A soft target

This cartoon by Kate Curtis appeared in the New Yorker

When I went to sleep, we'd heard about shootings in northern Nova Scotia. Details were vague: "multiple victims" - no word about injuries or deaths. Something about a guy dressed up as an RCMP officer and driving a car made to look like an RCMP vehicle. By dinnertime, we knew an RCMP officer (a real one) had been killed, leaving her husband and two children to grieve. When I woke up this morning, the number of dead had risen to eighteen, worse than École Polytechnique shooting of December 1989. It's now the worst shooting in Canadian history.

The RCMP in Nova Scotia says the number is likely to rise.

Elder daughter, who trained in journalism in Halifax, has the surreal experience of recognizing the names of the people reporting on this bleak story. She spent four years in Nova Scotia, amid people known for their friendliness and willingness to help. The people shot in cold blood were no exception.

Father's day

Nearly every Sunday morning, for the three years he was at law school, the Resident Fan Boy would pack the week's laundry into a duffle bag and ride the Bloor-Danforth line west, where he would join the Sears Man for church, Sunday lunch, and Sunday dinner.  Everything about the meals was Sunday.

Every Sunday evening, the RFB would return to his student digs, and groan the evening away after ingesting rich foods in several courses.

The Sears Man was an enthusiastic cook, and a generous host.  He and his family made their home ours when we visited Toronto with elder daughter and younger daughter when they were still quite small.  It was the Sears Man who rescued us when my daughters and I found ourselves stranded at Pearson International Airport during the big blackout of the summer of 2003.

It's another Sunday evening, and we've just learned that the Sears Man left the planet today.

On a Sunday morning.

On Father's Day.

It fits.

Irreversible

This morning, I left the house early to travel down to the southern edge of Hades to catch a morning screening at the South Keys Cineplex. The film was not one I'd ordinarily go to. It's a political and military thriller entitled Eye in the Sky.

The story was told in real time: you see a sixty-something woman rise in the early hours, leaving her husband to sleep while she slips across her backyard, accompanied by her dog, to a small office where she opens her computer with her fingerprint, and we realize that she is a high-ranking military officer setting out to deal with a crisis. The officer is Helen Mirren (the part was, of course, originally written for a man, and she demonstrates how unnecessary this was), the film is produced, in part, by Colin Firth, and the reason I travelled across Ottawa to see it was because this is the last film performance by Alan Rickman.

My daughters were exposed to Alan Rickman at an early stage and on the Valentine's Days preceding their respective births. I was six months' along with elder daughter when the Resident Fan Boy and I went to see Truly Madly Deeply in February 1992.

I wept profusely, and it was not all down to the hormones. I could weep now, each time I remember that I failed to purchase a DVD of this film, copies of which are now only available at exorbitant prices.

Younger daughter was on the way when I saw Rickman in Sense and Sensibility.
I didn't weep, but I did buy the DVD, thank goodness - Emma Thompson's commentary alone is worth every penny.

My daughters, of course, mourn the man who portrayed Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies. I do, too, but I had been a fan of his since just before their births, and can't help but feel that somehow, they are favourably marked by these two films which they attended in utero.

Eye in the Sky is very much an edge-of-your-seat sort of experience, and, of course, I soon forgot it was Alan Rickman playing a grandfather trying to locate and purchase a required toy, before revealing himself to be a lieutenant-general trying get a decision out of Whitehall politicians while lives hang in the balance in Nairobi. Naturally, he gets the very best line in the whole movie: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war." He delivers it without a hint of self-righteousness nor heavy-handedness.

While I am relieved that there are so many of his performances caught and preserved, I am so very sad that there will be no more.

I've never been to Paris

The Resident Fan Boy, Demeter, and elder daughter have all visited Paris, all when they were young. Each set of memories will be radically different, belonging to different decades. The overwhelming sadness of what happened there this evening will be about the same. For myself, I think of all those frantic parents who must be having the worst night ever. This is the song I found drifting through my head as the news reports got steadily worse. There are dozens of versions on YouTube, but this one is simple enough.

Gang aft agley

Emotional wounds, like physical hurts, leave me chilled and exhausted. Shock is shock. At times like this, I turn to my tried-and-true therapies: family research, music, and (yes, still) David Tennant. When some warmth and energy return, I might go into detail, but right now, indulge me.

About a month ago, David Tennant received a special recognition award at the National Television Awards, held in London. What appeared on British television screens got posted on YouTube pretty damn quick, but just a couple of days ago, someone got hold of a video focussing on Tennant's reaction to the surprise presentation as he sat in the audience with his wife Georgia Moffett. This is made all the more touching by the recent revelation that Tennant's father Alexander McDonald is terminally ill.

Sydney Smith was right

Last night, I phoned Demeter and learned she's been ill for a few days.  She told me she's decided to stop flying out to Hades for Thanksgiving.  Today, we had freezing drizzle and ice pellets intermittently throughout the day, so that by the evening, I found myself picking my way down a sidewalk covered with what seemed to be tapioca, and every time I stepped into the street for surer footing, cars would zoom toward me, driving me back to the slippery pavement.

So it was just as well we were booked for a "Family Dinner" at Table 40 which, fortunately for us, is at the end of our block.  We've been going to them for about four years now, roughly once a month, so they know us.  The menu is set, and you serve yourself from the platters brought to your table.  Tonight, it was broccoli and leek soup with parmesan popcorn to sprinkle on top of the greenest soup ever, short ribs served with creamy scalloped potatoes and warm cherry tomatoes, salad with greens and cucumbers and crunchy stuff on top, and finally, apple fritters.

I don't think I've ever had apple fritters before.  (The picture above is of beignets, which are close to what we had, except our fritters were brown.)  They're rather like really chewy Tim-Bits with apple in the centre and they were served with cups of chocolate sauce and raspberry coulis for dipping.  Each bite seemed to light up the pleasure centre in my brain.

By the time we were picking our way home in the gathering darkness, I felt better.

They don't call it comfort food for nothing.

Weather report

Twenty years ago (plus a few days), I was standing in the nursery of the Victoria General Hospital watching elder daughter (then only daughter) being set up "under the lights" to treat her neonatal jaundice. She was all of three days old and as they slipped the blindfold over her head, I, who had been watching with interest and chatting to the nurses, burst into tears.

I gasped out an apology:  "It's just that (gulp) she looks so (sniffle) helpless..."
The nurses exchanged a look and chorused:  "Third Day!"

Four years later (plus a couple of weeks),  I sat in my hospital room with newborn younger daughter a few feet away.  I had a stack of birth announcements on my lap and with a calligraphy-style felt pen was filling them out, large tears flowing down my cheeks.  I was careful not to let them hit the cards and smear the ink.  I knew that it was "Third Day", and there was no point blaming my misery on the wait for a private room, the difficulties in getting younger daughter to latch (resolved by the private room, by the way), or the complications of this second, more challenging delivery.  It was Third Day.  Third Day becomes Fourth Day and you get on with it.  In the meantime, it was the time to cry.  That was all.

Twenty years later (minus a week), I wait in the airport for elder daughter, who has completed her second year in university in Halifax, and turned twenty the day before.  I'm listening to a pod-cast of BBC Four's radio version of Twelfth Night featuring David Tennant as Malvolio.  (Not that it's relevant.  But it's the reason I'm listening.)  I look up to see a lovely young woman in a cream-coloured jacket gliding down the escalator.

Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty...

She doesn't, but I do get a hug.

Not quite a week later,  I make myself trudge down to the corner coffee shop.  It's Sunday evening, so I know there will be a seat, and this is younger daughter's fifth psycho-developmental-educational assessment which has been sitting unopened in our living room for several weeks, so I know I need a latté, a biscotti, and a wad of tissues.  There are no surprises.  The psychologist (a new one who was mentored by the old one) has been thorough, thoughtful, and kind.

The tears don't come, but later, as I salve myself with family research at the computer, the tears arise unbidden..  I continue to work, noting my wet eyes, but doing nothing about them.  It's the time to cry.  That's all.

Melinoe on a half-shell

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.

Birth and death

So I'd noticed there was a Tuesday matinée for nativity at the National Arts Centre this week, and the Resident Fan and I took gross advantage of younger daughter's student status and between that and my subscription discount, got three tickets for the price of one. In the front row.

Browsing through his programme, RFB asked me what a "production dramaturg" was. I glanced over my shoulder and noticed Peter Hinton, the artistic director of the NAC, wandering through the aisles, clutching his coffee mug and making small talk which seems to have been his habit since taking over the position. I hopped up and waylaid him and he said she was a person that kinda drew every aspect of the production together. I guess it's something like one step out from being the director. He said it was an interesting question, but I bet he says that to all the theatre patrons.

Back in my seat, I glanced over to the seats rising to our right and noticed a really pregnant lady. I didn't want to stare, so quickly averted my eyes. Peter Hinton did his usual quick intro to the play, asked the audience to turn off cell phones and unwrap their candy now and got a huge round of applause for forbidding texting and blogging during the show. He then strolled out a side door, mug in hand, and I briefly wondered where he'd go before I heard raised voices a few feet to my right.

Two ushers were loudly questioning the really really pregnant lady and her husband about their tickets, and they said the box office had lost them and the ushers said that was shame but there was no room in the theatre. And the play had begun.

It was exactly what I'd hoped it would be, for younger daughter's sake: a musical, animals, about Christmas. We launched into a modern slant on a medieval mystery play with shepherds complaining in verse, a trio of angels doo-wopping in the background, and songs ranging in style from bossa nova to Stephenish Sondheimish, pulled off by a rather frighteningly talented cast. One of the shepherds, just for an example, was Diane D'Aquila who, among other things, created the role of Elizabeth I in Elizabeth Rex. Many of the other actors in a sizeable cast (even when doubling and tripling up on roles) had CVs that resembled encyclopedia entries, and, oh look... there was Peter Hinton. I learned later that for the final week of the run, he'd taken over the roles for Marcel Jeannin (another fabulous actor, by the way) who'd had to bow out for personal reasons.

The guy who seemed to be having the most fun was Réjean Cournoyer (one of the lengthier CVs) who was playing Herod as something like a cross between Captain Hook and J. Pierpont Finch. And then. And then the play veers from slapstick and camp into medieval mystery territory again with the slaughter of the innocents. The Angel of Death stalks the stage, and Herod turns into that most terrifying thing of all, the pragmatic politician, sending those who did his dirty work from the banquet to the place of execution. The heart-broken mothers sing the dissonant harmonies of the Coventry Carol. Because Christmas has myrrh in it. Christmas also has loss.With the enraged Herod sprawled dead beside the banquet table, we were back into the spirit slapstick and pantomime with the "Coyote Christmas, which I suspect was a separate play at some point. Three starving coyotes invaded the audience, looking for something to chomp. They debated over the five-year-old sitting next to the Resident Fan Boy (a modern kid who didn't seem the least bit frightened by the prospect of being eaten by coyotes), before figuring out the audience was comprised of humans and not sheep. So, as you can imagine, when the angel told them about the Lamb of God, they got the completely wrong idea. In the mayhem that followed, younger daughter, the RFB and I had to keep pulling our feet in to avoid tripping up the Holy Family in hot pursuit of three coyotes tossing Baby Jesus like a football.

It turns out for the best though. (How else could you conclude a Christmas play?) When the Roman soldier (Peter Hinton again) comes looking for a baby to impale, the coyotes continue to insist they've got a lamb, and Jesus is saved. The joyful musical finale was complete when the lady who'd been about to be tossed out the theatre in the beginning announced: "It's a girl!"

Back at home, still glowing from the show, I posted a link to the review in the Ottawa Citizen at Facebook, but couldn't get an appropriate photo to come up. (The pictures in this post were taken by Andree Lanthier.) Instead, I kept getting a thumbnail of a group of men in orange jumpsuits kneeling by what appeared to be the Rideau Canal. I later learned they were at the Rideau River. About the same time that younger daughter, the Resident Fan Boy and I were settling in to enjoy the play, a nine-year-old boy slipped into the Rideau River not far from where we live. Because Christmas has myrrh in it. Christmas also has loss.

Oh sisters two, how may we do
To preserve this day?
This poor Youngling for whom we sing
Bye-bye, lulle, lullay.

The Beloved Passer-by

My father vanished from my life sometime during the year I was twelve. He had pulled the vanishing act a number of times before, so it was difficult to tell that he had really gone for good. When I was eight, he ran off to Boston with another woman, but he still sent Christmas gifts, so I assumed he was off on one of his lengthy business trips. He reconciled with my mother and rejoined the family when I was ten. My maternal grandfather had died a few weeks before, leaving a small legacy which my mother gave to my father to invest in a kitchen-designing business which promptly failed. At age eleven, I was now old enough to realize that my parents weren't happy and to know that the odor on his breath in the morning was alcohol. We spent that summer basically waiting for him to leave. He left in the autumn, the creditors closed in, and my mother, on legal advice, took out an ad saying she was not responsible for her husband's debts. He phoned a few times during the following year, usually in the small hours of the morning, asking to speak to me. Finally, in exasperation, my mother told him to not phone at all if he couldn't do so at a decent hour. The calls stopped.

A little over a year after he left, Judy Collins appeared on a variety show singing this song:
Luckily, I was alone in the house. I was ambushed by a storm of weeping, and said, for the last time: "Daddy."

My mother took out Canadian citizenship under her maiden name when I was sixteen. It was then that I learned that my father had been a father of three when he met her. My eldest half-sister was five when he left; her brother was three and her baby sister less than a year. My mother told me that they had been unable to marry because of his first marriage, "...but I felt married." I wandered around, saying to myself, "I'm a bastard, I'm a bastard..." not in shame, but in awe, and a good helping of teen-aged melodrama.

During my first trip to England when I was nineteen, we stayed in the same house in Muswell Hill where my parents had often visited in the year before their emigration to Canada. One night, I had a vivid dream about my father and awoke in tears, convinced that he had died. Well, he was an alcoholic and a smoker, and had had more than his share of life-threatening accidents due to the former, so it seemed feasible.

In my mid-twenties, I was awakened at three o'clock in the morning by a long-distance phone-call. The operator asked me to wait, but there was nobody there.

Not long after, I embarked on a Master's degree in Education, emphasis on creative arts in learning. During my studies, I came across a poem by Marie-Claire Blais entitled "L'ami":
. . . Et quand venait Avril, l'homme rentrait chez nous,
C'était souvent à la fin d'une fraîche journée . . . .

Ce n'est qu'un passant bien-aimé, disait nos méres
Mais cet homme venait chez nous, il baisait notre front
A la dérobée
Et s'éloignait aussitôt pendant que sommeillant doucement
Nos visions...

(. . . And when April came, the man would come into our place
It was often at the end of a cool day . . . .

It is nothing more than a beloved passer-by, said our mothers
But this man would come to our place, he would brush his lips furtively across our foreheads
And would leave as soon as dreams sweetened our sleep...)

This poem so reminded me of my father, who even when he lived with us, seemed to have banished himself to the outskirts of our lives, and I responded with a blank verse poem in pentameter, ending with an Alexandrine. (I was experimenting with poetic forms at the time, and forgive me in advance, I'm no Marie-Claire Blais):

Message to the Friend After Reading Marie-Clair Blais
When you left for the first time, I saw you
Sitting on the porch as we drove away
I wept without knowing why. Packages
Would arrive by post and every time
We took a trip, I unwittingly broke
My mother's heart by watching for you at
Each corner and station, for it had seemed
Your habit to appear without warning with gifts.

When you came back, I ran into your arms
And you swung me up, stepping into the
Dark kitchen and knocking over the milk
Bottles. That's how it always seemed to be,
Beloved passer-by, we reached toward
Each other with the joy and eagerness
Of long absence, tinged with awkwardness
Of strangeness. You knew me so well and so little.

When you left for the last time, you kissed me
Clumsily, slipping two chocolate bars and
Two magazines under my pillow. I
Crouched in my bed, not daring, not bearing
To see your car drive into the dawn. In
The dark, I choked back the chocolate like
Bitter pills. Later, I blacked out each line
In my diary meticulously.

Did you mean to wake me? I think you were
A bit of a glutton for pathos with
No appetite for pain. I think that I'm my
Father's daughter. I'd like you to know that
I knew that you loved me, never doubted
You loved me, but that each fresh failure, each
Perceived rejection when you attempted
Reconnection sapped your courage. It's quite
All right, I have a piece of you in safekeeping.

A few years ago, when I took up researching my family history in earnest, I realized I could track down my half-siblings. I sent Christmas cards to my half-brother and a first cousin, saying who I was and emphasizing that I didn't expect a reply. Considering I'd just dropped the psychological equivalent of a bomb on Colchester, they took my overtures graciously. Very graciously. It turned out my father had wived it wealthily in California not much more than a year after I had last seen him driving away. He had a condo with a boat mooring on San Francisco Bay. He had been awarded a MBE for fundraising, for heaven's sake, pretty rich, considering the financial circumstances in which he left my mother. And he had not told a soul that he had a family in Canada. He had divorced his first wife, but, as far as I can tell, my mother is unaware of this. They gave me his phone number and address. My half-sister told me to call him. My paternal aunt suggested that I shouldn't. In the end, I decided that I'm not difficult to track down, and if he had truly wanted to reconnect, he would have.

He didn't. My half-niece messaged me through Facebook on Saturday that he was dying.
On Sunday morning, as I waited for the second message telling me he was gone (it arrived in the late afternoon), I copied pictures of him from my baby album with my digital camera, and the song that was playing in my head was not "My Father", it was my favourite Leonard Cohen tune, "Song of Bernadette", these lyrics in particular:

We've been around, we fall, we fly,
We mostly fall, we mostly run.
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done.

Tonight, tonight, I just can't rest
I've got this joy here inside my breast,
To think that I did not forget
That child, that song of Bernadette.

So many hearts, I find,
Broke like yours and mine,
Torn by what they've done and can't undo.
I just want to hold you, won't you let me hold you?
Like Bernadette would do.

Here's Jennifer Warnes singing it:

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him.
- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene ii, line 31

My father always promised us that we would live in France
We'd go boating on the Seine and I would learn to dance.
I sail my memories afar, like boats across the Seine,
And watch the Paris sunset in my father's eyes. Again. - Judy Collins

The fourth day of Christmas (as Joseph trod and Mary rode and Matt danced)

Today is one of the traditional Feast Days for the Holy Innocents (the other days being the 27th and the 29th). Such a strange feast commemorating a massacre of children which is also an event that cannot be confirmed in any historical record outside the Bible. Not that it matters, children are being massacred on a depressingly regular basis around the world. Now is the time to sing The Coventry Carol and feel the helpless sorrow. However, one of my very favourite, favourite carols is "The Band of Children", words by Frank Samuel Herbert Kendon, the tune an ancient French carol Laissez paître vos bêtes. I first heard it years ago during one of those strange gem-like Christmas specials which I've never seen again and can't find any reference on the Internet for. It was an animated special in which six carols were illustrated while an actor read the lyrics with the tune playing in the background:

The stars shall light your journey, your mother holds you close and warm;
The donkey's pace shall rock you, sleep baby, dream no harm.

What songs are these, faint heard and far?
The wind maybe in palm trees tall, or running stream or nightbird's call;
The dark lies deep on the desert where Joseph and Mary rode,
The dark lies deep on the desert, sleep well, thou child of God.

What songs are these, faint heard and far?
'Tis neither wind in palm trees tall, nor waterbrook, nor nightbird's call,
It is the voice of children where Joseph walked and Mary rode,
The fierce wild beasts are friendly, sleep well, thou child of God.

What forms are these, clear on the dark,
That shine and yet are flesh and blood, that laugh and sing along the road?
It is a crowd of children where Joseph walked and Mary rode,
A singing band of children, sleep well, thou child of God.

O, never was seen so strange a guard:
About the footsore travellers they in lovely circles moved, till day,
Until the baby awakened, while Joseph trudged and Mary rode.
Such lullaby be all men's, sleep well, thou child of God.

I searched far and wide through YouTube for this song which I have in front of me in The Oxford Book of Carols, but it's not under "Band of Children", "Laissez paître vos bêtes" nor any combination of the lyrics or its author that I've tried. I did have limited success in finding an Advent version of the carol, Venez, divin Messie. The tune is not quite right, but it might give you a faint idea: Now, it occurs to me that this does give the rather spooky impression that it's the spirits of all those slaughtered children circling and protecting baby Jesus, but there it is.

And if the Holy Innocents sing, how about if they dance? About a week before Christmas, my Friend of the Right Hand sent a video link which I did not open. (It was, I repeat, the week before Christmas.) Yesterday, I finally got around to it and was at first bewildered. It's a video with a bunch of comments posted beneath, a recent one from a woman who lost her soldier son in Iraq and says she was able to sleep through the night for the first time. What the dickens? I started playing it. A tall, teddy-bear kind of guy gives directions to whoever is holding the camcorder and begins a strange loping short of dance in the middle of a Mumbai street. The background changes; he's doing the same odd dance in various places around the world, in the desert, on a beach, in a market. Then, oh my God, the music builds and he's not alone. And to my utter astonishment, I burst into tears. I now know this has received a great deal of media attention, but it was new to me and if it's new to you, I beg you to watch it. I'll wait....
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. So tell me, am I a blubbering sentimental idiot? My favourite bits are his stately variation with the Indian dancers in Gurgaon and the poignant lonely little dance in the demilitarized zone in Korea. And of course, the dances in the three largest Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. (Toronto is not labeled, but they're the first group that rushes in to join Matt. And yes, it does rain that hard in Montreal. Ottawa is a two-hour drive west; a downpour will fill your shoes in seconds.)

Matt Harding apparently used to design computer games, got put off by the violence, and set off to travel the world. Somewhere in there, he got funding from Cadbury's, and the rest is internet history. Dance well, thou children of God.