Dressed in morning

Every October I feel the pull to go to graveyards and catch wishes.

It's not as ghoulish as it sounds.

I read in a children's book some years ago that if you catch a falling leaf before it hits the ground; you can make a wish on it.

Leaf-catching is a rather strange thing to be caught doing, particularly if one is a grown woman.

Not having a car, I can walk to Beechwood Cemetery in about twenty minutes. This year, I was determined to go early in the morning, as nearly all of my past expeditions have been in the afternoon or at sunset. I set out on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving Monday, taking advantage of the fact that younger daughter has had a lift to school these mornings.

Beechwood Cemetery was not altogether deserted, even before 9 am. The groundskeepers were roaring about in their lawn mowers, vans, and earth movers. An occasional coffee-clutcher made his or her way en route to school or work. Down near the chapel, people were parking their SUVs. A long-limbed lady in black picked her way through the markers.

However, most of the time, I was on my own, snapping pictures, trying to capture the barely-used morning light. Every now and then, I would glimpse a golden shower not far away and plant myself beneath it. You really have to spot a leaf while it's still very high in the air and swoop with it. That morning, I caught seven. That's a record for one autumn, let alone one morning! I made seven wishes, three of them for younger daughter. (Judging from the events of the past week, the wishes are either coming true in a way I don't yet understand, or were poorly phrased.)

As I made my way back, I saw a man engraving a headstone, apparently sand-blasting through a plastic stencil. Wearing a hood rather like an old-fashioned hairdryer completely over his head, he crouched like Gollum on the edge of Middle Earth, surrounded by tombstones in the shape of open books, all blank, all waiting for sad stories in the drifting cloud of mist and dust.

Variations on precarious

Ever had a song that has always meant one thing completely change its meaning in the course of events?

I've always enjoyed Blues Traveler's "Most Precarious", in spite of an unbelievably lame official video where a handsome young man pursues a dazzling young woman while the camera focuses on her exposed belly button.

However, I'd dropped Demeter off at the airport, and while there will be a certain relief in having our house back to our accustomed level of privacy, I was looking out the bus window, assailed by darker thoughts because when your mother reaches a certain age, you have to wonder which separation is the final one. (I hasten to add that Demeter is in excellent health.) To drive away my melancholy, I stuck in my ear-buds and hit "Song Shuffle" on my iPod. "Most Precarious" was among the songs cheering my soul. This lasted until I picked up younger daughter from her independent school (consisting of 25 students) and discovered that for the third time this week, her teachers have failed to look at her assignments and the notes I enclosed with them.

We're having a battle of wills with the two head teachers who, despite younger daughter's having been at the school for two years, are convinced that her inability to remember the different items required for each class (a big change from middle school to high school) is some sort of adolescent stone-walling and not a result of her memory deficits and autism. Apparently, they think refusing to help her retrieve what she needs from the cloakroom, including the homework assignments which have taken hours of family time, will teach her responsibility.

I came home unutterably depressed and close to tears. Younger daughter, of course, became convinced I was angry with her.

And all of a sudden, "Most Precarious" is not a song about taking a chance on romantic love; it's a song about struggling for a daughter's education.



Music & Lyrics: John Popper

Don't you give up don't allow disaster
Don't you give up don't you let her win
We're talking about a "forever after"
Don't you give up don't you dare give in
Don't you give up don't you dare give in

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?

Please understand and hear what I'm saying
The time is now and you don't have long
She could be oceans away tomorrow
So soon your chance will have come and gone
So soon your chance will have come and gone

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?

The tight-wire's strung and you're out in the middle
All eyes upon you no net below
Inches to go and you're almost home free
Feel the wires swaying to and fro
Feel the wires swaying to and fro

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like it would be a damn shame?
Would be forever if it meant a day?
How stoically I exclaim
As she turns from me and walks away

The light in her eyes explanation escapes you
Longing to please and not feel alone
And she doesn't know it but really she loves you
Some day so soon you're gonna make it home
Some day so soon you're gonna make it home

Doesn't it seem most precarious
Doesn't it seem such a chance to take?
Doesn't it seem most precarious
Why does it feel like a big mistake?


We've left the school a stern voice message. Heaven help us...

My day in haiku

Day dawns and pounces.
Daughter is misunderstood.
Compose note to teacher.

Shop with Demeter.
Mall coffee near shoe repair.
Special hell in Hades.

Carefully composed
Note to teacher with homework
Is returned unopened.

Late afternoon is
Grey and spent in crammed transit
Anticipating

More goddamned homework.
Guidance and suggestions still
Much like pulling teeth.

Was today that bad?
Okay, it had its moments.
Nice pasta for lunch...

Leaving no quarter

In October, the wasps are dopey and cranky, and the spiders come in to get warm. When we lived in Victoria, the October visitor was usually a hobo spider. They're quite large and an unsettling and unwelcome sight crossing one's living room in the lamp light.

Although nineteen, elder daughter has somehow managed to never be in a house alone at night before (except for baby-sitting and that's not alone by definition). She spent her first year in university in residence, and when home, one of us is usually there. During a long distance chat, she breaks off in a panic: "Mu-u-um! There's a spider in the kitchen!"
"A spider?"
"It's HUGE! It's right by my foot!"
"Okay, grab a glass and put it over the spider, then you can slip a piece of paper underneath..."
"But it's HUGE, Mom! It's the size of a QUARTER."
"Now, calm down. It doesn't want to hurt you. Besides, remember the spiders in Victoria. They were much bigger..."
(They were, too, the accompanying photo notwithstanding.)
"Mu-u-u-u-um!!! I was eight; it wasn't my problem! And it's eleven o'clock at night and it's dark...."

I hand the phone to the Resident Fan Boy who talks her through the spider eviction.

This evening, as an enormous harvest moon fights its way free of the clouds on the eastern horizon, it occurs to me that she knows something important: when you're eight, it isn't your problem. When you're nineteen, it's becoming your problem although you may have parents to give you step-by-step instructions over the phone. Time enough to discover the depressing next stage. Yep, she's growing up, and I guess these will be cold nights for spiders.

Post prandial (see what I did there?)

Breakfast options this morning: warmed up garlic bread, cold chicken, left-over (made from scratch) pumpkin pie...

An appetite suppressant may be in order. This YouTube gem features Ellen Page who was born in Nova Scotia and nominated for an Oscar for her role in the quirky flick Juno. For the record, practically nothing in this video is true of Canadian Thanksgivings. Well, except maybe for the Canadian Club...

Tabling

Woke up in a sweat this morning, worrying about homework and schoolwork issues at younger daughter's school and remembering I need to cook today because we're having Thanksgiving dinner on the Sunday because elder daughter flies back to Halifax tomorrow, and Demeter is going to have all sorts of ways of trying to help....

So this video is a tad misleading, but it is also an aspect of the Canadian Thanksgiving experience:

A First Nation Summer?

The first frost warning appeared on the Environment Canada web site this past week, and the temperatures have risen this weekend to a steamy (for October) 26 degrees Celsius. I guess this is, to use a politically-incorrect phrase, an Indian Summer.

Early this morning, I stood at the bus stop en route to this month's BIFHSGO meeting in a summer-weight cotton blouse, marveling at the warmth. A fellow in a reflective vest moved from public planter to public planter, methodically uprooting the scarlet hibiscus that have bloomed there all summer. He spent some time knocking the dirt off the roots into the large stone pot, then stuffed the bush into a large black garbage bag. I felt rather sad for the doomed plants, still glowing prettily from the dark plastic depths, so when I got home after the meeting, I showed Demeter a picture I'd taken last summer at the house-sit in Victoria, to make sure I had the correct name for the flower.

Yesterday, I heard from a cousin asking me about our family history. He seems to do this every year or so. Each time I hear from him, he has basically the same questions which I answer patiently each time. He always seems to ask in October. His dad's 77th birthday is next week and they haven't spoken in years; his younger son has never met his paternal grandfather. I send a link to my family history map of Wales and a copy of a 116-year time line I did for my mother, but he really wants to look at a family tree chart, to see the names and how they connect to him and his sons. That's what we try to do in family history, to find where we fit, where we belong, and to say to those shadowy figures in the past, "I know your name; you belong, too." I send my cousin a link to my online tree where he can gaze at charts to his heart's content.

I know your name; you are not forgotten.

Keeping track

When my father departed for Boston with another woman, my mother decided to scrub around her life, make a fresh start, and move to some place warmer. She splurged, booking two "roomettes" on the train from Edmonton, Alberta to Nanaimo, British Columbia. I was eight years old and charmed by the beds which slid out of the wall like drawers. To this day, I can't recall having a better night's sleep, rocked through the Rockies. I was woken only once, as the guard in Jasper paced the platform calling out to those who could hear him to change their watches back one hour. Early in the morning, I lay on my stomach in my drawer-bed head-to-head with my six-year-old sister, gasping as nearly bottomless canyons opened up beneath the train as it sped over trestles. By breakfast time, we watched the sunny Okanagan orchards flash by the dining car. As an introduction to a new life, it was pretty hard to beat.

Recapturing that perfect sleep was one of the goals on my mind when we decided to take Demeter and younger daughter to Halifax by train last year to see elder daughter at her university and spend the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend. Other considerations were Demeter's life long dream to travel completely across Canada by rail (this seemed a reasonable compromise), and the idea of traveling through the Maritimes in autumn.

We started the 26-hour journey with the dayliner jaunt from Ottawa to Montreal, moving in and out of the shadow of rainstorms and reaching Canada's second largest city with its mad inter-weaving of La Metro subway, VIA rail, Amtrak and commuter trains at La Gare Centrale, to say nothing of the shoppers. After nearly forgetting my suitcase on the platform (I was shepherding Demeter and younger daughter while the Resident Fan Boy charged ahead and disappeared down the train corridor), we glided slowly across the dark river surrounded by the blazing lights of the city, and made our way down the south bank of the St Lawrence before veering away south from the Seaway just past Rimouski and crossing into the province of New Brunswick at daybreak just at the innermost tip of Chaleur Bay. From there we headed steadily south, rumbling across the Miramichi River about mid-morning, entering northern Nova Scotia sometime after lunch then making a long circle around the south-west edge of Halifax, arriving in the late afternoon, steps away from the famous Pier 21 where so many new Canadians entered the country, including Demeter many years ago.

When we took Demeter to the Pier 21 Museum the next day, a brand-new Cuban-Canadian tour guide greeted her with an enormous "Welcome ba-a-a-a-ck!" and a gold alumna sticker for her coat. She remembered her fellow boat passengers, Germans en route to Wisconsin and Italians en route to Toronto, being put in holding cages, while she, a British subject, was waved through to the waiting train to Edmonton. (We also learned there had been a young man, a Haligonian, on the boat...)

And we visited with elder daughter at the University of King's College, ate two Thanksgiving dinners (one of them cooked by us in a student residence kitchen), saw the sights, including the ancient (by Canadian standards) Old Burying Ground in the centre of the city where they stopped burying people in 1844. And I wistfully watched elder daughter striding through the streets of a city that will be hers and never mine. And I watched Demeter wonder about the beautiful boy from Halifax and what might have been. And I was grateful to have seized the chance to come this way, even though the train bed, not a magic drawer, but a shallow fold-out shelf, was lumpy and jumpy and I never did much more than doze, or peer out into the darkness at ghostly white cottages, paddock fences, and flashing poles.

We flew back home. Train travel, alas, has long ceased to be the economical option.

Rideau River Rorschach

It's five minutes to midnight. I took this in October, but not this October. Gosh, I hope I haven't posted this already....

If I had a hammer (write of passage number twenty-two)

He has one of those tool boxes you see workmen with nowadays: it's white and blue plastic, about three feet long and a foot deep -- looks rather like those cases hospitals use for transporting organs, if organs were three feet long and a foot deep. He's placed the tool box across the aisle and is standing behind it grasping railings on either side. He's wearing a dark tee shirt that says something about carpentry across the back. I have a good view of it because I'm standing behind him and I need to get off the bus.

Crowded bus etiquette is tricky. You don't want to ask someone to let you pass if they're getting off too, so I tap him on one broad shoulder and ask: "Are you getting off?" Unfortunately, he seems to think I'm angling for a seat that has just become available ahead of him. By the time we've established I'm trying to get out, the bus has taken off again.

"No," I say in despair. It has been a long day with too many crowded buses. "That was my stop."

"Well, you should have got ready two stop sooner," he tells me.

This is too much. "I got up in plenty of time," I protest.

He snaps.

"WELL WHAT THE *&^%@# DID YOU EXPECT ME TO DO, LADY? WHERE WAS I SUPPOSED TO GO?"

Now, in several years of taking transit, many of those weighed down with any number and types of bags and containers, I have never yet made someone miss their stop by blocking the aisle. It seems impolitic to say so, seeing as he's still yelling at me. By this time, I've to slip down to the exit, and while he continues to bellow, give him my best "Oh, are you going to go on like this?" look before turning to find younger daughter, who in the crush of getting on had found a seat further forward.

"I'm sorry about this, Mom," she says in a little voice.
"It's okay, sweetie," I tell her. "It's not your fault."

Angry Carpenter has sat down in the seat he thought I wanted, so has a good view of this tender little scene. He leans forward.

"Ma'am, I apologise for losing my temper."

Like his previous outburst, this is completely out-of-left-field, and scores of responses flash in my brain. However, it's an apology and how many of those do you get these days, even in Canada?

"You have yourself a good evening." I say, with all the sincerity I can muster. Then younger daughter and I get off.