spoil-sport.

So last night, the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I went to Show Tune Showdown. As I blogged about it last year, it's a fundraiser for one of our local gay-lesbian-transgendered-and-some-straights choir (this one is called "Tone Cluster") and is something like those show-biz competition shows like So You Think You Can Dance, so there are three 4-person teams from community or university musical theatre groups performing numbers from Broadway shows. We had a lovely time last year and a rather less lovely time this year. Because, guess what? This guy was chatting in the row behind us. I think he managed to contain himself during the actual musical numbers, although he had a very loud laugh, but he prattled through the introductory bits, and during the adjudications, he would make emphatic agreement noises: "Mmm-hmmm." "Yeah." "Uh-huh." Gosh, I wanted to smack him.

We gather that Show Tune Showdown will not be on next year, but is on for 2013. We're not sure why. The guy talked over it.

Seeing as I'm cold anyway...

2011-04-16T18:47:00.004-04:00

I'm chilled. Cold rain all today, that turned into snow and I haven't the courage to check what it's doing now, although we're heading out to the theatre in a few minutes. I've been writing Easter letters today, then trying to come up with a quick post.

All I can think of is a song I first heard back in the days when MuchMusic (Canada's then-superior version of MTV) had "Peace and Love" videos all day on Christmas. It's on my iPod now and is one I never fast-forward through when it comes up on shuffle. There's a clearer version of this at YouTube, but there's a vastly irritating mini-commercial at the beginning, so I'm going with this one (and I'm not sure about the lyrics):
Rickie Lee Jones Satellite by Celtiemama
Satellites - Ricki Lee Jones

Well, we were born forever
We are twinned in a fugitive mind
Friends should stay together and
Light the world with the fugitive guide

So you keep talking in many languages
Telling us the way you feel
Got up fighting in the road you're on
Get up, you're a walking satellite

I just saw you walking
Ice was reading fortunes in the moonlight
Things he could not tell you
You'll never read more than you will tonight

So you keep talking in many languages
Telling us the way you feel
Got up fighting in the road you're on
Get up, you're a walking satellite

Ah, Satellite!

We were born forever
Tunneled into the fugitive night
Friends must stay together
Code the world with the fugitive light
Oh, I just saw you walking
Ice was reading fortunes by the moonlight
Casting runes on the rooftops and alleyways (baby)
You'll never read more than you will tonight

So you keep talking in many languages
Telling us the way you feel
Don't stop, fighting in the road you're on
Don't quit, you're a walking satellite

Ah! Satellites!

Every, every minute?

2011-04-15T22:11:00.002-04:00

Being tired (again), I quickly checked my folders for photos taken in Aprils past and remembered that I got this digital camera for my birthday four years ago. I was terrified, but realized that the only way to get over the terror was to get out and start snapping. So I spent half an hour or so wandering along the banks of the Rideau River. It being April in Hades, I mostly went for branches in themes of grey and beige. Like so:

However, for some reason, I felt compelled to snap the little shopping district in our neighbourhood as I made my way home that Sunday afternoon. I thought it was a boring shot when I looked at it later, even made a half-hearted attempt to delete it.

Now I look at this ordinary scene and feel a bit spooked. It's difficult to make out in this photo, but just next door to the barber shop (you can see the old-fashioned barber's pole), there was a hardware store (see where the wheelbarrow is?) that had been there for many years, and next door to that, a rather more recent organic food store, where I bought "eco-cleaners" and the Resident Fan Boy got all our meat. A few weeks ago, the managers at the hardware store decided to have a spring sale event and in preparation for that weekend, stocked up the store with barbecue equipment, including several bags of self-starting charcoal.

That afternoon, younger daughter and I were heading out to take in a movie and found the traffic snarled and re-routed around a three-alarm fire. We retreated home and watched Twitter while the fire was upgraded to a five-alarm, and finally a six-alarm. Word went out for the neighbourhood to seal doors and windows due to the toxic nature of the blaze. (Well, it was a hardware store --- you can imagine...) When it was over, many hours later, the hardware store and the organic food store were gone, along with several apartments above the shops. The barber shop, another long-time neighbourhood institution, was so badly damaged that it is unlikely to re-open. No one hurt or killed, thank goodness, although a seniors' home nearby had to be evacuated. However, eight people lost their home and possessions, and three businesses were destroyed, with the other shops on the block damaged and even today, still using generators for power.

Stumbling upon this snap four years later, I'm reminded of that line from Our Town when a young girl, newly dead, is about to travel back to be a witness to a day in her life. When she asks about a special day, the so-called "Stage Manager" advises against it: "Pick an ordinary day, it will seem important enough."

Missing lives

2011-04-14T22:36:00.000-04:00

Younger daughter likes the National War Museum. I'm not sure why, but during school breaks and holidays, it's something else to add to the list of things to get us out of the house. This past March break, I was ready when we approached one of the guides to get our hands stamped for entry:
"I'm here to see the Missing Lives exhibit."
"The what?"
"The Missing Lives exhibit about the Balkans; I saw it on the web site..."
Hurriedly, she checked with someone else, then told us to head straight, then turn left. When I got there, I understood her confusion. It was a small row of photos down a side hall. I suppressed my disappointment, then went to have what I'd thought would be a quick look.

Each photo had names beside it, sometimes just one, sometimes several. The people in the pictures were the relatives of those names, just a few of the thousands who disappeared when Yugoslavia disintegrated into a morass of civil war and mass murder in the 1990s. This exhibit, which is only making one Canadian stop, is based on the work of British photographer Nick Danzinger and Canadian writer Rory MacLean. They published a book last year, but the exhibit I saw concentrated on fifteen families caught in the nightmare of not knowing for years, even decades, what really happened to sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands, mothers....

I do remember when the first stories of what went on in the former Yugoslavia first reached the newspapers. What was hard to grasp was, in so many instances, people were being beaten, raped, and murdered by neighbours after years of living side by side. Of the fifteen stories represented at the War Museum, the one that haunts me is that of a girl who was only a toddler at the time. They tied her father to a chair in his living room and shot him, starting with his legs. Then they turned to his wife, a woman they had known for years and said: "You did not expect us to be the ones to kill you. We are happy to surprise you."

Their one surviving child, spared because her aunt had taken her away before the murders, is now a young woman and was photographed by Danzinger during a recent visit to family home where these horrors took place. The neighbours can be seen peering at her from the house next door.

I mentioned a few months back that I had received a couple of books for Christmas that have poems for each day. The poems often have a spooky resonance with what is actually going in my life. This poem came up the week I went to the museum. It's written by Goran Simic who came to Canada with the help of PEN Canada in 1996, becoming a resident writer-in-exile at Massey College at the University of Toronto:

The Sarajevo wind
leafs through the newspapers
that are glued by blood to the street;
I pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.
As I run across the bridge
With my canisters of water,
I notice her wristwatch still in place.

Someone lobs a child's shoe
into the furnace. Family photographs spill
from the back of a garbage truck;
They carry inscriptions:
Love from...love from...love

There's no way of describing these things,
not really. Each night I wake
and stand by the window to watch my neighbour
who stands by the window to watch the dark.

(- The Sorrow of Sarajevo, Goran Simic, translated by David Harsent)

You can see some of the photos I saw in this interview with Nick Danzinger. The story to which I referred earlier is about three minutes in:

Facebook fable

2011-04-13T18:07:00.000-04:00

Boy, you can get into trouble on the internet. I therefore tell the following tale with fear and trembling.

First off, what's been happening in Japan has been horrific. In my pre-mummy life, dimly remembered as it is, I was an ESL teacher and a fair few of my students were Japanese. Their faces flashed before me as I sat horror-struck in front of my computer watching events unfold and trying to remember which ones were from northern Japan.

The real conundrum, for me, began with letters to the editor and various Facebook postings pointing out how much more powerful the earthquake that hit Japan was than that which rocked Haiti. Then came links to articles pointing out that if you donated to various help associations, the money might well be diverted to other causes because Japan hadn't actually requested financial assistance. The underlying suggestion seemed to be that this was sneaky of said organizations.

Now, I feel that Japan is in great distress, just as Haiti is (still) in great distress. Japan, however, is a First World nation. This doesn't mean that they are not in dire peril, or that they in any way deserve to suffer. My guess though, is that in a year and half's time, a large portion of their population will not be living in tents, nor dying of cholera. Nor, do I think, will their women and children be vulnerable to sexual assault on a nightly basis. Which appears to be the situation in Haiti right now, with no real let-up in sight.

So, I decided, after some thought, to state in my Facebook status, simply that I making woefully inadequate donations to two organizations I trust: Unicef and Doctors Without Borders and marking them "Wherever the need is greatest".

Clearly, I should have just shut up and made the donations. A couple of friends marked the status with "Like" and then I heard from a long-time and treasured friend, who is a practising Jew and has, over the past few months, become rather more vocal on pro-Israeli issues. The latest upset has been on the subject of the massacre of the Fogel family on the West Bank. My friend and many members of her community were posting items decrying what they felt was the suppression of the story by the world press.

The problem with my Facebook status was apparently my support of Doctors Without Borders. Doctor Without Borders certainly has borders, she briskly informed me, saying they had a record of shutting out Israeli surgeons. A quick google brought up a letter from MSF/DWB about the incident, which occurred last summer in connection with a tanker explosion in the eastern Congo. I responded, cautiously, that I knew little about this controversy but included the link. Within minutes, she had sent me a link to an article from an Israeli journalist. I think I would have just left it at that, but a few minutes later, she sent another link to another article in a different publication. By the same journalist. In fact, it was essentially the same article with added details about MSF/DWB surgeons objecting to Israeli music in the operating room.

Oh dear. This friend is a valued one. I have been a guest in her home, and most importantly, she has been a gracious and kind supporter of younger daughter. Feeling a little sick, I deleted the whole post. When I told the Resident Fan Boy about it, he went into his anti-Facebook rant, complete with pacing. I distanced myself from him for a couple of days too. Eventually, the friendly messages from Vancouver resumed. Eventually, I spoke to my husband again. I will continue to support both Unicef and Doctors Without Borders, but in a New Testament fashion. In secret. I can't afford to lose friends.

Tu creasti Domine

2011-04-12T22:25:00.001-04:00

As we saw the first of our buses drift into view, the Resident Fan Boy said, "The day is going well!"
"Hush!" I admonished him. "The Festival Gods will hear you!"

Most middle-class reasonably urban Canadian children eventually participate in a Kiwanis Music Festival. It's been a landmark of the middle-class, town-dwelling Canadian childhood since the middle of the last century. The Resident Fan Boy was entered with his school band, I competed as a member of my school choirs, plus my elementary school specialized in Scottish Country Dancing. Elder daughter is another school band KMF participant, and younger daughter experienced it with her elementary school choir. Today, though, younger daughter charted new territory for the family. She was entered in the Solo Female Vocalist Section: 14 and under.

See, it's one thing being judged as a group, it's quite another being judged individually. It's yet another thing being the parent of an about-to-adjudicated offspring, especially if that offspring dwells somewhere out on the autism spectrum. I spent the long bus ride over to Saint Timothy's Presbyterian Church in Alta Vista trying desperately not to think of everything that could go wrong, battling back thoughts such as: "Will she remember to acknowledge her accompanist?" "Will she talk during other solos?" and worst of all, "If she makes a mistake, will she stop and want to go back to the beginning?"

We got there early. Very early. The Resident Fan Boy is a Virgo, after all. He checked out the format with the adjudicators, who showed up about ten minutes after we did, then tried to relay an idea of what would happen to younger daughter. She slid further into the pew and covered her ears. My heart sinking, I watched the other contestants arrive with their families. The singers were easy to pick out; each one was clutching a plastic water bottle. Great, I thought. We didn't bring a drink for her. We're ba-a-a-ad parents...

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, one of the adjudicators rose to greet the knots of families, accompanists and soloists, all clustered to the back rows of the church, not daring to sit ahead of the adjudication desks. "You're so quiet!" she laughed. No one laughed back.

There were eight singers, all to sing "The Birds" (music by Eleanor Daley; lyrics by Hilaire Belloc). Daughter would be the last to sing. I tried to relax my hunched shoulders and focus on each girl. They all looked older than younger daughter who is one month from fifteen herself. Some were dressed in cocktail party-type dresses, some dressed as if for a job interview. Some sang in wavering voices; others sounded like opera singers. Some emoted, others glanced nervously from side to side. When younger daughter finally slipped up to the front with her accompanist, I realized that I had been sitting in the same position, without daring to move, for over half an hour.

And she sang, just as she's been rehearsing it for the past month. A little more softly than she should have been, but beautifully on key and directly to the adjudicators. I wish you could have heard her. When she finished, she made a graceful sweep of her hand toward her accompanist, then bowed with a smile and unhesitatingly took her seat in the row of soloists to await the adjudication. I could see her zoning out a little, while the adjudicator spoke, but she was quiet with just a hint of stimming. I could see the other contestants glancing discreetly at her.

At a Kiwinis Music Festival Event, it is customary to rank the top three. The three girls chosen were pretty well who we'd thought they'd be and theirs were only scores announced: 87 and two 86's. All the others got participation certificates and the notes the adjudicator had jotted down while they sang. We greeted younger daughter warmly and went over the comments which were constructive and encouraging: more engagement, more dynamics, "a lovely soprano sound", words well projected with good consonants, "very good preparation -- a very sincere and musical performance". Her voice teacher will be pleased. Her score? Does it matter? (Okay, it was 83.)

We were forbidden to record or take pictures, but I pressed the button on my iPod -- and the Festival Gods gave me a good recording....of the piano, so I am justly served. I do wish you could have heard her, because I'm her mother and not impartial.

The Resident Fan Boy says he has an ear-worm and can hear the song constantly. Unfortunately, it's his voice he hears singing it. I have an ear-worm too, but I've been hearing my daughter's "lovely soprano sound" in my mind's ear all day. There are worse things to be stuck with.