Corvid and COVID

This is not the crow.

I've just crossed the quiet street in the early morning, on my usual way to the coffee shop, when I feel a light tap to the back of my head, on the right side. Looking around in bewilderment, I spot a crow on my left, standing quietly on the sidewalk, beady eyes fixed on me.

Oh dear.

The last spring this kind of thing happened, two or three years ago, the crows were aggressive for a chunk of the summer.

Two or three years ago - it was three, actually - the Resident Fan Boy caught COVID.

From the Resident Fan Boy, Friday morning

I guess these things go in cycles.

Perhaps it is time to look

A couple of years ago, Spotify sent me a song that seemed to emanate the best things about a summer evening.  Spotify sends me rather more Scandinavian music than I really asked for, so I assumed this song was Swedish.  

About a year later, I noticed it wasn't Swedish.  (I'm so observant.) It's Estonian, and performed by a folksy band called Rüüt. 

It's fair to say that what I know about Estonia could probably be scribbled in the palm of my tiny hand.  It's south of Finland and north of -- Latvia? However, a couple of King Singers' concerts alerted me to the fact that Estonia is known for song.  They have a major Song and Dance Festival in the capital city of Talinn every five summers - this year, for example - and in the intervening years, they hold Youth Song and Dance Festivals, also huge.  

So here's the song, "Mina Ja Meri", sung by a lot of very young, very blond people in 2023.  I'm following it with a translation of one of the verses; the other verses are in much the same vein.  

Perhaps it is time to look at one another

Me and the sea, the sky and the earth

Tired from storms, but warmer than warm,

Me and the sea, the sky and the earth

Like flowers, we turn towards the light

Me and the sea, the sky and the earth

I give my heart's song into your care....

So, not so much about summer.  But it feels like summer.

Flushed with triumph

 

This amused me.

Camera-shy

 

Yesterday's urban wildlife encounter reminds me of an incident last fall, when I was on my way to set up breakfast for Demeter.

It's a short walk, and I caught the eye of a very young buck deer having a nosh in the plantations of a neighbouring apartment building.

"Don't worry," I told him.  "I'm not coming anywhere near you."

I'm pretty sure he didn't understand me, but he didn't challenge me, so I continued to the corner where I usually cross.  I got held up by what I call "funeral corteges", long lines of cars heading down Fairfield Road after being held up themselves by traffic signals further east.

While I waited, a young woman in grey sweats barrelled across the road from the other side, seemingly undeterred by the cars bearing down on her.  She was clutching her phone, and evidently intent on filming four or five deer that had now joined the buck, including a couple of young fawns.

I called to her, from where I stood:  "They have young with them; they might charge you!"  There have been reports of people being hurt by frightened urban deer over the years since they started appearing in Victoria, about twenty years ago; some dogs have had to be euthanised.

The woman, predictably, ignored me, gesturing uselessly as one deer came alarmingly close to her, although I don't think she understood the danger, then stretching out her arms to the sides, and pleading with them not to bolt -- as they were doing.

Did she really think they understood her words and gestures?  Did she believe she was in a Disney film?

A doe fled across the busy street, leaving her fawn behind, which eventually ventured after her.

None of them were run down -- including the clueless woman, still brandishing her phone, still calling after them to stay, to come back.

Breaking breakfast

In the midst of a stressful time, I skipped my usual route to the coffee shop, which takes me down a two-block arch of plane trees, and instead, took the narrow stairs to the basement level of our building, which, via a grim hall, takes me to the lower parking lot, where I strode into the full morning sunshine, crossed the street -- and stopped in my tracks.

Ahead of me (much farther ahead than it appears in this image), stood a young doe with the tiniest fawn I've ever seen.

I know enough about urban wildlife to never approach an animal with young, especially deer, which have been known to charge.  She may look like Faline, but those hoofs are sharp.

After taking my snaps, I took a generous half-circle path around the pair, keeping my distance and walking at a moderate pace.  The little fellow bolted into the bushes anyway, and Mum, after a lengthy wary stare, turned and followed her offspring.

It was only when I examined my shots on the phone while sipping my mocha that I realised I'd interrupted breakfast.

It's never what you think it's for

Not the most auspicious beginning of the month for me, I'm afraid.  I'll spare you the sordid details.

Life is.

It's never what you think it's for, and I can't seem to set it off,

And lately I've been insecure.

The chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve.

Used to be the greatest,

Now I see

Time is time, and time and time again

(And what would you say if you can't get out of here?)

Time is time, and time and time again,

To make your escape, you've captured the captor's fear.

'Cause I can feel my luck has turned it all around, 

And when you've fallen out, get both feet on the ground.

The curses you keep won't follow you now.

And so I try to be myself.

It's the same as always, I get tripped up.

And each and every time, it takes me away.

I'm often living on, just to be outside these walls again.

It's the age of what's to come, and, baby, you're on.

-Jessica Pratt

Going for Late Baroque

Gotta love this Rococo hopscotch that was meandering around the corner from us, courtesy of the young sidewalk artists residing on Chester Avenue.

Caught it before the spring rains washed it away.

And then who the hell was I?

I can't understand why I am exposing us all in this way . . . . Is this the tsunami that she unleashed when she went, and all of us still flailing in her wake, trying to put her together in the wreckage, and her slipping away, over and over, just as we begin to see her face? - Sarah Polley, in an email to her father Michael Polley

Looking to see what family connections there possibly could be connected to me and enjoy building hopefully a happy picture - From the profile of a recent DNA match to the Resident Fan Boy

Stories We Tell has that quality shared by all of my favourite films: the ability to draw me back, again and again, noticing new details every time; being a completely different movie every damn time.

The subject is the gradual revelation of a family scandal, and how widely the narrative varies: from those directly involved, to the those affected by it, to those who witnessed aspects of it.

We tend to screen books, music, and movies through our own uppermost concerns, so my first viewing of Stories We Tell, about ten years ago, reminded me of the myth-making and myth-busting of family research and the resulting clashes of narratives and identity.  More personally, I had a similar, but not identical, revelation in my own family at almost the same time, resulting in everyone affected having to rewrite their own family story.  I think few amateur genealogists fully appreciate the risks of their research, but this risk applies to anyone setting out to tell the story of their relatives.

Our changes in perception are constantly evolving, so a few months ago, I re-watched the film following the tsunami in the wake of the death of Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died last spring. The figurative family bombshell that hit Sarah Polley's family about a decade and a half after the death of their matriarch is not of the legacy-tarnishing quality as that affecting the Munro family, but it was also deliberately kept out of the papers, initially to protect Michael Polley, Sarah's father, and then, because this documentary was being made.

Sarah Polley in the 1980s with parents Michael and Diane

Diane Polley, an actor and casting director, died in 1990, when Sarah Polley, then a busy child actor and now an award-winning writer, was eleven.  Diane had four older children:  John and Suzy Buchan, from her first marriage, and Mark and Joanna Polley, from her second marriage.  They all take their seats at the beginning of the film, like a family gathering at an intervention - except none of them are in the same room; this is footage from separate interviews, during which Sarah Polley asked each to "tell the whole story, from the beginning", as if to someone who is hearing it for the first time.  The backing music is "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver:  And I told you to be balanced/ And I told you to be kind....  

And the late Diane Polley also seems to take her place as well, via footage of an audition from the mid sixties.  But she doesn't say a word.

Someone who doesn't take a seat is Sarah Polley herself, who deliberately keeps silent through most of the film, aside from the occasional question or brief comment, and appears in the occasional re-enactment of events, but with no soundtrack. Sometimes this makes her presence seem oddly impassive, but, as her father astutely points out, she has the ultimate control over what makes it into the film.

Here, I must alert you to spoilers, if you're planning on watching this movie -- and you should.

Polley moves back and forth in time, revealing the surprises and twists out of sequence, but closer to the timeline of their discovery.  She illustrates events with authentic family movies and (*first spoiler*) reconstructed Super 8 footage, using actors.  The Resident Fan Boy didn't notice the latter, but I did, mainly because I recognised Rebecca Jenkins, a friend of Diane's, an actor who also sang back-up for Jane Siberry in the eighties.

Polley is careful to illustrate the differences in  the many narratives about (*big* spoiler) finding out the identity of her birth father. The stories are similar, but vary in small, but important, details, revealing, in particular, the biases of her father, actor Michael Polley, and her birth father, producer/writer Harry Gulkin.  At one point, Gulkin tells Sarah, with some intensity, that the story belongs to him, because he's the one surviving person who experienced it directly.  (I have to restrain myself from shouting at the screen every damn time - if the story belongs to anyone, it's Sarah Polley herself.)

One of Polley's greatest assets is the thoughtful articulateness of her interviewees, particularly her siblings, all evidently very bright people with greater comfort in front of a camera than most people.  It's particularly fun when her brothers give her a hard time, in the way that big brothers do.

Close to the end, we have another moving montage of the storytellers, this time to "Demon Host" by Timber/Timbre: All those messages you sent, clear as day/ But in the night, oh, I couldn't get it right.... The camera lingers on each bereft face: Diane's grown children, her husband, her lover, her friends, her brother.  Years later, she is clearly so missed.

Michael Polley and Harry Gulkin both died six years after the release of this film, within a few months of each other.

The unreliable narrator is a new concept for me, and I seem to be coming up against the term multiple times over the past few months.  (Don't know how I missed this while studying literature in university.) This film demonstrates that we are all unreliable narrators; human memory is just too malleable and mutable.

I think Harry Gulkin was mistaken.  The truth, while ever elusive, is closer through the mesh of narratives, rather than sticking to one voice -- even if that seems the more intelligible way.

But then, perhaps truth is never singular.

As you finally get rid of them (Rid of them!)

It's the Ninth Day of Christmas, not the Second, but it's been about sixteen years since I last posted the lyrics to this Elvis Costello ditty (co-written with Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains), and it's been playing in my head a lot this holiday -- not that anyone got drunk, I hasten to add, and we finished the tourtières days ago:

I knew of two sisters whose name it was Christmas,

And one was named Dawn of course, the other one was named Eve.
I wonder if they grew up hating the season,
The good will that lasts til the Feast of St. Stephen

For that is the time to eat, drink, and be merry,
Til the beer is all spilled and the whiskey has flowed.
And the whole family tree you neglected to bury,
Are feeding their faces until they explode.

There'll be laughter and tears over Tia Marias,
Mixed up with that drink made from girders.
’Cause it's all we've got left as they draw their last breath,
Ah, it's nice for the kids, as you finally get rid of them,
In the St Stephen's Day Murders.

Uncle is garglin' a heart-breaking air,
While the babe in his arms pulls out all that remains of his hair.
And we're not drunk enough yet to dare criticise
The great big kipper tie he's about to baptise.

With his gin-flavoured whiskers and kisses of sherry,
His best Chrimbo shirt slung out over the shop.
While the lights from the Christmas tree blow up the telly,
His face closes in like an old cold pork chop.

And the carcass of the beast left over from the feast,
May still be found haunting the kitchen.
And there's life in it yet, we may live to regret,
When the ones that we poisoned stop twitchin'.

It is a far, far better thing

Over the past couple of decades, what passes for Christmas television programming has bemused me.  As far as I can tell, some underpaid minion, saddled with slapping some sort of viewing schedule together, had assumed that, since Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, anything connected with Dickens is Christmassy:  Great Expectations, Bleak House or even A Tale of Two Cities.

With that in mind, I can pompously intone:  "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times . . . . " when talking about this year's Christmas, can't I?

(Well I can.  You weren't there.  Lucky you.)

It was the worst in the sense that I knew it was going to be stressful, took steps to prepare and plan against that eventuality, and it was all exactly as stressful as I feared anyway.  

A house guest (delightful, courteous, and omnipresent).  

Extended family with temperaments diametrically opposed to the introverted temperaments in our household. 

An unusually deaf Demeter, plagued by a small and stubborn ball of wax in her so-called "good ear", and totally bamboozled by aforementioned temperaments. 

A daughter on the autistic spectrum, to whom Christmas is vital, abandoned for a few heart-wrenching minutes, by her panicky father on a holiday carousel.  (It's a long story, please don't make me repeat it.)

And the Resident Fan Boy, whose instinctive defence is shutting down his brain, whenever something emerges from left field, which happens a lot at Christmas.

It was the best of times in the sense that I didn't kill anybody.  I didn't yell at anybody -- except the Resident Fan Boy, and only a couple of times, at that.

The shopping was done on time, and the presents seemed to go over well.  There are still three Christmas cards to mail.  (For those of you not resident in Canada, we had a postal strike from mid-November to mid-December.). What food I managed to produce has been edible, even marginally festive.

So I really have nothing to grumble about.  My expectations weren't overly great, and my house is, in no way, bleak.

Besides, there has been very little Dickens on the telly - apart from A Christmas Carol.  The specialty channels are jammed with scores of Christmas-themed romantic movies, in the vein of Harlequin and Mills & Boon.  They play them year-round now.

Oh, joy.

Merry Eighth Day of Christmas, to you and yours.