Sha-la-la-la-boosh-boosh

During the past week, I have accomplished two things. Now, I'm not especially proud of this; these are two things that have been hanging over my head and weighing me down for several months. However, this week I completed them. The boulders have removed from my road and I can see my way clear --- to the Christmas cards I need to write and the presents I must purchase and....

Oh well, at least I'm not Sisyphus.

Here's the song that's been playing in my head as I plunge into my so-called future:

The light is dark enough

This morning, I checked in at John Reid's Anglo-Celtic Connections, which is always a mistake when I have other things that need doing. He provided links to two historical Wolverhampton blogs which are new to me. One is focusing on the impact of the First World War on the city. It certainly had an impact on my family: my great-aunt died in the influenza epidemic that came home with returning soldiers, and my great-uncle committed suicide in the 1930s, partly due to his physical, mental, and emotional war wounds. The other blog provides, among other things, pictorial tours of various areas of the Black Country, of which Wolverhampton forms a part.

And I stumbled upon this 1795 painting by one Joseph Mallord William Turner, aged about twenty at the time. JMW Turner became famous for his later paintings, masses of light, paintings in which it is difficult to pick out the subject because by that time, the light was the subject. Demeter has always loved those later works; she has a print of The Fighting Téméraire in her living room, which she can't see right now because she's recovering from an eye procedure and must sit in the dark for 48 hours.

So I must wait to share this with the great-great-great-granddaughter of John Meanley of Wolverhampton, an innkeeper in Snow Hill who took the first of his ten children to be christened, possibly making his way through this market place toward the imposing tower of St Peter's Collegiate, the morning of January 3rd, 1796. I wonder if he, his parents (who also married at St Peter's), his siblings or his wife ever brushed by a young man in the city the previous year, sketching this view while facing north where Queen's Square meets Lichfield Road. At any rate, this is something they must have seen almost every market day, and being the Black Country, I doubt the light was the subject of anything.

Blood and Roses

On Saturday afternoon, we made our way downtown to pick out our trio of pumpkins. Small groups of Muslim girls were moving through the Byward Market, passing out crimson and cream roses to the passers-by, in honour of Eid, I suppose.

I was delighted when younger daughter and I were presented with cream roses; we were cradling them and admiring them when we boarded the Number Seven bus for home.

That was why I didn't notice the zombies.

It took a few moments for me to realize why the bus was so crowded, unusual for a Saturday afternoon. I looked across the aisle at a man swathed from head to shoulders in a bloody bandage. The girl next to him appeared to have part of her cheek eaten away. Many other young passengers were in various states of decomposition; several had crimson and cream roses.

A man turned to the Resident Fan Boy and laughed, "It's like Woodstock for the Undead!"

They clambered off at McDonald Gardens Park where hundreds of men who died building the Rideau Canal are buried under the large mound. I wonder how many of the young zombies were aware of this, as they staggered back to the Parliament Buildings clutching their Eid roses.

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.