March sunset

Our house faces west, and when the sun climbs in the window at sunset, I know we're getting close to the equinox.  At the park, there are no windows to clean.

Too damn tired

It's March. It's Ottawa. It's Daylight Saving Time, and I get one less hour to sleep.

Gould comfort

It's March in Hades, which means veering from flash-freezes to freezing rain to slush. It was the last item today. I ventured out on the long afternoon journey to Bells Corners and was confronted with several shallow and not-so-shallow bodies of water, close to the curbs and overwhelming the feet of several driveways, effectively corralled by small walls of snow. One has to trek over squishy layers of grey matter to avoid ankle deep moats that cut across the sidewalks, while taking care to keep as close to the houses as the drifts will allow, because that ninth car in every ten will fail to slow sufficiently and one will re-learn the concept of water displacement in a curtain of salty filth.

I made it on to a bus with relatively dry feet, only to discover I had failed to re-synchronize my iPod when recharging it, so my music menu and assorted podcasts that help me through the hour-long trip to the outer reaches of Nepean were not available. This left me to choose between listening to the radio or contemplating my rich inner life -- the windows being too coated with mud to see out.

I chose the radio, and heard the middle of a piano piece with a voice humming along in my left earbud, so I knew it was Glenn Gould who was notorious for singing along with his nimble fingers. (Mind you, I also have a recording of the full score for Tchaicovsky's Sleeping Beauty in which you can hear, if listening on earphones, André Previn's "dee-di-di-di-dee" during the introduction to the famous waltz, so Gould was not entirely alone in this habit.)

I peered out at the passing Ottawa River, seeing someone cross-country-skiing on the snow-covered ice, ice-fishing huts near the Québec side, and someone else carrying what looked like large blue wings - all of these rather perilous pursuits in a thaw, no matter how temporary.

When I got home, I stumbled upon this:

Having someone in the house living on the autistic spectrum with a talent for music, I find I feel rather protective of Glenn Gould, even though he's far beyond needing anyone's protection now.

The temperature is plummeting tonight, meaning all those ponds will be miniature skating rinks.

Perfect.

Write of Passage Number Eleven

This happened in a bygone March of my student days:

This morning, two young girls got on the bus accompanied by a very short little boy with glasses. He was in a boisterous mood and the girls had their hands full trying to keep him in line:
"Be quiet!"
"Yeah, be quiet, or we'll make you kiss Tanya!"
A very tall girl with dark eyes and a strange hair-do boarded the bus, and the pipsqueak couldn't contain his excitement.
"Woo-hoo!" he sang out.
"Shhhhhh!" said the girls.
"I can't help it! She's sexy!"
"Hush! She's older than you are!"
The trio got out at Hampton School and the little boy lingered near the doe-eyed beauty.
"Bye," he said. "Boy, do you look good!"
One of his sisters (?) cousins (?) yanked him down the exit stairs. The pretty girl shook her well-coiffed head, extracted a textbook from her back-pack and set to reading, ignoring the smothered grins around her.

March to a different bummer

Some time during the final months of her life, my grandmother turned to my mother in a rare moment of lucidity and said: "The nice me is all gone; all that's left is a nasty old bitch." Those words come back and haunt me regularly.

Each time I do NaBloPoMo, I haul out my journals and diaries and check entries for the month being covered. In February 2009, I looked back at past Februaries and got rather depressed at the glimpses of my former happier and clueless self. Last September, I reviewed my past Septembers and concluded that February is a limbo month and September is a transition month.

March, at least for my family, is a fertile time for crises. As the temperatures slowly rise, events seem to unfreeze and hurtle into motion, often with alarming consequences. I've spent a good chunk of the day reliving stuff from left field and stuff from right field that still landed with a good hard thunk: my sudden diagnosis with gestational diabetes during my second pregnancy; the news that we were moving to Ottawa, my father-in-law's last inexorable slide into death, my elder daughter's fall from a school stage resulting in a broken clavicle; learning that my younger daughter was being transferred from the school programme in which she had been thriving. Yep. Good times.

Not all events that happened in March were incoming missiles. The Resident Fan Boy and I became a couple in March, and turning the pages, I stumbled across faces, exchanges and scenes I'd long forgotten. Maybe I'll get a couple of posts out of them.

I've used a number of approaches in my journalling, many adapted from Ira Progoff's books on journals. Sometimes, I track a day from minute to minute, usually when I have a deadline. Each January, I do a rundown of the past year, to see what shape it's taken, and I've even done quick write-ups of personal decades, looking for patterns. However, while I think I agree with Socrates about the unexamined life not being worth living, sometimes I find myself wondering: Have I improved at all? Wasn't I a nicer person before?

Looking back at my entries for March over the past decade or so has been a wee bit distressing. I seemed naïve, of course, but certainly more sociable, in a guileless and shallow sort of way. The depth that comes with maturity has things to recommend it, and given a few hours to ponder, I might even be able to think of some of those things. Oh dear, couldn't I go back to being the unenlightened slob I was? Callow she may have been, but she may have been better company. Is my niceness doomed to drain away into bitchiness?

Poor Gran. I bet it was March...