September snapshot

From my table at Planet Coffee, I can see a man in the breezeway, standing in the space between two benches on the wet bricks.

He's talking steadily, gesturing as if he were giving a presentation or sermon. He looks a bit like an actor memorizing a speech. His expression is earnest, and his focus, although inward, moves smoothly to various parts of the tiny plaza, as a speaker would, surrounded by rapt listeners. He has an earpiece in his ear and a cellphone held loosely in front of him at waist-level.

I can't hear him through the thick glass, but I find myself hoping he really is talking to somebody...

Red is the colour of my shame-faced skin

Someone has drawn an eiderdown of greyish lavender clouds across the sky, with just a vestige of the earlier day's bright blue trailing at the edge.

I look out the kitchen window at a freshly-painted chartreuse table in the centre of a large square of brick tiles. When the unimpeded sun was shining in the late morning, I spotted one of our neighbours digging out a square of soil and pulling bricks to the edge of it. I had assumed she was setting out a garden patch like the one she established in her front yard in bits and pieces over the past year or so.

With a shock, I realize that this lady, a spry but elderly woman who cares for her tiny grandchildren when not moving the earth, has not only paved the backyard, but has also painted the table. All in the space of the afternoon.

I, a younger woman, have been overwhelmed by what needs to be done. Clearly, I need to fight free and get with some hurdling.

Once in a blue moon

So I had one chance, and one chance only, to see the "Van Gogh Up Close" exhibit which is having its one Canadian stop at the National Gallery. I booked tickets for the first group of the day and used my time-honoured art gallery strategy which works particularly well at popular showings: I strode past all the people bunching up at the first pictures at the beginning of the exhibit, and made my way past small gatherings of slightly suspicious security staff to the very last room and started working my way backwards. This way, I had nearly two rooms to myself.

I also don't go to every single painting; I scan the walls and go to those that call to me. The first one that drew me in was the one you see above. It's called "Tree Trunks in the Grass", and it was painted some time during the last six months of Van Gogh's life.

As I "listened" for other paintings (and about half a dozen kept pulling me back), I remembered the first (and only other) Van Gogh exhibit I saw some years ago in Toronto. I used my strategy then and got hypnotised by a contemporary of Van Gogh's named Louis Anquetin. See if you agree:
Oh, and there really is a blue moon tonight.

Nightswimming

A long-ago July night when I was twelve (or thirteen?):
At our small Girl Guide camp by the edge of Lake Cowichan, our tent plotted to skinny-dip.

I think our captain, volunteer parents, and counselors knew. We were twelve (or thirteen?) and not yet masters of deception. We slipped into our sleeping bags naked, and at the given signal, wrapped ourselves in towels and crept out on the dock, whispering and giggling, lowering ourselves into the water, leaving the towels on the edge.

I've never known a feeling like it, swimming without the elastic constriction of a swim-suit, no pulling pressure on my shoulders as I stroked through the silky black water, looking up at a million stars.

I don't think we could have been out there for more than a few minutes. Did the Guide Captain call us back in? I don't remember.

I was the last to try to clamber out. The others were reaching for their towels when I heard the count from the camp-fire at the next site, surrounded by a quartet of hunched-over young men: "One! Two!" Shrrrrrrrriiiieeeeek!!!!! The girls dropped to their bellies as the combined light of several flashlights hit them. I was still in the water, clinging to the edge, watching the frantically retreating silhouettes when I realized there was no towel waiting for me.

"Guys! Guys??" I called frantically over and over, until one girl threw a towel that wasn't mine and not much larger than a hand-towel in my direction. I don't remember how I got back to the tent.

It seems I've had so many opportunities to experience and re-live humiliation and embarrassment.

But I've never ever had another experience like that precious few minutes in the black waters beneath a black sky full of stars. I tried skinny-dipping again when I was about sixteen. It simply wasn't the same. Some moments will never come back, more moments than we care to admit. Memory has to suffice.

I wonder if Michael Stipes was thinking along the same lines when he came up with the lyrics for "Nightswimming". He has said it's about a "kind of an innocence that's either kind of desperately clung onto or obviously lost.

I'm not sure how obvious it is, and I'm not desperately clinging on to it, but I do remember.



This finishes the July NaBloPoMo for me. Over the past four years, I`ve NaBloPoMoed February, March, April, May, July, August, September, October, and November. I plan to do January 2013 next, provided we all make it past the end of the year. (That`s just me, whistling in the dark. But I can see the stars.)

Long shadows

This evening, the penultimate evening of July (it's still July 30th here in Victoria), I walked out in the fresh breeze and caught sight of my own shadow stretching several yards to the east. As a child in Edmonton, I remember delighting in the length of my evening shadow which made me appear not only grown-up, but gave the illusion that I was wearing high heels.

I don't have my journals here; they're back in Hades, so only long shadows of July memories occur to me as I walk: summer band, teaching summer ESL students, reluctantly picnicking with picnic-mad elder daughter when she was little, walking barefoot (until I trod on a bee at age eighteen), my first boyfriend, being led through a pitch-black forest by another boy when I was nineteen and encountering stoned hippie-types (I assume they were hippie-types --- they certainly sounded stoned), weddings, my very first funeral.

July is the month when I feel the year turn around to loop back to Christmas. It is usually the month when I see which way the year is going to go. I am sometimes relieved; sometimes horrified. Shadows can be threatening; they can also be shelters.

I feel relatively sheltered this year. I hope I'm right.

Sniffle, snorg

Once again, I find it's getting close to midnight here in Victoria, and I'm coughing and hacking -- and cheating.

Here's a brilliant piece of Motown-style blasting from Elise Legrow of Toronto:

And just in case you think it's all studio effects:

This should clear my sinuses

Oh gawd. Summer colds. They're the worst. They're just so damned unnatural. I've had a lovely day, really, seeing a friend I haven't seen in eighteen years.

But I need to get to bed. I thought I'd leave you with a boffo moment from the Winter Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988. kd lang was very young then and claiming to channel Patsy Cline. When she let rip with this number at the closing ceremonies, all heck broke loose.

G'night.

Shining in a naughty world

So in the midst of some pretty depressing news worldwide today, I have to say, that this has to be the most charming Olympic flame ever, combining flaming petals representing the participating nations. As jaded as I get about the Olympics, it was a lovely sight and symbol.

Almost midnight; I think I've caught a cold....

Too-damn-tame-life

So the Resident Fan Boy turned up on the doorstep today (yes, I was expecting him), and younger daughter is so relieved, she's been practically purring all afternoon.

This evening, I took advantage of his presence to wander around the outsides of the house-sit and spray the plants. Rain on St Swithin's Day notwithstanding, we seem to be settling in for the usual Victorian dry August.

I startled a rabbit that fled across the street into a more manicured garden. At about this time last year, I was engaged in the same activity when I spotted a rather majestic buck posing like a lawn ornament in the same garden where this year's bunny had high-tailed it. I stood and gazed at him from behind the tangle of BC native plants that make up this house-sit's garden (much to the annoyance of the well-manicured neighbours, I suspect), when an elderly lady, complete with full-length velour dressing gown, suddenly appeared in her doorway.

"Shoo!" she cried shrilly, clapping her hands imperiously. Majestic buck didn't budge.

"Shoo! Shoo!" she shouted again. Nothing. She vanished into the house and reappeared with a large pan and lid which she clanged vigorously.

"Shoo!"

The buck stood and gazed at her. She retreated, slamming her door. I stood for a few seconds more, decided the show was over, and didn't slam my door. Heaven only knows how long he stood there. He must have gotten hungry for her well-tended plants at some point.

A year later, I wrapped up the hose somewhat untidily. (I save the careful winding for the date of our departure which is two weeks in this case.) I happened to turn as I reached the top step, just in time to spot a large raccoon lolloping back from the same yard across the way. He headed straight into the garden I'd just finished spraying, and spotted me eying him. He seemed resolutely unconcerned, as most raccoons I've encountered are. I knew better than to follow him, and went back into the house. I did not slam the door.

(I took the above photo in another garden in another Victoria house-sit in 2009. He was just as unbudgeable.)

Too bad, Greenland

 About a week ago, someone got ticked off at a block party in a suburb of Toronto and shot some people.  A few days later someone else decided a midnight movie premiere in Colorado would be a great place for target practice.  Elsewhere in the news, there's a crisis in Syria, and a truly frightening and sudden ice melt in Greenland.  Both these stories and many others have repercussions for the entire globe, but pages and pages, and hours and hours of news coverage are being devoted to these violent suburban incidents.

I'm not belittling their impact on hundreds of people, the relatives and loved ones of the slain, wounded and yes, even the murderers.  However, I don't think the obsessive attention to these events benefits anybody and indeed, increases the likelihood of more murders.  Why?  Because, judging from the number of hit "reality" TV shows, everyone wants to be famous, and blowing a bunch of people away (unless you happen to be in Syria) seems a really efficient way to do this.  Take a gander on this item from British journalist and screenwriter Charlie Brooker.  

Now, personally, I find Brooker's sarcastic comments a tad redundant, but I think the recommendations to the media made starting at the 1:42 mark in this video by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz are worth repeating, particularly #2 (and I'd add "Avoid mentioning the name of the killer whenever possible."):

1.  "Don't start the story with the sirens blaring."
2.  "Don't have photographs of the killer."
3.  "Don't make this 24/7 coverage."
4.  "Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story."
5.  "Don't make the killer some kind of anti-hero."
6.  "Do localize this story to the affected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market . .  . ."

How likely are newspapers and news programmes likely to take this advice?  The answer is in the sixth point.  We're talking about a market.  They're selling this as news and we are gobbling it up.

Too bad, Greenland.