Bone idle

This time last year, I was locked out of my blog, and making almost daily descents down Linden Avenue, from Fernwood, through Rockland, then down into Fairfield.

Almost exactly a year ago, I glanced to my left, and was halted by this sight.

Someone having trouble letting go of Hallowe'en? A social commentary on texting? The ghost of Christmas Future?

Bye-bye November. Advent begins in earnest tomorrow.

Fine-boned, spectral and skeletal

It's early morning -- for a Saturday, and I find myself being carried through the streets of Lowertown and Sandy Hill on a bus filled with mostly young women with loosely piled-up hair. Outside, it's a world of solitary young men, well, more like a few parallel solitary worlds, each containing a young man out on his own - walking his dog, sitting in shirt-sleeves on the floor of a rickety metal balcony (not even shivering at 0 degrees Celsius), striding along with a coffee, or with earbuds, or with coffee and earbuds.

The young women disembark en masse at the University of Ottawa, dispersing and disappearing along various pathways leading to academic buildings, probably libraries on this Saturday morning as the post-secondary community moves into term essay season.

I see Nordstrom's coming into view, remembering how it was Eaton's when I first arrived in this city, became a ghost-town version of Sears, and now has shed all pretensions of being Canadian. I have a wait between buses, and have had no breakfast, so I grab a coffee and pastry at the quasi-swish department store coffee shop - then make a mental resolution not to do that again. Something that expensive should be reasonably delicious.

Along the Québec bank of the Ottawa River, there are puddles of sunshine. The trees caught in the slanting light are glowing in silvery-white ghostliness, all vestiges of autumn colour vanished, leaving them spectral and skeletal, like fish-bones.

To call back the November of 2010

Earlier this month, I mentioned a couple of songs that recall past Novembers for me. What about this November?

Here's a song I've been hearing on the bus ride back home in the mornings. It's smooth, cool, old-fashioned pop, and written by Emm Gryner, a singer/songwriter from Sarnia, Ontario who's frighteningly talented and disgustingly pretty. (Not that I'm envious, or anything.) Here she's singing with Joel Plaskett, another really, really gifted singer/songwriter who's from Nova Scotia. (Click on the title to hear it):

Gold Soul of Rock 'n' Roll

I'm not puttin you on not putting you on my friend
Word for word these are the things he said
Once your idol here comes a tidal wave crashing in
You and your queen on a hill and the storms are lashing in
I walk through your town
God's Grandeur underground
Somewhere there's someone turnin' you up loud
Gold soul of rock 'n' roll
Baby babe I get so low but never round you

Ice will break oh the lights will change on the Owlerton Green
Heart so bright lit into the mic oh the jive you've seen
Roundabouts and racers
The groovers and the shakers
Somewhere someone's burnin' their Melody Makers.

Gold soul of rock 'n' roll
Baby babe I get so low but never round you
You're the gold soul of rock 'n' roll
All the others lost it all
But you never do...

Remembering Novembering

Back in the nineties, when my girls were very, very young, I used to record "A Prairie Home Companion" off the Seattle public radio station (which we could access from Victoria), so I could listen to it at my leisure throughout the week. "PHC" was so saturated with music, skits and stories, that a single listening didn't suffice, and besides, I found it hard to settle down and give it my full attention on a Saturday night. I remember a kind of November when the streets in Victoria were coldly damp and the air full of a sort of grey/gold light from the almost winter sun shining through the clouds. I was hurrying to wherever I was going with my Walkman on, listening to Garrison Keillor repeating emphatically: "Be prepared for something wonderful to happen..."

This is the fifth month I've "NaBloPoMo"-ed, and almost each month I've done this, I've hauled out my journals from the past twenty years and read entries of the month in question. I wasn't able to do this for August 2010 because I was three thousand miles away from my diaries, but for each of the other three months - February and September of 2009, and March 2010 - a theme has seemed to emerge. My past Februaries seemed frozen in limbo. Septembers were months of transition, and Marches rife with crises.

Novembers? Well, they have been spent in preparation, mostly for Christmas of course, but they seem to be a period for things that aren't quite due, but soon will be: December seminars that I quaked about teaching, school field trips and projects, my own children's being. November was the month in which I underwent amniocenteses and saw my children for the first time on the monitor during ultra-sound. In the case of my elder daughter, it was a time of joy and wonder; during the second procedure, my fluid started to leak and I spent twenty-four miserable hours wondering if I'd lost my younger daughter.

Looking through my journals is not an easy thing to do. I'm hit with waves of nostalgia and regret, bewilderment at the motives of someone whom I am no longer. There are flashes of joy and warmth, though. Memories of friends, of concerts, of things shared, and pleasures savoured alone.

Two gems, one from each daughter's earlier years:

We discovered, having moved into the neighbourhood of Fairfield near downtown Victoria, that the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies were an easy walk away. Elder daughter, then at age two, persisted in calling it "Forgiveness Day".
Younger daughter had received a gift of the book Angelina and Alice from the Angelina Ballerina series.
"I can read it," she told me earnestly, "because I was a mouse..." (And so she was. For Hallowe'en.)

In a few cases, I had mentioned music that reminded me of particular times. Here are two songs that, for me, belong to two different Novembers:

Oh, gosh. So much coming at me. Every time I look around... I'm going under....

Goldengrove unleaving

A couple of weeks ago, we were eating our traditional Sunday lunch of macaroni and cheese (from scratch, mind, okay, not the noodles), and the Resident Fan Boy was plotting his final attack on the leaves in the front yard, it being the final week for the city to pick up the bags of garden refuse. He gets excited about things like that which is rather endearing.

"It's like that poem about 'Goldengrove unleaving'," he rhapsodized. I gave him an incredulous look.

"It is Margaret you mourn for?"
"That's right; it's about the leaves falling, and about being reminded of death."
"But Goldengrove is a man, isn't he? And Margaret is weeping over him, but she's really mourning for herself..."
"No, it's about the leaves falling..."

So out came the Norton's Anthology and this time and this time only, the Honour History major trumped the English Literature major. The poem, by Gerald Manley Hopkins, is actually entitled Spring and Fall: to a young child. The Resident Fan Boy remembered studying it in a First Year English course at UVic; I, despite having a degree in the same at the same, never actually studied it, but knew it from an essay called "The Poet and the Peasants" written by the late Jean Kerr which recounted, in hilarious and poignant detail, her ambitious plot to get her five young sons to memorize and even like poetry. I have never forgotten the article, but clearly, I didn't read this particular poem closely enough:



Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

So, to sum up, it's addressed to a little girl, not a heart-broken young woman, and Goldengrove is a place, not a heartless young man. Couldn't have been more wrong.

So I went out to walk in the "unleaving" neighbourhood just before the late afternoon sunlight got gobbled up by the over-eager twilight of late autumn, where the last of the maple leaves were being scooped into paper bags by the more civic-minded, the rest being left to blow anti-socially over others' yards. It has been an unusually balmy November and there are whispers of a rainy rather than snowy Christmas this year.

I bent my steps in the direction of the Rideau River and thought mourning-for-Margaret November thoughts while watching ducks on a current so slow and in air so still that they might have been swimming in a pond. Then I strolled further and noticed for the first time that there are beavers living along the river bank. Mind you, I've never seen one in my nine years in Hades. I suppose the squirrels could have been getting extra hungry and ambitious; I wouldn't put it past them.

Finally, I nearly got ploughed off the sidewalk by a car which roared up the side-street and inexplicably tried to wedge itself between the sidewalk and another car making a right turn into a driveway. Honks and words were exchanged between the two drivers, as I checked to see if my heart hadn't jumped out of my chest and dazedly mused about the lack of control we have in what happens to us, plus the fact I'd told the RFB I'd be home in half an hour and his potential progression of annoyance to worry to panic if I'd not shown up. This, of course led to morbid thoughts of the events of a year ago. Come to think of it, I was mourning for Margaret then, too.