Pacificism

I've taken advantage - although not nearly enough - of the locale of this house-sit to stroll down to the sea and through Ross Bay Cemetery.

Early in my stay, I discovered this charming memorial.

It's a husband and wife: his name is Anglo-Saxon and he was born in British Columbia; hers is Japanese. I love the multi-levels of the phrase "A Pacific Family". Born on different coasts of the same ocean. Peaceful and peace-loving.

Last evening, on one of my last strolls, I found the walks closed off, as the pathways are being upgraded this summer. That's how I came upon this tiny marker, separated from the other stones and memorials by a large expanse of summer-dried grass.

Clicking on the photo will enlarge it.

I guess I should rejoice that someone cared enough to mark his/her grave, but it's a lonely testimonial to life in Victoria for those who were different.

Room 63 on the 42nd floor

I stumbled across an obituary yesterday. I realize that the older I get, the more likely this is to happen. This one opened the floodgates of some rather unpleasant August memories from several years ago.

We had recently made a move from the Gorge area of Victoria to the municipality of View Royal. I remember being busy in the basement - I may have been hanging laundry - and listening to my father singing the same song over and over: My wife was two-timing, fickle as can be/ With a man named Smith, she was double-crossing me/ So one night, I followed them to even up the score to Room 63 on the 42nd floor . . .

This was during that agonizing summer of waiting for my father to leave. He clearly wished to convey to me that my mother was dating the man in the obituary.

I can only recall going on one outing with the man along with his large family, including one daughter my age. I didn't particularly like him; I found him supercilious and brusque. I have no idea whether my mother was actually involved with him; it seems an uncharacteristic thing for her to do while my father was still living with us (not to mention when she would have found the time), but if my father thought this man was the chief factor in the final deterioration of their marriage, he was overlooking his own drinking, the resulting accidents, and the mountain of debts - which he was soon to leave behind. To say nothing of his own numerous infidelities. My chief sense of the summer was my dawning realization, at age eleven, of how flawed and foolish grown-ups could be.

The obituary describes the man - whose name was not Smith - as a "pure light" and declares that "to know him was to love him, and that was his effect on everyone".

It was a long time ago. Maybe he changed.

Rest in post

Our stay in Victoria is hurtling to a close, even more so with the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter in residence. I'm relieved to have them with me, but miss slipping out to the ocean and the cemetery. You take what you want, and you pay for it.

Peachable Offence

Last Sunday, I made a peach pie.  I strolled into the backyard of our housesit and plucked about ten ripening peaches from the tree coiling up the side of the house.  I did notice that several of the peaches had been sampled by something.  Some were gouged, and in a few cases, bitten in half.  I thought an animal had climbed up into the branches for a nosh.  Demeter and other friends felt sure the culprits were birds.  Birds? I thought. Birds can bite a peach in half?

Two days later, I set out on a warm evening to hand-water the garden. I rounded the corner and halted, aghast. A large branch, laden with peaches, dangled almost to the ground. The leaves were limp. I reached up and the whole branch came away easily in my hands. I lifted and dragged it to the compost pile and quickly harvested all the ripe and partially ripe fruit.

I left the hard green peaches on the severed branch, figuring they were beyond help.

Returning to the scene of the disaster, I saw the break and noticed that one of the tethers supporting the tree and anchoring it to the wall had snapped.

Looking to my right, I saw an unmolested branch bearing rosy fruit hanging down.

My deduction? The branch at the far right can't support an large (ish) animal, while the doomed branch could. Until it couldn't. A squirrel? A racoon, perhaps? My bet is on the squirrel; I think racoons can pick and pluck.

Yesterday's photo shows what I did with the slightly more than a dozen not-quite-ripe peaches. It works! I was able to store half the peaches today, and the rest should be ready in a day or two.

As for the tree, I think it'll live -- the leaves are glossy and firm with about half a dozen delectable glowing globes out of reach.

A figure of peach

This is something I'm trying from a "lifehacker" website to overcome a fruit fatality. Details tomorrow.

Tempest fugit

When I was briefly footloose in late July, I snatched at opportunities to do things without negotiation or coercion. One of those things was taking in a play by the other summer Shakespearean company in Victoria, Shakespeare by the Sea, who have been competing in a friendly manner with the far better established Victoria Shakespeare Festival. SbtS has been at this for about three years, and so far I had failed to find the time to attend.

So I set off on a Sunday afternoon, after glimpsing heads in sun-hats and brilliant sunshine from the front window of the house-sit. By the time I reached the bus-stop, I knew there might be trouble. The sun had fled, and black clouds crowded the northern horizon behind Government House. The clouds were emitting loud rumbling noises.

Resolutely, I boarded the bus and disembarked near Dallas Road for a five-minute trot toward Ogden Point. I noticed uneasily that the Sooke Hills were vanishing. I smelt the rain before it began to spit around me. I hurried into the Breakwater Cafe for a comfort break before a long Shakespearean sit, and emerged into curtains of water -- more Ottawa-style precipation than Victoria. The Resident Fan Boy and I refer to such downpours as "shoe-fillers".

Cowering under my umbrella, I searched the surrounding area for a tent and saw several, including those being hastily packed up by merchants. I asked one or two for directions and was told: "Down there, if they've decided to go through with it."

They had, indeed. I joined The Tempest in full swing with the hapless passengers of a shipwreck looking suitably drenched, having to make their exits and entrances from outside the shelter. I use the word "shelter" advisedly. The audience was being steadily dripped on, and alarming balloons of water were appearing in the overhanging canvas. The cast were slipping improvised watery witticisms into the text and my neighbour kept draining her umbrella into my lap.

Reluctantly, I decided to depart at intermission, but you couldn't say that the production lacked atmosphere.

The house that might have been

Before the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter arrived from Hades, I took advantage of my unfettered state and walked around the neighbourhood of this current house-sit often. My eye was often caught by this house, largely due to its eye-catching colour and oddly leaning-in shape. Friend of the Right Hand tells me it was once red and white. It stands at the foot of what is now the Dallas Waterfront Trail, on the eastern end of Ross Bay.

I told Demeter about it, because I had been considering trying to paint it for the water-colour class we've been taking together this summer. She told me that in the days when she was a single mom of two slightly-used daughters, trying to break free of rental headaches, this was a house she had briefly considered buying. It was too expensive, even for those long-ago buyer's market days, and she felt that the oddity of the house and the vast fixing up it required would make it impossible to sell later. She bought a brand-new, tiny townhouse condo in Esquimalt instead.

I gaze at this quirky quasi-castle, a short stroll from the charming bungalow I'm house-sitting. It must be worth a fortune now. What would my life have been like if we'd moved into what was then an undoubtedly rickety and crafty curiosity? Demeter would never had had the money - nor, probably, the desire - to renovate it. But we would have lived by the sea, and I would have gone to sleep lulled - or terrified - by the crashing waves.

I will go down to look again. It's not often you see the parting of the ways so clearly.

One for overnight - five for a week: the movie

Photo by Nathan Philps

I plop my pile of DVDs on the counter.
"One for overnight; five for a week."
"One for overnight; five for a week," the fellow behind the counter echoes, then we pause and look at each other.

"That sounds like a great movie title," I say with an air of faux dreaminess.
"I'll write the screenplay and give you the option," he offers.
"Great idea!"

He's gazing at my account. "I want to give her this one for free," he says to his coworker. Apparently, I'm within a few check-outs of a free rental, but not quite.

My mind drifts back twenty-three years to an evening shortly after we had taken up residence in our house on the edge of Fairfield. Elder daughter was five months old and I was drunk with exhilaration.
We live here. We actually live here.
I had strolled down to Pic-a-Flic to change the phone number on my account, explaining we had moved into a house a few blocks away. A mischievous grin spread across the face of the fellow who was behind the counter then.

"Party!" he stage-whispered. "Party at Persephone's!"

Back in the present, I collect the half-dozen DVDs, thinking ruefully of our eventual return to Hades, where the last two video-rental stores closed this past spring.

Dreaming past midsummer

Photo: David Bukach

I have been well "Shakespeared" this summer: two Tempests - one on a warm summer's evening in the park a short walk from our Hades home, and one during an actual tempest in a leaky tent at Ogden Point in Victoria; A Comedy of Errors as envisioned by A Company of Fools channeling Dr Seuss at Strathcona Park in Ottawa; Romeo and Juliet by the light of a not-quite-full moon amid the Garry oaks on the Lansdowne Campus of Camosun College in Victoria. I didn't make it to the Hamlet by "Victoria's Shakespeare by the Sea", so instead of six summer Shakespeare plays, I'm only seeing five.

Last night, the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I made our way to Camosun College to see A Midsummer's Night Dream, the other production of the Victoria Shakespeare Festival. It's our seventh summer seeing VSS's plays; they've been doing them for something like 25 years.

There was pre-play entertainment from singer Colleen Eccleston, whom I remember as a young and rather flaky folk-singer doing pre-shows for concerts. She's now rather older and still a bit flaky. She used to sing a rather ghastly ditty which began: "I apPRECiate the sensitive man…" The songs tonight were a mix of her own compositions and standards, not a sensitive guy among them, thank goodness.

The play began with eerie flutes and strumming guitars, and odd drum rhythms.  I recognized the musicians as actors who had speaking roles in the Romeo and Juliet the week before.  I also recognized the fairies, mostly female with at least one uninhibited male, clad in colourful skirts and body stockings with outlandish headdresses, trilling and whooping, as befitted unsettling Shakespearean sprites.  The body stockings were soon concealed under Athenian robes as we launched into the romantic conundrum that begins the play.  Theseus and Hippolyta did a quick change to appear in elaborate costumes as Oberon and Titania quarrelling over the young boy that Oberon wants as a servant.  Soon the "rude mechanicals" began their rehearsal and Bottom - played with perfect comic timing by Paul Henry Oppers - was a hilarious trial to beleaguered Peter Quince - played by Taylor Lewis.  Neither of these gentlemen had appeared in the Romeo and Juliet, and they added a welcome energy to the company. I had enjoyed R&J, mind you, but this play excelled in its ensemble work.  It's always been one of my favourites, anyway, and this turned out to be one of the best VSS productions I've seen

At intermission, I entertained myself by listening in to the debate in the row behind me.  A boy flatly informed his mother that "the part in the beginning never happened; it wasn't in the book."  The "book" to which he was referring ("with Shakepeare's words") had to be a stripped-down version of MND, focussing mainly on Bottom.  Being thirteen or so, this fellow had no patience with his mother when she assured him that this was the authentic play.

Once the lovers were sorted out, Titania and Oberon reconciled, and everyone who needed wedding married off, we were treated to the "rude mechanicals"' mangling of Pyramis and Thisbe.  Susie Mullen, who had been an admirable Nurse in R&J, made a lovely Wall.

The RFB, younger daughter and I made our way back to the house-sit through the dark, under a canopy of summer stars.

Photo: David Bukach

All on a golden afternoon

Younger daughter with her grandmother Demeter