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.

If, like a crab, you could go backward

The top of her brightly coloured bike helmet is only a few inches above the top of my table.  She's moving steadily, but not particularly quickly, backward, so I have time to reach out to steady my tall glass of iced mocha.

She bumps gently into my table, smiles beatifically at me and steps to her left to continue her reverse trek into the back of the legs belonging to a tall elderly gentleman standing in line for his morning cup of coffee.

"Walking backwards is a thing these days," I inform my neighbour on my left.  "I've been trying it myself; it's supposed to improve your balance."

The mini-back-pedaller reappears, this time walking forward, having retrieved her grandmother, and they return to their seats at the table to my right, where a tiny bike has been stashed.  The lady tells an inquiring fellow grandmother that the little girl is "just three".  The child knows she's the topic of conversation, and takes off again, sans helmet -- sideways.

Summer and smoke

This morning, for the first time this year, I hesitate, and decide not to crack open the windows.  There is a growing wildfire near Sooke, a community west of here, and while the city is bright with summer sunshine, I feel the dryness in my mouth that signals the presence of smoke, something that has become sadly seasonal here.

My mind drifts back, like smoke, to the two summers when my mother was a "hostel parent".  These were the summers when I was 7 and 8; Demeter had discovered that an affordable and comfortable summer holiday could be had, if she took over, for a few weeks, the running of one of the smaller and more remote international hostels in the great Albertan parks of Jasper and Banff.

I have about half a dozen memories of the hostels and enough time has passed that I can't readily distinguish which memories are of Jasper, and which of Banff.  I remember an early morning breakfast and seeing my mother drop the corpse of a mouse into the wood burning stove.  

There was a creek running by one of the hostels, where Double Leo Sister and I would play and paddle in the afternoons.  We were equipped with emergency whistles and told to blow on them if we needed help.  At the shrilling of them, Demeter would come running, banging a pot, to scare off bears, only to hear:  "Wasses, Mummy!!"  (We were terrified of being stung.)  By the end of the summer, we had become the girls who cried "Wasses", and Demeter decided the bears could have us.  (I've told this story before, haven't I?)

Demeter, questioned this summer, can only remember "Coral Creek".  There is a Coral Creek Canyon, quite far to the southeast of Jasper - and Demeter believes the hostel was in the southern part of Jasper National Park.  However, there is also a Corral Creek to the east of Jasper, past Hinton, Alberta, and another Corral Creek, nearly at Banff and less than five kilometres south of Lake Louise. Perhaps this other Corral Creek was the location of the Banff hostel where Demeter was a hostel parent.  None of these places appear to have hostels now.

Nothing left but distant memories.  I'm pretty sure that the Jasper hostel was where we were the summer I was seven, because my father came to see us there, and he left the family the summer I was eight, although I was never told.  

The second hostel was, I believe, near a railway track, because a family with girls roughly my age came to stay, and we children were at the railway track when a train came roaring through.  Our rather feather-brained dog, a poodle/Scottish-terrier cross, stood still on the tracks, gazing at the oncoming train, as it blasted its horn.  Too terrified to try to retrieve her, I tried to run in the other direction to avoid seeing her crushed, while the other girls, held on to me.  The dog sprang to safety with seconds to spare.

Demeter was called a "hostel parent" because of the youth of the visitors coming through, often in cycling groups.  A largish contingent came from New York City; they were loud and lively.  I was furious to be banished to bed.  For years, I remember a song they'd sing after dinner:  Hey, jig-a-jig, kiss a little pig, follow the band . . . . My husband's a baker . . . is he/ All day he bakes bread, he bakes bread, he bakes bread, and at night he comes home and (expectant pause) drinks tea!!

The implications of the pause zoomed right over my eight-year-old head.  I didn't know that the song is at least 300 years old, and was far filthier.  The cleaner version I remember turns up in the 1976 television movie Sybil, which starred Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.

 Toward the end of this second hostel summer (I'm pretty sure), Demeter had the bright idea of taking six-year old Double Leo Sister, and eight-year-old me on a spiralling hike up and around a mountain. The gravel road climbed in an ever-upward curve, as the sun beat down, and we wore out.  I've seen the pictures Demeter took that afternoon.  We looked weary.  We never found what Demeter sought: the fire look-out station at the top.

This week, Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper itself is aflame. I probably visited the town at some point, but my only memory of it was passing through it by train, when Demeter, Double Leo Sister and I moved to British Columbia. I was in my bunk half asleep when the conductor passed, calling for everyone to set their watches back an hour for Pacific Time. I may have thought of the hostels before drifting off, like smoke.

When the old man died

Fairly recently, we reached a notable numbered anniversary for the death of my father-in-law. 

It snuck up on me, but when the realisation hit, I felt no stab of grief, nor did I feel like doing a jig.  He was the Resident Fan Boy's dad, and the grandfather of my daughters.  Elder daughter and the RFB genuinely miss him; younger daughter is too young to remember him.

I'm afraid I don't particularly miss him.  He was high maintenance, and not fond of me.  Nevertheless, I was chagrinned to find, running through my mind on a mildly disrespectful loop:  When the o-o-o-ld ma-a-an di-i-i-ed....

"My Grandfather's Clock" was a fairly regular part of my childhood.  It was a staple of so-called "songs for children" - even though, as a little girl, I found the lyrics quite creepy:  a clock that carefully measures out a man's lifetime and dies when he does?  I have a vague memory of my sister's Grade Two class singing it at assembly:  Ninety years without slumbering - tick-tock, tick-tock - His life's seconds numbering... 

Ick.

Like a lot of songs aimed at children in the late 20th century, it certainly wasn't written for children.  It occurred to me that my daughters, children of the dawn of the 21st century, may not be familiar with the song.  I have no recollection of their ever singing it.

I looked it up and discovered that: a)  the term "grandfather clock" originates with the song; and b) it was written in the 1870s by Henry Clay Work, same guy who wrote the Civil War song "Marching Through Georgia".  Work came from a Connecticut family with strong Abolitionist beliefs, and is distantly related to Frances Work, the mother of Diana, Princess of Wales.

There are probably several parodies of this, but the one I know of is "My Grandmother's Cat" by Garrison Keillor.  It seems to be carefully copyrighted, so I won't put it here, but it's possible to listen to it through Apple Music.

My late father-in-law didn't quite make it to ninety, although I think I remember a grandfather clock in the front hallway.  Don't know what became of it.

Peeping Mom

 I've run out of day again (which seems to happen more often in December; shall I blame the Soltice?), so here's my Advent calendar this year. It's the kind of Advent calendar I loved as a child: where you open the doors and windows and see what's behind them.

Or else something has changed.

I still love it.

Good night.

Music therapy

An impossible day. Well, clearly not impossible - I got through it.

Due to a delayed grocery delivery, I found myself at Demeter's at 2 pm trying to serve and clean up after lobster bisque without running water.  I only remembered when I went to fill the kitchen sink that there was a scheduled water turn-off for Demeter's building that afternoon.

As I was boiling pots of water to clean the dishes, and trying to wipe up sticky umbre soup drips without scalding my fingers, a waltz tune drifted into my addled brain, along with snippets of song.

I realised it was The Story of Celeste, something I hadn't heard since I was quite a little girl.  It was written and performed by Paul Tripp with an orchestra, back in the days when there were quite a few of these kids' stories with symphonic orchestras making the rounds and being recorded.  Tripp also wrote the rather better-known Tubby the Tuba, but as a little girl, I thought Celeste's waltz tune was just the most beautiful thing ever.

It's a Cinderella story, with Celeste, an orphaned tune looking for an owner, being locked up by the cruel Miss Squeak (a clarinet), who detests tinkly tunes.  Celeste, of course, finally wins the heart of Prince Cello, and becomes his tune. So she can belong to him.  And he can play her. 

Okay, perhaps it's wiser not to look too deeply into this story, but the music is lovely.

Close to tears from fatigue, I left Demeter's and ran into her neighbour, who told me what a good daughter I was, and thumped me approvingly on my injured arm.  

I didn't cry out, but staggered home to see if I could dig up the recording I remembered.  YouTube didn't fail me.  It's about fifteen minutes of your time, if you have it:

Foggy finances

Thinking back to a December memory which is about nearly a quarter of a century old:

In those days, I caught a lift to the Unitarian Church every Sunday, sometimes accompanied by elder daughter.

I don't know how the subject came up but I was telling my lift about about flying to San Francisco in my pre-child days, and my growing terror when the plane took an eternity to rise through a bank of clouds.

Elder daughter, then four, listened gravely from the back seat, and announced: "My cloud-people get cloud-money.  They get it from the cloud-bank."

Signs of the times

Click to enlarge and read the children's message.

One of the things we rather like about our building is the variety of residents.

Not that we see much of them these days.

Among our number are retirees, young professionals, students, and four families with young children - the latest are our neighbours, a couple of willowy lawyers who gave birth to a daughter about two weeks ago. We didn't know until five days after her birth, when we heard what younger daughter described as an angry cat.

That's life lately, snatches of sound, and glimpses of movement. The hallways are deserted. It's even easy to get time in the laundry room.

This morning, I headed out to pick up some milk for Demeter, apparently the last time I'll be permitted to use my own cloth bags for shopping. It was colder than I'd anticipated, despite the bright sunshine, so I doubled back to get my coat.

That's when I noticed the signs taped beside the front door of my building.

What a strange time to be growing up. What will they remember?

Then I got tired and left

Last November, I made time.

So often, I've looked at the Gorge Waterway from the bus, as it takes the loop en route to Silver City. It was a glorious morning, so I left home a good hour before I had to, and got off the bus, misguidedly, at a hairpin curve on Gorge Road, but made it across unscathed.

And there it was. My adolescence.

An uprooted tree, had toppled head down in the Gorge, wasps buzzing around its corpse. Was it there when I cycled along here in Grade Nine? Am I really so old?

There were the same steps, the one leading down into the water. I used to sit here, waiting for the boy I secretly loved - who was in love with my best friend, of course.

I almost wanted to balance along the very edge, as I did as a nine-year-old, when the bricks were being slowly piled. Beyond was the playground, swings still there, but in a slightly different location. No teeter-totters in this litigious age. The clammy change-room for swimmers oblivious to concepts such as fecal counts stands behind, and in front, a bank of vegetation blocks the view of the beach.

I turned up the steep incline leading to the crosswalk. My legs remembered it better than my head. At the intersection, there are now traffic lights, and a push-button walk signal in the direction of my old elementary school.

No more "Stop students! Traffic through!" sung out by a military-inspired student crossing-guard trio, marching down to their corner:  
Left! Left! Left! Left!
I had a good job and I left! I had a good job and I left!
First, they hired me, then they fired me, then I got tired and left!
Left! Left! Left!

Up Admirals Road, where a huge yellow seniors residence has replaced the corner-store, and a couple of houses. I glanced in, and a lady in a dressing gown waved.

I waved back.

On up the hill to the duplex. An older lady was already peering down the drive.

"I never realized there was a house back there."
"It's a duplex. I lived in this one by the street, and the Wardens lived in the back one."

She told me how she and her husband, newly-wed, got together a thousand dollars for a down-payment on a modest house we could see from our standpoint. I thought to myself that a thousand dollars would have been a humongous amount when this lady was a young married. She was telling me her life story as the bus I meant to catch rolled by.

I caught the next one.

Ambushed by 2019

Woke up this morning with a start. The Resident Fan Boy had gone to work - back after more than two weeks off, and I realized that it was January 3rd, and the things that seemed so far off during Christmas - aren't.

I bolted out of bed and turned on the radio.

This song, which has been getting a fair bit of airplay on CBC Radio for the past month or so, is about other things that are far off. Hawksley Workman is singing about the towns of Battleford and North Battleford in Saskatchewan, but he grew up in Huntsville, another small town in Ontario, during the 1980s.

Most Canadians growing up in any Canadian town or even city in the latter half of the 20th century, though, will recognize elements of this song.



I feel less panicky this evening. I got a few things done.

The days when her ball wasn't working

From my journals of 21 years ago:

"Elder daughter (age 5 1/2) talking to herself as she knocks toys around the living room: 'No one knows how she could do the world's greatest hockey goal . . . . Maybe it was because she practised a lot at home . . . . Her sister was always chasing her around . . . . Now she sat on her ball, thinking about the days when her ball wasn't working . . . . Then she hit the ball . . . .'

"This morning, she climbs into the bed and whispers to me, pointing at the ceiling: 'I can see my dream up there . . . . A person is putting out fruit . . . . It's gold, so it must be my dream . . . .There's another of my dreams next to it . . . . Can you see it?'"

What are little boys made of? (Part Two and write of passage number forty-three)

My heart sinks when the bus on the way back from Butchart Gardens stops near Elk Lake, where several young kids are lined up.  It's day camp season in Victoria.

I was a day-camper for my first three summers in Victoria, ages 9 to 11 -- eons ago.  In those days, there were few day camps and we were transported daily by ancient, retired city buses.

Now, the hapless and hopeful counselors must marshal their charges on to city buses, to fidget and chatter cheek by jowl with unenthusiastic passengers.

This lot look roughly in the 6 to 8 range with a couple of taller boys who are either big for their age or some kind of junior assistants.  There are about fifteen children in all, and they have been instructed by their twenty-something counselors to stand.  Most of them ignore this, being small enough to fit several to a seat.

One little boy (there's always one) is sitting by himself, inches away from me.  His name is James and he's spent the first ten minutes of the journey playing with a rubber frog he's retrieved from the sandy pails dangling from the fingers of the distracted female counselor.  She has a nose piercing and purple hair-ends; she's busy pivoting to keep an eye on everyone in her end of the bus.  Her bearded co-worker is overseeing about half a dozen kids in the back of the bus.

For the next ten minutes, little James dozes off, but as he rouses, it becomes clear he isn't happy.  His small face screws up, and tears start dripping down his summer-coloured cheeks.  I wave to catch his counselor's attention, point discreetly in James' direction and draw imaginary tears under my eye.

He looks up at her in abject misery and butts his head against her hip as she reassures him that "we're almost there".  (This is debatable -- we're still in the upper reaches of Douglas Street.)

One of the big boys slips in beside him and tries to jolly him out of it, gently poking him, and trying to draw his attention to what's out the window, finishing with a droll "Drip-drip-drip".  Female counselor tells him this isn't helpful and to cut it out.

I'm a little worried, given my proximity, that wee James is bus-sick. but it's becoming clear that his discomfort is growing; he's starting to grab a bit at his groin and cry harder.  In other words, he's really wee James.

Mercifully, the group's stop is not quite downtown, and, out on the sidewalk,  I see James at the head of the fleeing line, clutching his counselor's hand.

Yellow to Hero

For the past few years, I've been trying to follow the philosophy of "Show up", meaning making more of an effort to get out and attend things.

Today, I got out and attended Boyhood, which was shot over twelve years.  They cast a seven-year-old boy and the director's seven-year-old daughter as his older sister.  I think she's supposed to be about two years older, but luckily, the developmental lag that boys seem to have worked in the movie's favour.  Shooting for a few days a year for a total of 45 days between the spring of 2002 and the autumn of 2013, all the characters, the boy and the girl, and the adults that surround them (including Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as the parents) age 12 years without the need for prosthetics or special effects, and even though the film is close to three hours long, you barely notice it.  (Except for the part where I had to run to the washroom.) 

Both young actors were born in 1994, so their childhood and adolescence is contemporary with that of my daughters.  The story, though, is a very American one and it's set in Texas which is damn near a universe of its own.

While I'm not sure how much of the characters' experience would be recognizable to my children -- the American school experience was very foreign to me, even though I had close American friends as a teenager -- they would certainly recognize the music.  Starting in 2002 with "Yellow" by Coldplay, we hear snatches of Blink 182, Britney Spears, Weezer, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, and of course, Gotye, among many others.  The song that stayed with me as I hurried out into the night and damn near got run over by a car bearing down on me in the lit crosswalk, was "Hero" which I've certainly heard before -- somewhere.  The lyrics are particularly apt, especially as the main character, now age 18 drives across Texas  to start college.  The original video, I discovered, is also a bit of a heart-breaker. 

Other pilgrimages on the western border (Part Four of a Google Map walk through a childhood neighbourhood)

Aside from the trek to church, my Westmount childhood featured another weekly pilgrimage up the west side of my block, heading north along 127 Street to Eccleston's for the purpose of squandering my weekly allowance.
View Larger Map Geez, was it really that small? I remember it being crammed with candy. I'm sure there were other necessaries to buy there, but I only remember the shelves where I had to choose between, um... a Jersey Milk chocolate bar...no, wait... maybe an Aero bar or.... If I was feeling exotic, I might get some MacIntosh toffee or Turkish Delight.

We even hit Eccleston's for Hallowe'en, when prairie kids such as we would sing out "Haahl-low-weeeen Ap-PUULLS!" rather than the more pedestrian "Trick or Treat". Mrs Eccleston, a petite plain lady with short, permed dark hair would stare at us in horror and scoop sweets into our pillowcases. I, being dressed as a not-at-all scary princess, complete with gold crown and heavy chain painstakingly crafted out of cardboard by my mum, was bemused.

Across the street, but only in wintertime (November to April in Edmonton), was the outdoor skating rink where I never quite learned to skate. My mother always told me this was because I was too afraid of falling, that I should go limp and plop down painlessly like a rag-doll as my sister did. (My sister, an expert in cuts and scrapes, was covered in scabs up until her teens.) I would cling to the wooden boards, watching long whip-lashing lines of skaters hold hands and swing out from the centre ice I dared not breach. As the late afternoon twilight descended and the bright lights came on, a beautiful but tinny nameless song played over the PA system. I have never been able to identify it, though it stills plays in my head and I strain to hear the chorus.

(This is my continuation of the exercise suggested by John Reid at his blog Anglo-Celtic Connections.)

The tricycle thief (Google-map-walking through a childhood neighbourhood, Part Two)

Our journeys to downtown Edmonton always started with a three-block walk to 124 Street where the buses ran. (According to the current map, there is now a bus stop directly in front of where our house used to stand, probably put there for the seniors in the residence that has taken its place.) It seemed a very long trek to an under-eight-year-old, rife with all sorts of hazards. For example, there was a cantankerous get-off-my-lawn guy who permanently traumatized me by yelling at me when I accidentally stumbled on his carpet-like green.

The walk was usually taken with my mum (although I was on my own when the lawn ogre roared). I remember walking with my dad on one occasion, desperately trying to match his stride which took up three of mine.
View Larger MapMore often though, I ventured to the end of my block and sat on the curb facing east. Warm in the afternoon sun (I certainly didn't do this in the winter), I would thoughtlessly toss ants to their watery grave in the gutter while I waited for the familiar figure to appear in the distance. When the figure returned my frantic wave, it was my cue to run to meet my mother returning from work.

One day a group of young kids on tricycles appeared in silhouette, peddling from the next lane in the next block. Just as suddenly, they vanished, along with the approaching figure of my mum. Baffled, I ran the half-block to where my mother had disappeared, halting to gaze down the deserted back lane. A few minutes later, there was my mother, purse over her shoulder, grimly towing two tricycles.

A few weeks before, my sister and I had received our very first tricycles. Mine was an electric blue, hers a bright green. Both had bright plastic ribbons flowing from the handlebars. They had promptly vanished from our front yard. Not long afterward, I was engaged in my favourite activity of climbing on our wooden white-washed front gate and riding it until it slammed shut with a satisfying click. A posse of about five or six kids trundled by, either riding or clinging to a largish tricycle and a smaller one. The ringleader of this mob was a rather loathsome little girl called Gigi. (With a name like that, I suppose she didn't have a chance.) She jeered: "You can't ride on my bike!"

Being five, I was too distracted by this out-of-left-field insult to notice the details of the trikes. Mama, returning home that summer evening, had recognized the tricycles immediately, despite the miscreants having partially ripped the decorative ribbons from the handlebars to disguise them. She had, after all, spent precious time and money acquiring them. I can only imagine the terror of Gigi and her gang when pursued by my mother who, although by nature a gentle person, could be formidable. She later told me that they abandoned their ill-gotten vehicles in the backyard and ran for the safety of the house. She, of course, pounded on the door and confronted the startled mother.

Once home, Mother covered the white mudguards on the wheels with our address in large letters, and we were strictly required to keep our trikes in the backyard shed. I don't remember seeing much of Gigi after that. No great loss.

(This is my continuation of the exercise suggested by John Reid at his blog Anglo-Celtic Connections.)