Write of Passage number fifteen: they shoot Clydesdales, don't they?

Two young men are sitting on the bus - hoodies in camouflage patterns, earrings, leather jackets - comparing jobs and tattoos, their exchange punctuated with the usual expletives:
"See this one? One hundred *%$@#ing dollars."
"Yeah? How long did it take?"
"I dunno,$#@*&ing hours. Still hasn't &*%^$ing healed yet."

From my seat directly behind the last speaker, I am mesmerized by what I can see of his hair, various shades with indigo by his right ear. His cap, appropriately dark with the visor pulled to one side, reads: "Sweet Acre Farms -- Home of Carroll's Clydesdales".

"Dying is easy; comedy is hard."

When I was fifteen, a friend invited me to go see the movie Godspell. On reflection, it was an odd film choice for two young Unitarians, but my Anglo-Saxon was rusty and I wasn't all that sure what I was getting into. I was swept away by the joy, hilarity, pathos, and infectious music. I was so exhilarated when I emerged from the cinema, that I walked all the way home, despite the darkness and lateness of the hour.

Over the years, I had the opportunity to view the stage production several times: an exuberant version by a clever company that normally specialized in improv; a polished version by one of those touring "Broadway" companies; an earnest professional version in Toronto that no doubt hoped to recapture the magic of the almost mythical Toronto production that featured Victor Garber, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Thomas, Martin Short and Jayne Eastwood;
and the inevitable amateur church version that got by on heart and charm.

Both my daughters got hooked on it in turn. Elder daughter was especially enamoured of it at age five and had to be gently talked out of a Godspell-themed birthday party. (I wasn't quite sure how I would explain that one to the other parents, and what games would we play? "Let's electrocute Jesus in the back yard, kids!" We went with Snow White.) I still remember searching for something in the stacks in the downtown branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library when younger daughter was a toddler and hearing her singing wordlessly in her stroller. When I stopped to listen, I realized it was "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord."

Younger daughter has remained steadfastly loyal to Godspell ever since, so when we learned that Canterbury High School was putting it on this month, we moved swiftly to procure tickets for the matinée.

Canterbury High School, for those of you unfamiliar with Hades, is the high school devoted to the arts in the public school system. Students come from across the Ottawa-Carlton School District to attend and must audition to gain admittance into Fine Arts, Drama, Dance, Literary Arts, or Music (or, I suppose, to a combination of the aforementioned). So this wasn't going to be your average zits-and-all high school performance.

And it wasn't. The set, meant to be an abandoned and drained outdoor swimming pool, covered with graffiti and brimming with trash, was student-designed and effective. The musicians, unseen backstage, played beautifully at the right volume and on cue. The performers sang well, knew their lines and were unfazed by slight mishaps such as the occasional feedback boom or a lost shoe during a dance number.

There were some odd directorial choices, forced, I suspect, by the need to involve as many students as possible. As is standard in many middle and high schools, there were two casts. We were seeing the "New Testament" cast whose final performance this was. About half a dozen dancers were brought in to add extra menace to the opening scene, the questioning by the Pharisees sequence, and the interlude where Jesus is tempted by Satan. This has been traditionally performed by the cast members only and I found it distracting. I imagine the parents of the dancers would passionately disagree.

The oddest choice of all was having the other so-called "Old Testament" cast appear at the foot of the stage, dressed quite elegantly in shades of black and grey with the women in heels, to bear away the body of Jesus. Nice bonding, but a bit bewildering to those not closely involved.

It took me some thinking afterward to pinpoint what wasn't quite working for me. Then it occurred to me: the funniness was missing. The other productions of Godspell I've seen have been hilarious; I've hurt myself giggling. This production had humour but it got hidden in asides that sounded more like teenage wisecracks than jokes.

Godspell is a musical, but for character actors. These kids are still too young to carry off the breathless vaudevillian pace of the script, and way too reluctant to surrender their prettiness to the clown characters they're supposed to embody. This robbed the more burlesque moments of the play of their innocence.

Let me give you an example: "Turn Back O Man" is a Diamond Lil/saloon-type number. In the touring Broadway production I saw years ago, the girl assigned to sing this was a plump and uninhibited performer dressed, like the rest of the cast, in an outrageous fluffy concoction with layers of knee-socks and a pair of battered old sneakers. She threaded an endless feather boa throughout the throng in the packed lower orchestra while treating individual audience members to Mae West one-liners. When she made her way back to the stage, she glanced up into the balcony and gave a little wave. I was in the balcony. Everybody waved back. It was so over-the-top, so literally a burlesque, that everyone felt comfortable and included in the joke. Her teen-aged counterpart in the Canterbury production was clad in a sort of striped body stocking with a little skirt and artfully torn leggings with bare feet. Instead of Mae West, we were leaning uncomfortably toward Lolita. Many of the female cast-members were dressed in variations of colourful tunics with leggings and bare feet or runners. They didn't look like clowns; they looked like something out of anime or manga.

"You've got to be pretty in the city of God"? Well, you've got to be a bit flaky in a production of Godspell

Still, the farewells at the Last Supper were genuinely moving and the Finale carried the full dramatic punch.

I may be giving the impression that the young actors were incompetent; let me assure you, they were not. They let them into this school for a reason. One girl, though, truly stood out. Her name is Natasha Mumba. This lady has the presence and the power and the chops. She can sing, she can take control of the stage and she has the makings of one fine character actor. Look out.

Younger daughter's reaction to Canterbury's Godspell? She sat there trembling slightly for a few moments after the lights came up, gazing down at her programme.
"I loved it!" she declared, finally. Spellbound.

54-40, why fight?

Each weekday, I take an hour's bus-ride with younger daughter to her school, drop her off, then pelt down to whichever bus stop will catch me the first of the three buses that will eventually get me home. I climb on, stick in my ear buds and tune into the last half-hour of CBC Radio Two Morning. It's a very eclectic mix of music and I like it.

The bus was taking a detour down Richmond Street en route to the Westboro Transitway station when this gem came on the other morning:


Geez. I hadn't thought of this song in years. It was getting airplay during our final months in Victoria before we descended into Hades.

Canada's going into Standard Time this evening (except for Saskatchewan which refuses to take part in such nonsense). That gives me an extra hour of sleep. I think I'll play some 54-40 and dance myself to bed....

Write of Passage number fourteen: do I get my medal yet?

Conversation doesn't come easily to younger daughter. I spend two hours each day with her on the bus, but very few words are exchanged and if I try to introduce a topic, I'm usually met with an impatient "I know! I know that, Mum!" even if she doesn't know, because the underlying message is Please stop talking; I'm getting overwhelmed.

So the days when she does initiate a conversation are special indeed, and terrifying, because it means the topic is of vital importance and my answer can make or break her heart.

About a week before Hallowe'en, she sees something out the bus window which makes her shudder with delight.

"Hallowe'en is coming really soon!"
I agree.
She reaches across and touches my arm with one mitten. It's black and has reflective skeletal hand bones over the back. (Uh-oh. She's touching me to make sure I'm paying attention. This must be paramount. She rarely does this.)

"I do want to go trick-or-treating this year..."
"Really?" I say, gently quizzical. "Aren't you fourteen?"
"I know I'm fourteen, Mum!" She retreats back to her window and I watch her internal struggle throughout the long bus ride, punctuated by rebellious murmurs and flat declarations such as:
"Fine! I won't go trick-or-treating!"
Minutes pass, more muttering.
Finally: "I've changed my mind! I won't watch Meet Me in St Louis tonight!"
Meet Me in St Louis features a long segment about Hallowe'en. The previous evening, she watched ET which is set in the days around Hallowe'en.

As we get off the bus, she is clearly unhappy and strides ahead of me. I follow her sadly, considering the issue. The Resident Fan Boy and I both gave up trick-or-treating when we became teenagers. Things were a little more delineated then. At thirteen in British Columbia, you used to leave elementary school and enter junior high. These days, middle schools muddy the waters between childhood and adolescence. They can begin as early as Grade Six in some provinces. Furthermore in our long-vanished childhoods, there was considerable social pressure to stop trick-or=treating when one got older. One lady was so adamant that she refused treats to any kid who appeared to her to be over ten. Her windows got soaped and egged quite a bit...

When we came to Ottawa ten years ago, I was quite startled to see great hulking teenagers outnumber the little tikes who appeared on my porch with pillowcases at the ready. Nevertheless, older daughter decided on her own (with several veerings in the days before the festival) to stay home when she turned thirteen.

Near younger daughter's school, she falls back into step with me. (Another once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence.)

"I'll watch Enchanted tonight. I was just kidding about trick-or-treating."
My heart melts. "Some teenagers do trick-or-treating, but Daddy and I stopped when we were thirteen. So did your sister. Why don't you ask at school if they still trick-or-treat?"
Short silence.
"I think I will go trick-or-treating, but this will be the last time."
"That sounds like a good plan," I say gravely.
"And next year, I'll just stay home."
"Well, you can still wear a costume to school and we will still carve a pumpkin and you can hand out the treats."
"Yes. 'Cause I'm not a little kid."
"And the good thing about handing out the treats is that you can still eat them!"
"Good. I might get hungry on Hallowe'en."

An Ottawan October full moon

Another full moon in Taurus in Ottawa. This October evening found us scurrying down the dark street toward the bus stop, the impossibly round orb peering at us between the houses.

The National Ballet of Canada was performing a rarity in Ottawa: a mixed programme which, to tell the truth, I prefer to the full-length ballets that usually visit The Nation's Capital, having grown up with the smaller stages of Victoria. My short attention span could be a factor as well.

I had decided to dress up a little for once, donning a long black linen jumper and by the time I'd worked out the accessories --- I looked exactly like a dour church lady. The Resident Fan Boy was amused to note I'd tried to offset the effect with a pewter Unitarian pendant, but a church lady is a church lady, regardless of denomination. (Unitarian church ladies look marginally more hippyish.) Ah well. I'm too fond of my bodily comfort to attempt something flashier.

We have the three front seats of a six-seat loge for this particular subscription. This evening, there was a couple and a single lady seated behind us. The couple decided to make a break for the empty loge ahead of us as the lights went down, a risky move, as we know Torontonian balletomanes never make a move for the better seats until after the second intermission. Why became clear when a family of six showed up to claim their loge. Sneaky couple apologetically slipped back into our loge where single lady had to slide back to her less desirable seat.

This little dance was going on during the opening moments of Serenade. The National Ballet of Canada started sort of specializing in Balanchine in the eighties, carefully preserving every nuance of the choreography. I think I've said this before, but I always feel a bit aggrieved when watching a Balanchine ballet because I can't help but hold him personally responsible for the prevalence of anorexia in the dance world. This may be massively unfair, but it seems from film footage that short plump ballerinas were the norm pre-Balanchine, who preferred an idealized long leggy uniform look in his women dancers, making the New York City Ballet the classy equivalent of the Rockettes. Serenade, one of his best known works, is glorious, abstract precision with only a hint of a story. It's a series of beautiful tableaux that depend heavily on the dancers having the same proportions. I have a feeling old George would have complained about the bouncing boobs of a couple of the better endowed dancers which was quite evident in those linked bourrées of which GB was so fond.

Still, it was difficult stuff impeccably performed. The only bobble (aside from the breasts) occurred when one of the leads sprawls gracefully, loosening her hair with a deft movement. This poor lass spent several seconds trying to unobtrusively free her very thick and springy hair from its bun while lying on her side as two others danced and posed around her.

I've seen this ballet many times, but was struck this time by how modern Tchaikovsky sounds in this piece, premonitions of Copland.

During the ballet, younger daughter was stimming somewhat, taking her hairband on and off, leaning into the railing of the loge. Normally we have a four-person loge, so if this happens, I don't worry so much, but I was very aware of the people behind us, especially after their break for freedom. Meanwhile, the four young preteens-to-teenagers in the loge ahead were providing a distraction for the Resident Fan Boy, who reported that the youngest boy, who might have been eleven, was working hard at blocking his brothers' view and, as it happened, the RFB's line of vision as well.

The RFB observed that the boys' interest was piqued considerably during the next ballet, a very modern piece set to Chopin's 24 Preludes by Marie Chouinard, a Québecoise with an Order of Canada. (That's Canada's equivalent of an Order of the British Empire, for you non-Canucks.) I, for one, would like to see the National Ballet's waxing bill. The costumes consisted of black see-through body stockings (for the girls) and dance belts (for the boys) with duct tape strategically set over the naughty bits. Among other things, it made the dancers appear to have enormous cracks.

The piece was sort of Degrassi High meets Mad Max. Towards the end, younger daughter gave audible groans as each new prelude began. I don't blame her, really. It was beautifully danced and the choreography was intriguing, especially juxtaposed to the civilized sounds of Chopin, but still, it was forty-five long minutes.

The evening ended with Crystal Pite's Emergence. I happen to know two of her cousins (Victoria's like that), and I've always rather enjoyed her stuff. The Resident Fan Boy watched as the body language of young boys ahead got extremely agitated. Two of the lead female dancers wore diaphanous tops with no duct tape.

As with the previous ballet, I'd purposefully not read the synopsis, just to see what I'd pick up.
"So," said the Resident Fan Boy as we applauded. "What was that about?"
"Insects," I responded promptly. I was right. Bees, apparently. According to the programme, Pite thinks bee colonies and dance companies are similar as they seem to operate in a egalitarian fashion, but are strictly based on hierarchy. Personally, I wonder how anyone could possibly mistake a ballet company for an equal opportunity enterprise. It's all about hierarchy.

Off into the special Hades that is Ottawa on a Saturday night. Younger daughter hesitated a fraction of a second before boarding a crowded bus at 11 pm and a young blond teetering in a miniskirt and stilettos shrieked at her: "Come on, come on! Make it snappy!" The bus driver (whose ear she was teetering beside) looked up at her in appalled wonder.
"She really needs to pee," explained her equally blond, mini-skirted and high-heeled companion, semi-apologetically. They and the horde of tipsy students in their company alighted (okay, descended heavily) at the Rideau Centre, and the driver, as if fearful he'd pick up more, lead-footed the bus through Lowertown past the cruising paddy wagons.

Full moons. Gotta love 'em...

Love's other side

Last March, I wrote a post about one of my favourite authors, Madeleine L'Engle, an author known for her children's books and Young Adult novels, who also wrote novels, essays, autobiographical pieces and poetry. (Never cared for her poetry much; loved most of the rest.)

One of her adult novels is called The Other Side of the Sun, a reference to "love's terrible other side", when you pass through the burning agony of love (and we're talking suffering here, the original meaning of "passion") and try to emerge alive and unwarped, though transformed and traumatized.

This is true of even the healthiest and most functional of relationships, because love, whether of a friend, parent, lover or child, always incurs loss, whether through death or estrangement.

Being the mother of a special-needs child, I seem to be moving through the heart of the sun time and again. However, this past summer, loss and the terrible sacrifices love requires were a central theme. Recently, one of my mother's favourite cousins died after a brief struggle with cancer, leaving her siblings and especially her bewildered husband, who counted on her for everything, bereft and adrift.

A week before that, my mother's only sister died at the end of a long, slow, agonizing decline into dementia. I've written about my aunt before, as she struggled to come to grips with her daughter's sexual orientation. (Coincidentally, that was my very first NaBloPoMo post.) As it turned out, she had a better grasp of the situation than I did.

It was easy to underestimate my aunt. Liberals tend to underestimate and categorize conservatives, just as much as conservatives label liberals. My aunt was conservative, no doubt about that. In my family search trawling through historical records, her name shows up as a fairly substantial financial supporter of the G.O.P. Back when Kennedy and Nixon were duking it out for the American presidency, my parents happened to be visiting my aunt and uncle in San Francisco. When my father returned to their apartment one day, sporting a Nixon button, my mother was appalled, especially as my father was a visitor to the United States. So she showed up with a Kennedy button. My aunt refused to let her in.

I wonder what she would have made of all this Tea Party shenanigans. Okay, I don't. This was a life-long Anglican (Episcopalian) who left the church when she thought it had become too liberal, then left the Baptist church for the same reason. She even told my mother that when she was in heaven she wouldn't be able to comfort her burning sister with a drop of water. She said this in an almost jocular fashion, but she meant it. When her daughter emerged from the closet, she was appalled and bewildered.

Yet my aunt was also a woman of humour and warmth. She had great fun gently teasing a very young and very indignant girl at the clinic where she was a nurse, by telling her that she too was African-American. She was, too: born in Kenya, becoming an American citizen not long after she married. Her hospitality was impeccable; a week's stay with her in California would spoil me for months.

She spent many years searching for educational resources for her hyper-active, learning-disabled son, long before such terms became commonplace. When her son became self-sufficient, her husband promptly came down with Parkinson's and she nursed him faithfully and competently to the end. We thought she might finally enjoy a less-burdened life, but a few short years after her husband's death, she was diagnosed with dementia.

And who harrowed hell for her? The daughter with whom she had struggled for years.

Madeleine L'Engle wrote: "It is when I am most monstrous that I am most in need of love." I don't remember which book this was (it is probably from A Circle of Quiet), but it was important enough to me that I wrote it down in one of my journals years ago. My aunt did become something of a monster as the dementia took over, all patience, happiness, and faith seem to flee, leaving her frightened, lost, and oh, so angry. Who could blame her? Yet her daughter persevered, took the verbal abuse, fought for better care, strained her other family relationships.

And some time during my aunt's final weeks, my cousin explained to a nurse that she was adopted. (Both my American cousins are.)
"Are you?" said my aunt, looking up in surprise. "I had forgotten. You....are my own."

And just for that moment, they emerged from love's terrible other side.

It's been a slice

Morning, as autumn wheels inexorably toward winter. The grass is silver with frost and crunches subtly underfoot. The most stubborn of leaves are giving up in droves and plummeting. I'm waiting for the #150, planting myself under a grand maple because it's All Souls Day already and I have failed to catch a single leaf for wishing. I catch two before the bus pulls up then watch gardens full of doomed, sparkling flowers flash by. Amid ghostly filthy snowman made from last weekend's snowfall, abandoned jack o' lanterns glitter with frost on this cloudless, bright, freezing morning.

I'm always come over with a sense of loss and waste as I survey smashed, rotting or shrivelling pumpkins. So many delicious pies that will never be.

Every All Saints' Day and for a few days afterward (if I'm persistent and don't allow the rot to set in), I put on my trusty DVD set of the Royal Shakespeare Company's marathon stage version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Dickens, I feel, always smacks of late fall and early winter. Then I put out bowls and chopping boards and reduce the jack o' lanterns to saffron cubes before steaming several double boilers' worth, mashing them and stuffing them into two-cup freezer bags. (Canned pumpkin in my pies? Nevah!!! Canned pumpkin is mostly squash, y'know...)

This is a large project that easily takes up the length of the Nicholas Nickleby DVDs, which are among my favourite things ever. Someone has been kind enough to post nine minutes of what is a nine-hour show. Of the four main actors in this particular scene, only Roger Rees played one character, most of the fourteen cast members played anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen characters throughout the play:
A bit of trivia: the blond actress is Cathryn Harrison, a granddaughter of Rex Harrison. While searching for this clip I found a blurred but watchable version of the South Bank Show on the creation of this production. But I must to bed. I'll mash a bit of pumpkin before I go.

Well, that was...interesting....

Now here's the odd thing. The handful of you who check in with me here know that my younger daughter lives with the label PDD-NOS, a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum. Today is Communication Shutdown Day (along with All Saints' Day and National Vegan Day, but never mind that), so the idea is to cut yourself off from the internet, or at least from Facebook and Twitter, so you can share that sense of isolation that someone on the autism spectrum faces every day.

I guess I'd have to be more addicted to Facebook than I am to experience a real sense of being cut off from humanity. I "tweet" about once a month and sadly, don't even get so many emails that I can't go without checking for a day. I'm also old enough to remember life when houses without PCs were the norm.

However, I do intend to NaBloPoMo this month for the fifth time, so participating in a computer-free day is a challenge. If I stayed up, I could simply post one stroke past midnight. NaBloPoMo is on Pacific Daylight Time, so my post would read "November 2nd" at my blog, and "November 1st" at NaBloPoMo.

Given that my constitution gave up on party hours years ago, though, I simply unplugged the computer at 9 pm last night and logged back on twenty-four hours later. That will have to do. Oh yes, and I did donate and "x"-ed out my profile picture at Facebook.

Did dropping out of the so-called social network teach me anything? Well, depressingly enough, I got a lot more done. Did it teach me more about the challenges of autism? Well, no. I live here with my daughter in the outskirts of Autismland (a suburb of Hades). Taking away the computer doesn't teach us more about rejection than we already knew.

Not my furry child

. . . The morning came, and left
The sunlight on my step like any normal
Tradesman . . . . - Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not For Burning

It wasn't how we expected the day to end. Oh perhaps, with twenty/twenty hindsight, the signs were there, but they weren't apparent that sunny Monday morning. The Resident Fan Boy had taken time off work because Demeter was arriving from Victoria that day, in preparation for a 26-hour train trip out to Halifax with younger daughter to spend Canadian Thanksgiving with older daughter.

We'd booked a place at our local animal hospital for our cat, who has stayed there before. I was getting a little nervous though, because she hadn't been eating over the weekend and had spent the better part of the previous week sleeping even more than usual. Not unduly alarmed, I phoned the vet and managed to get an appointment for midday, so we accompanied younger daughter on the hour-long bus ride to her school and returned for some last minute guest-room cleaning before slipping the cat into the soft carrier for the ten-minute stroll to the clinic.

The vet is new to the practice, but knows our cat from recent stays and inoculations, calmly noting the difference in her. Until she looked into the ears.

"Oh, now, that's not good news," she said, before assuring us that most pet-owners don't pick up on jaundice, although in the natural daylight of the examining room, we wondered how we could have missed it. We agreed she would be admitted and signed the paperwork for more tests before heading home to await the results. But by then, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

It came a matter of minutes before we were due to board the bus to retrieve younger daughter from school. I listened briefly to the blur of descriptions of possible medical interventions, but recognized the kindly hesitant tone, so I asked my standard question: "If it were your pet, what would you recommend?"

"I'd say good-bye."

A quick conference with the Resident Fan Boy during which we agreed he'd fetch younger daughter. A hasty farewell at the door. I did a quick round of the house, stashing a wad of tissues in my pocket and donning the twenty-first century equivalent of a black armband, a pair of sunglasses, before retracing my steps back to the animal hospital on this sunny early October afternoon.

It's clear they have this down to a fine art. The worst bit is signing the papers and paying the bill which, obviously, must be done beforehand. Then they ask you if you want some time alone. I didn't know, never having done this before. (I've had pets euthanized, but that was a long time ago before they let the owners stay.) So I said 'yes', and they brought her in wrapped in a crimson felt blanket. She looked calm, but bewildered. That may have been partially due to the fact that I was dripping tears on her head, despite my best efforts to be a solid comforting presence. As I stroked her and spoke to her, I noticed the bandage on her leg which held the cannula ready to take the injection. I scratched her gently under her chin and behind her ears for one last time, then went to the door and gave a quick nod to the assistant.

It's an odd thing, cradling and crooning to a live animal, then the realization that life has left the body. I've only been present at two human deaths, during the time I volunteered at the hospice in Victoria, and in both cases, there was no dramatic clear-cut moment between being and not being. The vet checked with her stethoscope and told me she was gone, and I could see as I stepped back, by the splayed white paws, that this was true. I left quickly after a swift hug from the vet, sunglasses in place so I wouldn't upset the owners with living animals in the waiting room.

When my elder daughter was three, she kept requesting a "moving cat" and we realized with sinking hearts that she meant a real one. My mother never could deny anything to her beloved granddaughter, so when my younger daughter was one, off went five-year-old elder daughter with her grandmother to the SPCA. It was time, thirteen years later, to break the news to my now eighteen-year-old at her university in Halifax. I tried to do it in gentle stages by text message. She apparently staggered back to her dorm and laptop where she contacted me by Skype, presaged by the sound of her ragged weeping through my computer speakers.

After the bootless exercise of trying to comfort elder daughter through a computer monitor, it fell to me to break the news to younger daughter as she arrived home from school with the Resident Fan Boy. She retreated to her bedroom and shut the door. I emailed her teacher and printed up several pictures for her to take to class the next day. Then I headed out to the airport on the bus, to tell my mother, who had been airborne when all of this happened.

The most surprising reaction came from the Resident Fan Boy, a dog-person marrying into a cat family. Yet, several times over the next three days, I'd come across him weeping, usually in the kitchen in the morning. "It was our time," he said. I, too, had poignant stabs, still do: when I hear movement on the stairs and think she's coming up, when I look for a black form curled in the laundry basket, when I shift carefully in bed around the ball of warmth between my ankles. Which isn't there. On the whole, though, I felt distanced and peaceful. Is this because I was there for her final minutes, because I saw the limp body on the examining table and knew it was beyond pain and fear?

There are people who are a bit dotty about their pets. They buy them clothes and trinkets and call them their "furry children". I beg to differ. Yes, both children and pets deserve love, shelter, exercise, stimulation, and protection. But children are not pets, nor are pets children. I have children. I have never put their food in bowls on the floor before locking them in and going out for a few days while having a neighbour check in on them. I don't have them do their business in a sandbox in the basement. My daughters will, eventually, vote.

There is, however, a cat-shaped hole in our lives. It is a unique shape, the right size for a little black cat with white stockings and garters. It will not be filled, even when we get other pets, who will in turn, leave their own holes. Because loss is the price of love, whether for animal or human. And when the day ends, in the expected or unexpected fashion, love may be indeed all we have left. (Goodbye, Julie.)

A hard rain's gonna fall

It's 10:30 here in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the leading edge of Hurricane Earl has been whirling through for the past hour or so. I see trees and bushes tossing wildly and sheets of rain slicing down the deserted streets, with waves of water sloshing over from the gutters. Good thing Earl was downgraded; he's now a "weak Category One". I wouldn't care to encounter anything stronger. Reports already coming in of fallen trees and power outages. I better get this done...

Half an hour ago, I waved goodbye to elder daughter as she descended to the parking levels of this hotel to drive the short distance to the University of King's College, "Canada's oldest chartered university" (founded 1789, which is ancient by Canadian standards). I slipped into the tiny computer room here and had a quick weep, because once people see someone in here, they decide to come in too.

Being eighteen, elder daughter is eager to get started, and being eighteen, she's still veering between being a child and an adult. This song has been relentlessly playing in my head for the past twenty-four hours:
Oh very young, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancing on this earth for a short while . . . .
There'll never be a better time to change your mind
And if you want this world to see a better day
Will you carry the words of love with you?

And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.

The computer room has people in it now. If I need a place for another quiet weep, I'll have to find someplace else.