Counting blessings (write of passage number twenty)

I don't enjoy riding sideways on the bus. Besides, the side seats are usually in the "priority seating" (recently renamed "courtesy seats" in one of those futile re-branding exercises), so I move back if I can.

Last week, we couldn't. It was the morning of younger daughter's speech therapy appointment which means leaving the house at 8:15 rather than 7:20, which means more people. Someone offered me a side-seat, and it seemed churlish to refuse. The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter took seats further back.

About halfway into town, a very tall beefy young man thunked into the space between the elderly woman sitting behind the driver, and me. He spread his sizable knees and squared his broad shoulders and I found myself pushed to a forty-five degree angle away from him. I had time to catch an amused glance from the Resident Fan Boy before I noticed that Beefy Young Man was talking. The times being what they are, I thought he might have a cell phone which I wouldn't be able to see, given that I was leaning from my waist like a famous Italian tower. Then I noticed how rhythmic his words were:

"...Number two, she is walking toward me. Number three, her love is like...."

Across the aisle, a teenager in a khimār gazed at BYM, her jaw dropping open. Her eyes found mine and she gave me a mischievous eyebrow flash and grin.

"Number five, she looks at me..."

"What was that about?" asked the Resident Fan Boy, waiting to see younger daughter and me off at our transfer.
"Uh....I think he was rapping," I shrugged.
"Rapping or raving?"
"Well, he kept saying words like "love", so I don't think I was in danger."
"Well, no. Not unless he was saying: 'Number six, kill the white lady....Number seven, kill the white lady..."

I rolled my eyes at my snickering husband, handed younger daughter her bus pass, and got on with our day.

Nearer my quad to thee

The Resident Fan Boy looked out at the pouring rain this morning and laughed mean-spiritedly.
"It's raining on all those damned runners," he said.

We learned a long time ago to avoid downtown Hades on "Race Weekend". There are several. As Ottawa (and other cities) have moved away from church-going and temple-attendance, the weekends are being taken over by the Tabernacle of the Body, and the fact that other people may actually have places to go to is swept aside along with many transit routes and streets, to accommodate Saturday and Sunday morning jocks so they can get their endorphin fix and systematically destroy their joints. It's not like they are ever going to grow old, after all.

Early in our sojourn in Hades (please, please let it be a sojourn...), we forgot about the Race and attempted to attend the Resident Fan Boy's church downtown. After realizing our mistake and managing to disentangle ourselves from the big bus detour on Mackenzie King Bridge, we tried to cut through Confederation Park on foot, struggling to make our way up Elgin Street through a maze of bodies in shorts and leggings. All doing quadricep stretches without checking behind them. It was like zigzagging amid hundreds of mechanical dipping birds; you never knew when someone's Nike-clad foot would shoot up to a casually reaching back hand. Ouch.

That's right, just keep on with your single-minded pursuit of bodily perfection, folks. Don't mind us.

Better safe than sari (write of passage number nineteen)

Wednesday is Hump Day. We all know it, that hurdle sticking up in the middle of the week that just has to be got over so we can slide down to Friday. In Hades, it's when the buses are crammed, presumably because it's the one day that everyone shows up at work or school because no one starts or finishes an illicit long weekend on a Wednesday.

We're delighted that younger daughter's voice lesson falls on Hump Day, because it's a bright beacon in the centre of her tempest-tossed week. However, this particular Wednesday, the extra legwork required had just about nailed me into the ground. The fact I'd been battling a strep throat for three days was not an asset. So I was a bit slow clambering into a back entrance of an articulated bus, and the lady hurrying behind me evidently thought I'd been waiting to hold the door for her.

I sank into a window seat and she joined me companionably.
"Crazy day," she laughed, her voice as delicate as egg shells.
I managed a reasonably friendly grimace as what felt like a razor slash somewhere in the region of my uvula began to throb painfully.
"I'm afraid I'm not very well," I began apologetically.
Her eyes widened. "You sick???" she squeaked.
I nodded, and suddenly the seat next to me was empty. Bewildered, I looked about. She was now several seats ahead in the lower section. Every few seconds she'd glance back at me, her face contorted with horror.

Feeling decidedly leprous, I got off the bus and dragged myself through the Rideau Centre en route to Shoppers' Drug Mart in search of throat lozenges. Within twenty-four hours, my throat would feel better, but I'd be struck with conjunctivitis and resemble a demented Ood for three more days. After that, I'd lose my hearing, give up and get anti-biotics.

Maybe my Sari Lady was prescient. Or perhaps she thought I was going to vomit on her. I'll never know.

The shortest season

Two weeks ago, it felt like winter does in Victoria: cold, damp, temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius. Along the Ottawa River Parkway, you could only see the new green fringing the branches of the trees if the sun shone a certain way.

Last week, I saw my first red-winged blackbird of the year. On the bus, a woman tucked partially opened lilac blossoms into the ponytail of her young daughter. By the end of the week, the I got a brief whiff of lilac blowing in through the bus windows, and looking out across the river to the province of Quebec, noticed that the white and silver slivers lining the opposite bank were now chartreuse. Further beyond, the Gatineau hills were banded in alternating lime and hunter green. Vivaldi was streaming in through my ear-buds. (No, not that one. This one):

The Victoria Day weekend came, which is the first weekend when Ottawans can safely put out their bedding plants. Thousands ignore this fact, to their detriment and disappointment. Black-thumbed persons such as myself spent the weekend ferrying the winter clothes into the basement and retrieving summer-weight cottons from bins.

When I stepped out onto the pavement last Tuesday, the spring green had vanished, replaced already by the colour of an Ottawan summer which can best be described as...sigh...office green. The air is heavy with moisture and the now inescapable stench of lilac. So begins the four-month summer, to be followed by three weeks of autumn, six months of winter and (if we're paying attention) two weeks of spring.

The not-so-soote shoures of Aprille

I entered the chapter room of the cathedral with elder daughter (then six), pushing younger daughter (then two) in her stroller. My heart and stomach sank as I felt that old familiar suffocating pressure of barely repressed hatred emanating from Bête Noire (whom I've described in a previous post) who was studying the bookshelves. Demeter offered her hand to his wife who ignored her and greeted the cousins who had entered with us. We retreated to the other end of the room; Demeter was white with shock and hissing her indignation.
"Mama, please..." I whispered.
"They can't hear me."
"Yes, but the girls can."

That had the desired effect and in a mercifully short time, the little procession of family mourners made their way to the front pews. I brought up the rear, coaxing younger daughter along. The Resident Fan Boy sat on the aisle next to elder daughter's first godmother, then me with younger daughter, elder daughter next to her grandmother, the two cousins, and finally the Holy Family (the RFB's term for the Bête Noire, his wife and children). The body of my late father-in-law was escorted in by six of his brother priests clad in their black cassocks, their surplices left off for this Maundy Thursday. We rose, and I turned, then remembering it wasn't a wedding, studiously cuddled younger daughter, using her as a buffer against the hurt and the hostility. She leaned forward, gazing at the lit candles on the stripped altar, murmuring: "Birthday, birthday..." I prayed she wouldn't burst into song.

During the recessional, I held the Resident Fan Boy's arm as he followed the casket into the late afternoon sunshine pouring through the open west doors of the cathedral. Younger daughter held his other hand, goosestepping merrily to Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary. I glanced over my shoulder to elder daughter, whose tears glistened in gold rivulets down her cheeks as the sun caught her face.

Another uncomfortable hour at the reception. The Bête Noire's wife had set up court in one corner of the chapter room, while I flitted around chasing children and greeting whom I could. After a discreet message from First Godmother, who had been aware of the rift for years and who had never mentioned it to either party, awkward arrangements were made for the bewildered cousins to join the Holy Family for drinks at their hotel, then have dinner with us.

I escaped as the crowd dwindled and with relief, stepped out of the side entrance into a soft spring evening at sunset.

Godmother Two had left a casserole, a true sign of love from one who hated to cook to another who felt the same. When the cousins arrived, the talk was of the service, how father-in-law would have loved the theatricality and symbolism of the somber black guard of brother priests and the Maundy Thursday setting. The Resident Fan Boy told of elder daughter's reaction to the stained glass window in the modern chapel, a recent addition to the cathedral: "That's not what God looks like!" On hearing this, elder daughter made a bee-line for the study and emerged some minutes later bearing this portrait: "The good things come from his hands and the bad things come from his feet," she explained.

This is the sixth month I have "Nablopomo-ed", and for four of the previous five, I have gone through the rather painful "Mirror of Erised" exercise of leafing through old journals in search of a kind of unifying theme for the given month in my own http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflife. November is preparation, February limbo, September transition, and March crisis. April, since it comes right after March, seems to be a time when the crises blow up in my face, or I end up exploding myself. What shall I call this? Eruption? Outburst? Would "effervescence" do? Maybe not.

How about the "outpouring" of April? It's a time of the first thunderstorms of the year here in Hades, a time when, if I'm to learn anything from my journals, it's best not to take too much initiative, since there's that increased risk of being blown sky-high. My next Nablopomo month should be October. In the meantime, I hope to keep blogging, not in a steady downpour, but in intermittent showers.

The mirror of erised

I love a family wedding, but only if it's happening to someone else's family. I wasn't as excited about this wedding, to tell you the truth. After the soap opera that the Royal Family became during the eighties and nineties, the sheen of the various ceremonies lost its gloss.

However, two billion viewers were supposed to be looking in on this, so how could I resist? I took to bed early and when I came to at 2:30 am, snapped on the television. We have learned the hard way that CBC is hopeless for a royal event; it just takes the BBC feed and natters misinformation and banalities all over it. Unfortunately, much the same was taking place with BBC World News. It was 7:30 in London and the commentators were reduced to babbling at parade-route campers on the Mall and wedding breakfasters in Cumbria. I clicked around and the American channels were going on about clothes and CBC was breathlessly informing us that the carpet at Westminster Abbey was indeed red and being vacuumed.

I turned off the set and went back to sleep, wondering how awkward all this would have been had Diana survived to attend this wedding. I dreamt fitfully of being in some sort of mini-bus, watching Kate Middleton climb aboard with a tinkling cell phone which she tossed crossly to someone. Her hair was in a complicated mass of curls and thatching.

I re-awoke at 4 am, just in time to see the Beckhams arrive. Meanwhile, white banners scrolled across the bottom of the screen, proclaiming that "The Royal Family are excited", "Kate Middleton's dress is still a topic of speculation" and "Prince Harry is to be best man".

All abruptly changed at 4:30 am, when the BBC took over from BBC World Service and suddenly started to tell us what was actually going on --- for example, who all these very white, very wealthy, mostly blond people were. The camera kept zooming in on a trio of identical blonds with rather vacant expressions. I gather these are Earl Spencer's daughters, only two of whom are actually twins, but the BBC didn't actually help me there; I had to work it out for myself. The commentary itself kept going on about the wide range of guests, but they all looked pretty similar to me.

Oh, but it was a wedding, and the bride was beautiful (with mercifully straight hair) although she looked damn tired, and the ceremony was beautiful, and the Queen actually looked rather relaxed and happy. Afterwards, they asked Andrew Ford and Simon Shama how this would be remembered and they thought it would be remembered as a happy day.

Well, maybe.

Someone posted Diana and Charles's ceremony at YouTube, and as I watched the cast of familiar players, so many of them dead now, and listened to the stirring music and the rather purple BBC commentary ("...groom casts a longing glance westward..." Strewth!), I was overcome with a feeling of sorrow for the expectations of that day, which, as it happens, were already crumbling at the edges. (Mind you, I should have avoided reading the hopelessly trite comments left after each video segment from people who have decided that Diana was saintly because she was pretty and Camilla evil because she isn't.)

Nearly fourteen years ago, I tortured myself after Diana, the Princess of Wales' funeral by re-watching a tape I'd made of the wedding of The Duke and Duchess of York in 1986, seeing William as a mischievous preschooler after the scenes of the the lanky teenager in mourning. Memories of happier times can be double-edged swords. I find myself unable to watch old videos of my own children. I just know too much now. I know what I've lost. These tapes have become my own Mirror of Erised, JK Rowling's painful reminder of the hazards of glimpsing our deepest and most desperate desires.

There's a wish for the happy couple (and for any couple heading out on the marital journey): May your happy memories be a balm and not a bludgeon.

André is a wimp

I was planning other posts for today, but another post got in my way. Canada Post.

Canada, as one of my sympathetic friends has pointed out, is the only First World country with a Third World postal service. I mailed a package for elder daughter at 9:08 on the morning of April 18th, four days before Good Friday. It's right there on my tracking notice. On the Tuesday after Easter Monday, eight days after I mailed said parcel, I noticed that the package had been "processed". It was still in Ottawa, full of cupcakes, now over a week old. I filled out a "ticket", and they cheerfully reported that it had been delivered this morning, the very day elder daughter checked out of her dorm. She went to pick it up; no dice. It had been signed for at Dalhousie University. My daughter attends the University of King's College, next door. I phoned Canada Post, got put on hold, then some guy named André suggested that I had misaddressed the package. When I had the temerity to get angry, he hung up on me.

I didn't swear; I didn't call him names. He just hung up on me when I suggested that the situation arose from Canada Post making "mistake after mistake".

Clearly, I should wait for the Resident Fan Boy to get home before attempting such phone calls. Time to go to my happy place....
Sigh. My favourite Marx Brother movie (Monkey Business) with my favourite Great Big Sea song ("When I am King"). Thecoweyd,you're my hero.

And as for you, Andre, you're a wimp. May all your packages be misdirected. Go, and never darken my towels again...

For worms, brave Percy

This afternoon, as I set out to fetch younger daughter from school, I paused on the porch to lock the door and felt a sensation on my cheeks that I haven't felt since September. The warm, wet, spongy feel of humid air. After a weeks of cold rain and temperatures around 0 degrees Celsius, it looks like this is yet another year when Hades will simply skip spring and plunge into the mugginess of an Ontarian summer. Some people blame El Niña; after reading about Krakatoa, I'm blaming Eyjafjallajökull.

With the warmer weather, Ottawans are talking to each other again, almost as if the removal of parkas was a prearranged signal that it's okay to speak to strangers.

"How's your day going?" inquires a chipper barista at the Second Cup where I take younger daughter for a pre-voice-lesson snack.
"Oh, okay," I reply.
"Is it cold out there?"
"Not at all. It's getting muggy and there's that smell..."
"Worms," she says, hitting the steamed milk. "The air is wormy."
"The sidewalks were full of 'em this morning," I agree. "I rescue worms, if I have the time."
"I missed a school bus saving worms when I was a kid," she says. (This was probably five years ago, I think to myself.) My mum couldn't believe it."

I've posted a few photos of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Hadean spring. In Victoria, spring starts in January with the first snowdrops, then lingers through the next three months with different streets breaking into a relay race of cherry blossoms. The daffodils come in March, and the tulips come in April. The air is soft as kisses and smells like the ocean.

This morning, when my nostrils were full of the scent of worms, I fancied I saw some daffodils. It's possible; it's late April in Ottawa.

Oh, and the Resident Fan Boy informs me that we just had a tornado warning...

A glancing blow

I was writing some Easter letters last week. Yes, I write Easter letters. We do have some friends and family who are quite serious about Easter, so we send them cards and we might as well enclose a letter while we're at it.

In one of my missives, I was describing our February trip to Toronto which included a trip to the Ontario Science Centre. On Family Day. We deserve a medal.

We saw a special exhibit on whales and I sought to illustrate my letter with a picture of the pakicetus, the ancient land-living ancestor of today's whale. Only I couldn't recall the actual word "pakicetus", so typed "Whale Evolution" into Google Images. One of the images that came up was of a round young woman standing on a beach, and the photo was captioned with some adolescent joke about evolving hands out of flippers to hold Twinkies. And I sat there sadly, feeling a little sick, thinking of this girl, posing innocently on the beach for a friend or maybe a family member who presumably posted the photo to something like Flckr or PhotoBucket where some guy (it has to be a guy, right?) thought it would be a hilarious joke to paste this all over the internet.

The next morning, I glanced into one of my Poem of the Day books, and up came this famous triolet:

To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much? - Frances Cornford (1886-1960)

Frances Cornford was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and married to a classical scholar named Francis Cornford. This is supposed to be one of her most famous poems which is a pity, because she actually wrote some lovely stuff. This isn't lovely: it's mean-spirited, pretentious, supercilious, arrogant and inequitable. The sort of thing, in short, that might be written by a very young person, as I suspect that puerile photo-poster with the cruel sense of humour was. Cornford was twenty-nine when she wrote it, so I feel even less inclined to excuse her.

Fortunately, GK Chesterton gave Mrs Cornford a well-deserved literary smack:

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

Quite right. You go, Gilbert.

However, it occurred to me that I am guessing so much about both GK Chesterton, whom I really only recognise in passing, and Frances Cornford, about whom I knew nothing until now. So I've got a book about Chesterton out of the library and will now head off in search of more of Cornford poetry, because, as I've said, she did write some lovely stuff. I may even read it on the train. But a bus is more likely.

They didn't keep on killing Rory

At last. Something to make Saturday evening television watching bearable. The Space channel has made this season's Doctor Who available for Canuck Whovians within hours of the episodes' airing in Britain. Of course, we have constant commercial interruptions and promos for Space's vast array of blood-spattering vampire shows, but at least we don't have to illegally download the series anymore, which saves us both time and bandwidth.

How does it look so far? Let's start with the stuff that I find distracting. (Note: anything that pulls me out of the willing suspension of disbelief is a liability):

1) We're starting with a two-parter. Now, I can understand why, because the plot requires that the Doctor has not seen his companions for a matter of months. (Or weeks. Or years. I probably need to watch this a third time.) However, every single other New Who season opener has had rather more levity to it. The world has always been in danger, that's a given, but the season traditionally starts with a light-hearted romp. Two-parters tend to be a bit more serious. This one certainly is.

2) Historical bobbles. Granted, these are petty, but they put me off. The hair is way too long for 1969, especially for government types. Long-hair really didn't become mainstream until the seventies. Plus, we have an African-American Secret Service agent issuing orders. Really? In Richard Nixon's White House? Kennedy hired the first black secret service agent in 1960 (he lasted about three months), and African-Americans make up something like ten percent of the Secret Service fifty years later, but I doubt there were many, if any, serving Nixon in the late sixties, and they certainly would not be yelling at Nixon about "engaging with the suspect". (Or whatever he said. I'll definitely have to watch it again.)

3) An American lady (played by an American actress, as it happens) says: "Hang on, didn't I just say that?" Wouldn't she say something like "Wait a minute"? Americans do say "hang on", but not in this context which is a British usage. Again, it's petty, but it knocks me out of the story, and I have to waste time getting back in.

The good stuff:

1) Steven Moffat and his twisty-turny, timey-wimey complex plots. It usually means I have to watch his show several times to wrap my poor excuse for a brain around them, but he's also very, very funny, so it's not a hardship.

2) River Song. Gawd, I love River Song. River Song and Emma Thompson are the closest I've come to girl crushes. If we can't have Elizabeth Sladen anymore, can we have Alex Kingston in her own River Song spin-off series? Please?

3) I do like Matt Smith as the Doctor, particularly when he drops his voice. I'll never fancy him, but I didn't fancy Christopher Eccleston either and he worked, too.

4) They promised to kill off a major character in this episode and it wasn't Rory. Thank goodness. That really would have been over-kill.

I guess the "ayes" have it. Not one of my top ten episodes, but it passes the Persephonic Doctor Who Multiple Viewing Test. And by the way, I'm not promising to review each episode. Aren't you relieved?