Cassandra’s Tears

The Vessel

2011-11-15T14:46:00.003-05:00

Karina looked in the mirror and wondered when she got old. It wasn’t yesterday. It wasn’t that morning. When, then? Yesterday she was walking the dog, briskly, feeling the morning sun on her face, a knitted hat keeping the tangle of her hair under control while it kept her ears warm. She had gone out to the Mortons’ dinner party with Ralph, feeling sleek and sexy in her black satin cocktail dress. This morning she had lain in a bath of mango-scented mousse and read a few chapters in a novel, and had not felt old. Even seeing her reflected nakedness in the big bathroom mirror had not convinced her otherwise.

But here in the Simon’s dressing room, squeezed into an outfit meant for a girl a third her age, she suddenly realized she had made a mistake. She wasn’t 25 anymore; she couldn’t pretend that she was. Her hair, naturally curly, looked like a witch’s thatch, the skin on her arms was loose, and her breasts sagged. Where was the flat stomach she had always prided herself on maintaining? An old woman stared back at her from the mirror, skin pouched under the eyes, jowls instead of a smooth jaw line, and her neck a mess of ropey wattles. Her eyes filled with tears and she changed back into her own clothes, sniffling.

“What’s the matter, Kar?” asked Ralph as she emerged from the dressing room. “Are you crying?”

Karina handed the clothes to the clerk and took her husband’s arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said quietly. “I don’t belong in this place.”

“Want to get a coffee?” asked Ralph. Karina nodded and sniffled again.

Later in the coffee shop, over their lattes, she told her husband about her experience in the dressing room. “I don’t know if it was the light in there or if I’ve been deluding myself for years now,” she mused, “but I suddenly realized that my body has gotten old. I still feel good, but I look awful.”

“No you don’t,” soothed her husband. “You’re beautiful!”

Karina smiled. “You say that because you love me,” she said. “It’s sweet, but not realistic.”

Ralph sighed. “Don’t be so down on yourself,” he admonished. “All those flaws you think you saw: you’re the only one who sees them. You’re being overly critical of the vessel housing your spirit. It’s inevitable that our bodies are going to age. Human beings have built-in obsolescence. But no one really notices it. They’re seeing your soul shine through your eyes, hearing the love in your voice. Your body, how you choose to clothe it, isn't really important. It’s you we love, I love.”

Karina looked up from her coffee, eyes bright, and smiled.

Between the Cracks

2011-07-17T20:33:00.003-04:00

     The edges of things are what fascinate him: the changing of seasons, waves lapping against the shore, the first glow of sunrise. As he lies on his pillow, before putting on the eyeglasses that will throw everything into sharp relief, he savours the blurriness around him, the softness that his sleep-filled, myopic eyes afford him in the morning. It is now that he can see the spaces between the molecules that make up reality, the passageways that should allow him into different worlds. Alas, he has never found the way through those openings. He can only gaze at them and wish in vain.

     Washed, shaved, dressed and bespectacled, Albert is every inch the unimaginative accountant. His world consists of ledgers filled with numbers and hard facts. There is no room for the unknown, the speculative. He wears dark suits with crisp white shirts, neatly knotted, unassuming ties, and his thinning hair is cut short. You would not notice Albert in a crowd; there is nothing remarkable about him. In a police lineup, you would most likely gloss over him.

     But for some reason after work that particular Thursday, after reviewing a difficult client’s complicated accounts and developing a headache that made his temples throb, Albert decided to stop at a bar on his way home. He’d never gone in before, but it looked dark and quiet inside, and he needed darkness and calm to settle the pounding in his head. He found a seat in a corner where he couldn’t see the television—mercifully with the sound off—advertising some product for premature, male-pattern baldness on an eternal infomercial. The bartender came over to get his order and he asked for a single-malt scotch with no ice. When it arrived, he sipped it slowly, appreciating the slow burn as it made its way down his esophagus.

     Albert fumbled through his pockets looking in vain for aspirin. He took off his glasses and rubbed the sides of his nose where they left imprints, trying to shake the headache. Someone appeared to have joined him in his booth, so he put his glasses back on, only to see an empty seat. ‘Strange,’ he thought, and took the glasses off again. Once more there seemed to be someone sitting opposite him, out of focus, but solid enough that he could not be mistaken.

     “Excuse me,” he said aloud, addressing his visitor, “do I know you?”

     The apparition reached across the table and tapped Albert’s spectacles. “Try them now,” he heard someone say.

     He put the glasses back on his nose and this time the person opposite him did not disappear. In fact, where the bar had been empty, it was suddenly crowded with people, the bartender obliviously wiping a glass out with a cloth. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone arrive. Where had these people come from? Why hadn’t he seen them before?

     Albert studied the person across from him. He saw a woman with long silvery hair, but her face was unlined and her eyes were bright and alert. She was dressed in what he took for rags and then realized were pelts of small animals, dozens of them, sewn together so that they overlapped with heads and paws hanging over the ones below. Those periwinkle blue eyes looked like they missed nothing. How had he missed her?

     “Hello, Albert,” she said in a voice like rustling leaves. “You probably wonder why I called you to this meeting.” Suddenly she burst out laughing, and Albert heard the tinkling of a glockenspiel, the clang of tubular bells and the peal of a carillon as all the strangers at the bar joined in her merriment. He could not hide his amazement. Either he was hallucinating because of the headache and the scotch, or he was just going crazy. The woman reached across the table and took his hand as the laughter ceased.

     “I’m sorry, Albert,” she said. “This must come as a bit of a shock to you, but you are gifted with the Sight. We’ve noticed you, we’ve heard your longing to travel through the cracks at the edges of things, but we haven’t been able to help until now. Your life is so regimented, you never let down your barriers, and it is just today that you have done something different enough that we could take advantage of your weakness. Thank you for taking off your glasses.”

     “How,” Albert stuttered, “how do you know what I was thinking?” He started to blush, wondering what other intimate thoughts this woman—whom he now realized was very beautiful—had read. She recognized his discomfort and smiled, making herself even more lovely.

     “Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with us,” she said. “Call me Olivia. These are my friends. Would you like to come with us? Would you like to travel through the spaces at the edges?”

     Albert looked around the bar, at the strangers who glittered in the dim light, shining with gems and iridescent feathers and silver and gold and he thought, ‘Why not? This is what I’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’ He considered going home to his cold and empty apartment, heating up a frozen meal in the microwave, reading his journals and going to bed as he always did at 10:30, alone, with only the prospect of more of the same the next day.

     “Just a moment,” he told Olivia, and signaled for the bartender. Albert paid for his scotch and gave the man a generous tip, then rose from his seat and said, “I’m ready.”

     Olivia took his arm and together, followed by the rest of the throng, they walked through the dusky twilight until they disappeared between the cracks.

Pay it Forward

2011-04-19T14:45:00.004-04:00

While this blog is generally reserved for my creative writing, I am making an exception in this one case.

The Happy Seamstress is currently participating in Pay It Forward 2011, a fun little game where you get to receive and give hand-made gifts.

The rules are as follows: I will make a handmade gift for the first five people who comment on this blog post as long as they promise to blog about this and send a gift to the first five people who comment on their blog post.

If you want to participate, simply leave a comment on this post with a link to your blog post. I’ll be emailing you to get your mailing address so please leave your email with your comment.

If yours is not one of the first five comments, feel free to participate anyway! If nothing else, this is certainly a good way to spread the joy of craftiness.

Lost

2010-12-26T10:30:00.001-05:00

The sky was reverberant with geese flying every which way in their V-shaped communities.

“They’re flying the wrong way,” Nicole said to Phyllis. “That’s not south.”

Phyllis looked up from her lattè and squinted at the chaos overhead. It was true, the geese were flapping and honking, but none of the Vs was headed south toward warmer climes.

“Maybe they’re lost,” she said.

Nicole didn’t think so, but she didn’t know why exactly. She’d read something about magnetic fields and wind directions and knew the geese were smarter than they looked, and that somehow they always ended up where they were supposed to. Phyllis glanced at her watch and drained the rest of her coffee quickly.

“Got to run, Duckie,” she said. “I’ll see you at Mother’s tonight.” Then she kissed her sister on both cheeks, gave her a quick hug, and hurried out of the café. Nicole sighed.

Ever since their mother had been admitted to the residence, the two sisters found they had less and less quality time to spend together. When they met, it was to grab a quick coffee and discuss the care and feeding of their mother, who was now incapable of either since her stroke. She missed just having girl talk. Now it was all business. Nicole thought of the eventuality of the old woman’s death and wondered if she would gain her sister back after she lost her mother. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Instead she looked out the window and watched the geese arrow above, going everywhere but the right direction.

“Would you like something else?” asked the waitress.

“No thanks, I’m done here,” said Nicole. “I’ll pay at the cash.”

Leaving the café, she started rummaging around in her purse for the address of the bookbinder that she’d copied down from the phone book. She had a set of dictionaries that had been her grandfather’s, with a publication date sometime in the late 1880’s, and they needed to be rebound desperately. She’d written the address down hurriedly on a scrap of shopping list and shoved it in her bag, but now she couldn’t find it.

“I’ve got to clean this out,” she thought to herself, starting to get a little frantic. There were bills, receipts, concert tickets, kleenexes, a lipstick and several matchbooks, but the torn piece of yellow paper with pink lines was nowhere to be seen. “This is crazy,” she thought.

Another spate of geese honking made her look up and there, right in front of her, was the sign, Books Rebound. She let out a sigh of relief and headed across the street to the shop, only to be greeted by another sign in the window: Closed. “Well, that sucks,” she said to no one in particular. “What do I do now?”

Nicole stood still on the sidewalk and felt like a lost goose. The passersby milled about her, traffic made a constant roar, and the honking continued overhead. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. Her purpose of seeking out the bookbinder was lost, as was her sense of direction.

“I suppose I could go home,” she said, then realized she had spoken out loud and thought people might think her slightly daft. But she didn’t want to go home. There she would undoubtedly go to the next thing on her to-do list, right after “visit bookbinder”. In her mind’s eye she saw the list on the kitchen table, the bottom torn off where she had written down the address that she couldn’t find and now didn’t need. Just then her cellphone rang, and she grabbed it as a drowning man might lunge at a line thrown to him.

“Hello?” she answered. It was Phyllis. Hadn’t they just parted ways moments ago?

“Nicole, honey,” her sister’s voice said urgently, “come to the home. Now. They think Mom might be on her way out.”

Nicole snapped the phone shut, shoved it back into her overstuffed purse and found her car keys. Suddenly she had her purpose back, and her sense of direction. “But for how long,” she wondered as her eyes were drawn once more skyward. “For how long?”

Genie

2010-10-28T23:04:00.003-04:00

“Pick a bottle and let your genie come out of it,” instructed the woman who had introduced herself earlier in the evening as Evening Breeze over Sweet Grasses, and the women seated cross-legged on the rush mats obediently reached toward the array of glass and ceramic vessels and chose. Paula sighed.

The entire session had been a bust, as far as she was concerned. It was Doreen from work who had suggested she sign up for the workshop. “I loved it!” the receptionist had gushed. “Breeze is fabulous. She was able to tap into all my deepest places where I was repressing emotions and memories, and I felt like a new person when it was over. You really ought to try it,” she had advised Paula. Was it that obvious? Could everyone see that Paula was carrying around a steamer trunk full of angst? Well, she thought to herself, if it would help her sleep better at night and stop obsessing over the things she couldn’t change then it was worth a shot. All she had to lose were several hours in a long line of evenings where she sat in her empty apartment, trying to stay away from the liquor cabinet and not eat everything in the refrigerator.

Evening Breeze over Sweet Grass—she told them to call her “Breeze”—was a tall, middle-aged white woman (somehow Paula had been expecting a First Nations squaw in buckskins) in a long dress of cotton homespun tiedyed all the colours of the rainbow. Her long, gray hair was braided with feathers and beads and she wore a necklace of shells and semi-precious stones. From her earlobes dangled more feathers. Paula resisted an impulse to roll her eyes when the woman introduced herself.

The workshop was being held in a small room at the local community centre which Breeze had transformed into a hippy den. The walls and ceiling were draped with printed Indian cotton sheets, the air was thick with incense and the only illumination was from a multitude of candles. A low table in the middle of the room was covered with various objects, and the floor was strewn with rush mats upon which the workshop participants were instructed to sit “comfortably”.

Breeze chanted a prayer, at least it sounded like a prayer, invoking the spirits of all the elements to join them in their journey of self discovery, as they uncovered the demons lodged in their souls and banished them to make room for the essences of sunlight and fresh air and clean water. Paula fidgeted and felt self conscious. She had never believed in the mumbojumbo the priest had spouted on Sunday mornings when her parents had forced her to attend church, and she didn’t believe this either. But Doreen had said it would help, so she was willing, at least, to try.

The workshop participants were all women. Paula wasn’t surprised. She didn’t know any men who would sign up for this kind of activity. They ranged in age from a young mother in her early 20’s to a grey-haired crone of at least 80, with Paula herself somewhere firmly in the middle. As she looked around the room, she felt as though she were between a pair of facing mirrors, watching her reflections march from youth behind her to old age in front. She shook her head to clear it of that image.

Breeze asked the women to take items from the table, to hold them and feel them and let them evoke memories and emotions that they would reveal to the others. An orange stuck with cloves brought the grandmother to tears as she recalled the Christmas her husband had died, and the smooth marble egg induced the young mother to talk about her fears during her pregnancy that her child would be stillborn. Paula fingered all the items, but none moved her. They were just things. The other women seemed to draw from some kind of communal energy that Paula just couldn’t tap into, and she felt left out and vaguely cheated.

There had been one moment when she had picked up a a small bit of quartz and had thought of speaking about her own losses: the marriage that had ended in failure, the son dead in a motorcycle accident, her father in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s who no longer recognized her and her frustration at a job that she hated. But when she looked in the faces around her, at the expectation that she too could experience a catharsis that would set her free, her desire to unburden herself vanished and she simply passed.

Now she was to let a genie out of a bottle. Paula picked up a container of amber glass, only an inch high, a cylinder of a half-inch diameter and a quarter-inch narrow neck. A tiny bit of cork served as a stopper, sealing the contents away from the outside. Except, there were no contents.

Paula held the orange glass up to the light and watched as the candle flames warped in the cylinder. There was no genie in this bottle. It was as empty as the whole evening’s exercise had been. The other women didn’t seem disappointed at all, and she wondered if maybe it was she, Paula, who was somehow deficient, and not this white woman in the long hippy gown with the gray braids and tacky jewellery. She wasn’t even sure now why she had signed up for this workshop of self discovery.

Okay, she said to herself, here goes nothing.

She grasped the tiny bit of cork between her fingernails and pulled. Nothing happened. She sighed and looked up expecting to see her fellow workshoppers experiencing various revelations. They were gone. Evening Breeze over Sweet Grasses was gone. The rush mats and low table had vanished. Paula was sitting crosslegged on a sandy beach, the ocean stretching far off to the horizon where the sun, a glowing ball of red-gold, was about to plunge into the water. A cool breeze teased her graying hair from the elastic band that loosely held it, and she heard the cry of gulls in the distance.

What the…? she thought. Where was everyone? Where was she? She felt goose bumps rise on her arms and reached for the sweater she had taken off earlier in the evening during a hot flash. It wasn’t there. Of course not, it was on the rush mat she had been sitting on in the community centre. This was crazy.

Paula carefully got up, feeling her knees and hips complain as she unfolded herself from the cross-legged position she had been in for hours. The beach stretched uninterrupted as far as the eye could see in both directions. One way was as good as another, she figured, and started walking north, grateful that for once she was wearing sensible shoes. The golden sun started sinking below the horizon and she felt a moment of panic as she thought she might be stuck out there in the dark, not knowing where “there” was. Overhead the sky moved through the shades of sunset. In the east it was already indigo.

As Paula trudged across the sand, twilight became dusk and then night. Stars appeared in the darkening sky and she tried to pick out familiar constellations, but recognized nothing. Was she still in the northern hemisphere, she wondered? She chuckled at the thought that she had been magically transported to a beach in Australia. Paula had always wanted to visit the sub-continent. She and Harold had talked about it, back when they were still in love. Before Jonathon had…. She left that line of thought and kept walking, hoping she would find some shelter for the night. It was getting cooler and now she really was starting to panic.

To her left, the ocean glowed with a phosphorescence she tried to remember what she had learned about in nature shows from television. It was some small sea creature or an alga that created that effect, Paula thought to herself. The result was unearthly and beautiful. To her right the sand ended at a dense forest, the darkness beneath the trees holding she knew not what danger. Ahead, quite suddenly, she espied a flicker of light which grew, as she neared, into a small fire on the sand. Paula approached the flames eagerly and saw a small man seated beside them, roasting an unidentifiable animal on a stick. Her stomach growled and she realized she had not eaten for many hours.

“Hello,” said Paula. “May I join you?”

The man looked up from where he was carefully turning his dinner and squinted at her over the fire. He was tiny, wizened, more like a monkey than a man, she thought to herself. His skin was brown and leathery, and there was scant hair on his small head. He was dressed only in a short leather kilt, but a coat of animal skins lay nearby with a pack and what looked to be hunting weapons, a bow and a quiver of arrows. Paula smelled the cooking flesh and her mouth watered.

When he did not answer, Paula stepped forward so he could see her better in the light of the fire. “I’m lost,” she said, “and I’m hungry. I saw your fire. May I sit down?” It occurred to her that maybe he didn’t speak English. You’re not in Kansas anymore, she told herself. Suddenly the man spoke and she startled.

“Please,” he said. “You summoned me, after all.”

“I summoned you?” Paula gasped. “What are you talking about?”

“The bottle,” he said. “You let me out of the bottle. I’m your genie.”

“No!” cried Paula. “That’s impossible!” Yet nonetheless here he was, and here she was. Maybe it wasn’t impossible.

“I’m cooking our dinner,” he said. “Join me.”

Overcome with hunger, Paula obediently sat, not wanting to get too close to this wizened creature and yet grateful for the contact with another human being. Wait, was he human? He had said he was her genie. Were genies human? The little man scraped the meat off the stick with a sharp blade onto a metal plate, then cut it in two and placed the second portion on another plate. Paula didn’t see where he took them from, but at this point she didn’t want to know and she really didn’t care. As he handed it to her, he said, “Be careful, it’s hot.”

He was right, the food was hot. But it was also delicious. Paula wolfed it down, not caring to ask what kind of animal had sacrified itself for her supper, she was so ravenous. As she was licking her fingers clean, the man passed her a canteen and she drank deeply. It’s true, she thought to herself. Everything tastes better when you’re outdoors. Her hunger sated and her thirst slaked, she felt she could face whatever came next.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, would you please tell me who you are, where I am, and I how got here?”

“I don’t have a name, unless you give me one,” said her host. “This is where you need to be, and you came here by opening the door, which in this case was the bottle. My bottle. Genies live in bottles, you know.” He winked then, or it was the flickering of the fire? Paula wasn’t quite sure.

“Wait,” she said. “I opened the bottle, that tiny little orange glass bottle that wouldn’t hold a teaspoonful of anything, and I let you out? Or did I let myself in?”

The genie smiled. “Either or,” he replied. “Actually, it was just the vessel. It was a bottle, an empty bottle. When you uncorked it, you opened the passageway within yourself that would bring you here.”

“But where is here?” Paula wanted to know.

“As I said, it’s where you need to be,” repeated the genie, “only it’s not really a place.”

“It sure looks like a place.” Paula suddenly shivered. “It feels like one, too.”
The genie reached for his animal-pelt cloak and put it around Paula’s shoulders. He seemed unaffected by the cool night air. “It’s all in your mind,” he said, and winked again. This time Paula was sure of it.

“Okay,” she said, “if you’re my genie, aren’t I supposed to ask you for three wishes?”

He smiled. “You can if you want to,” he said. “But what would you wish for? What would you change? What do you want that you don’t already have?”

Paula thought of all the things one demanded from genies: wealth, health, love. She wasn’t rich, but she had enough to live on and a little bit put by for a rainy day. Her health was good, the one thing in her life that had not forsaken her. Love. That was another story. She had known love, and she had known the loss of it, too. Harold had loved her. They had both loved Jonathon. She felt a sudden ache in her breast as she remembered her son, the day he had kissed her goodbye and then ridden off to school on his motorcycle, that vehicle she despised, always fearing he would have an accident. She remembered the call from the principal, the visit from the police, the condolences of the doctor in the emergency room. She remembered afterward Harold treating her as though it had been her fault.

Paula thought of her father whom she visited dutifully in the nursing home every weekend. He no longer knew who she was. She had gone from being his daughter to her mother, to his sister, to his mother and then to a stranger. She no longer knew why she subjected herself to this weekly torture, except that this was her daddy who had pushed her on the swing, who had taught her to ride a bicycle, and then a car; he had shown her how to thread a worm on a hook and cast the line out into the stream. When she thought of him, she remembered the tall, strong man smelling of pipe tobacco who would read her stories at bedtime and then kiss her goodnight, his cheek scratchy with five-o’clock shadow. How could she abandon him? Even though he did not know her, she still loved him. The tears that had refused to flow during the workshop came then.

“I can’t have them back,” she whispered, her voice choked with emotion, “can I?”

“No,” said her genie softly. “I’m sorry.”

She pulled the cloak closer about her shoulders and stared into the fire which still burned high, even though the little man hadn’t put any more fuel on it. Suddenly overcome with fatigue, she lay on her back and stared up at the unfamiliar constellations in the night sky. As her eyes adjusted, she started to pick out stars of different colours and brightnesses and meteors shooting through the upper atmosphere. As a child, Paula had believed that the stars were living beings who granted wishes. She still sometimes recited the nursery rhyme “Star light, star bright” when Venus appeared at dusk, even after she had learned that she was seeing a planet and not some distant sun. She never expected to “get the wish I wish tonight”, at least not since she turned ten. Still, where she hadn’t believed in God or Jesus, she had still kept her mind open to magic; and yet, like God and Jesus, magic had never manifested itself—until now.

“Well?” asked the genie, who seemed to know what she was thinking before she spoke. “If I had the power to grant you even one wish, and I’m not saying I’m that kind of genie, what would it be?”

Paula looked over at the little man where he sat next to the fire. In the time that she had lain on her back gazing at the night sky he had changed. He seemed taller, less wizened, younger. She considered this phenomenon, and then looked off toward the phosphorescent waves lapping at the sand. “Why hasn’t the tide come in?” she mused out loud.

“Because this place doesn’t really exist, remember?” answered the genie. He was definitely looking younger now, and taller, and bore a striking resemblance to someone she knew but couldn’t name. Paula squinted at him in the firelight. Who did he remind her of?

“I don’t know what to wish for,” Paula finally answered. “The things I want most you’ve already said I can’t have. You can’t bring Jonathon back, or restore my marriage, or give my dad back his mind. Nothing else really matters to me. I don’t even know why I still go on day to day, except that I feel I should be there for my father, even though he doesn’t even know who I am anymore.” She looked over at the genie again. “Why do you keep getting younger every time I look at you?” she asked.

The genie grinned. He looked like a teenager now, his long hair falling in unshorn locks about his face. “It’s a trick of the light,” he answered.

Paula watched as he continued to age backward, and then she knew. She sat up and turned to face him. “I want a child,” she said, “I want to care for someone, I want someone to love, someone who loves me in return. Nothing else matters. Really.”

The genie snapped the thumb and middle finger on his small right hand. “Your wish is granted!”

Paula blinked. He was gone. The fire was gone, as were the beach and the strange constellations. She stared at the tiny bottle of amber glass in the palm of her hand, and then looked up at the women seated around the low table on their rush mats. They all stared back at her. Breeze asked, “Paula? Did your genie come for you? Would you like to share your experience with us?”

Paula shook her head. “I must have fallen asleep,” she mumbled. “Sorry.”

As she was leaving the community centre, her sweater over her shoulders and her purse tucked under her arm, Paula glanced at the corkboard where messages and advertisements were posted. She saw a sign with a fringe of telephone numbers hanging off the bottom asking for volunteers to help school children learn to read, and tore one off. She smiled to herself. All was not yet lost.

In the darkness of night, all birds are blackbirds.

2010-09-20T21:53:00.008-04:00

No moon illuminated the garden, the only sources of light were the pinpoints of fireflies, flashing for their mates, or the decoys that made meals of would-be suitors, and the eyes of the cat as it stalked through the underbrush in search of its own nocturnal nosh.

Louise sat on the porch swing and pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders. The sun had set hours ago, bathing the yard in pinks and yellows, then slowly colours had faded and the sky had gone from blue to mauve to silver to black. There were fireflies in the woods and fireflies up above; the former winking on and off, the latter twinkling in their constant constellations.

It’s getting chilly, thought Louise. I should go inside, turn on a light, wash up the dinner dishes, start on my mending. Still she sat. The cat materialized in front of her and rubbed its dew-laden fur against her shins. She reached down and scratched behind its ears. It dropped something at her feet and she could barely see the offering of a mouse, its neck broken.

“I’ve had my supper, Puss,” Louise said. “You eat it.” Puss picked up the small limp body and carried it to a far corner of the porch to consume it. Louise looked away, even though the darkness hid the carnage.

She gazed up at the stars and felt small and helpless and lonely. Once George would have sat here with her, pointing out the constellations, telling her stories about Orion chasing the Pleiades, or Pegasus throwing off Bellerophon as he attempted to storm Olympus. He would have pointed out the Summer Triangle, the Eagle’s Eye. She looked for the red star that was Antares but couldn’t find it. She looked for George among the pinpoints of light, but he wasn’t there either.

Oh, George, she thought. You weren’t supposed to go without me. We made a deal.

The cat finished its meal and came and sat next to its mistress, delicately washing paws and whiskers. Who would have thought such a fastidious, affectionate creature could dispatch small woodland creatures so efficiently and coldbloodedly? A little Grim Reaper.

At home, does the gatherer of souls take off his robe, hang his scythe on a nail, put on a woolen sweater and sit on a rocker by the fire, then put his feet up and relax from a hard day of reaping? Does his wife bring him hot cider like I used to bring George? Does he have a cat? Louise reached down to scratch Puss again and was rewarded by a lick from its rough pink tongue.

“I’m going in, Puss,” she said, “it’s cold. Are you coming?” She got off the porch swing, which creaked under the shift in weight and for a moment she thought George was beside her in the darkness. No. It was just darkness. From the apple tree a night bird sang. A blackbird, for all she could see.

Dinner is served

2010-08-08T18:31:00.000-04:00

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...” Alice fell asleep before she’d finished reading the first paragraph, her cheek on the smooth page of the hardcover copy of A Tale of Two Cities. She’d read the book in high school, and felt that it set the tone for her present state of mind. However, her sobs of frustration and loneliness had taken their toll and she succumbed to exhaustion as soon as her eyes started moving across the page.

There was a tap tap at the door, and Alice roused herself enough to mumble sleepily, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Gwen,” her roommate answered through the locked door. “Are you going to come down for supper? It’s ready now.”

Alice rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock on her bedside table. Oh wow, she’d zoned out for the whole afternoon, since after her embarrassing encounter with Stephen, Gwen’s brother. It was now 7 o’clock and her stomach was rumbling again, telling her it was time to eat. She closed the book and got off the bed, fumbling with the lock to let Gwen in.

Suddenly she was hit with the most tantalizing aroma. Cooking odours both rich and complex were drifting upstairs. Her mouth immediately started watering and she felt faint with hunger. Gwen smiled at the look of amazement on Alice’s face and said, by way of explanation, “It’s Stephen cooking. He’s a professional chef. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No!” blurted out Alice, totally overcome by desire. “I didn’t know.”

She descended to the kitchen with as much decorum as she could muster, trying to control the salivating and the rumbling of her stomach. When her eyes beheld Stephen girt in her apron, the one with the trout in the frying pan and the logo “The end of the Rainbow” on it, humming quietly to himself as he lifted pot lids, tasted for seasonings and opened the oven door to remove something that made Alice think of Christmas dinners, she nearly swooned. It was too much. He was beautiful to behold and a chef as well. The part of her mind that always set her up for disappointment whispered, “He’s probably gay.”

Stephen looked up as Alice and Gwen entered the kitchen. The table was set with linen and crystal, the wine glasses Gwen had received from her mother on her last birthday, and there was a bottle of baco noir uncorked and ready to pour. With a flourish, Stephen took off the apron and hung it on the coat tree in the corner, then proceeded to serve soup before he sat down himself with his sister and her roommate. He smiled warmly at Alice as she gingerly dipped her spoon in the creamy, golden liquid. “I hope you like it,” he said. She smiled shyly and took a tentative sip, letting the liquid lie on her tongue a moment before greedily swallowing it.

“This is fantastic!” she gushed. “What is it?”

Stephen smiled again before answering, “Carrot and sweet potato. It’s our mum’s recipe, actually. I just dressed it up a bit.”

Alice didn’t reply; she was busy scraping every last drop of the precious potage out of the bowl with her spoon. Gwen and her brother exchanged glances, but said nothing.

The soup was followed by broccoli-cheese strudel wrapped in delicate phylo pastry, golden brown and crispy on the outside, melt-in-your-mouth delicious inside. There were oven-roasted vegetables drizzled with a balsamic vinaigrette and a rice pilaf, all of which Alice devoured wordlessly. Just as she thought she couldn’t possibly eat another bite, Stephen produced bowls of fresh fruit salad, fragrant with crème de cassis liqueur.

When everything was gone, Alice sighed in contentment. Never had she eaten so well, never had she had a meal prepared by such a beautiful and talented chef. At this particular moment, it was definitely the best of times.

Sehnsucht

2010-08-08T18:30:00.002-04:00

“Typewriters are always better than computers, for writing anyway, and there are no exceptions to that rule.” Alice reread the sentence in the book in front of her and burst out laughing. You don’t write with typewriters, she thought, you write with pens and pencils. You type with typewriters, and if we were talking about creative writing, then nothing beat a pen or pencil on lined paper, double spaced with lots of room for crossing out and scribbling in additions, one-sided so you could add whole paragraphs on the blank facing pages. Crazy, she mused. Who thinks up these things anyway?

It was lunchtime, and Alice could feel the hunger pangs and hear the growls as her stomach insisted on being fed. She had such an appetite these days, and she never seemed to be full. It was insane. Maybe she had a tapeworm, like her great-aunt Mathilde had always joked about. But then, great-aunt Mathilde had been grossly obese. The tapeworm excuse was only so she could keep filling her maw with rich pastries and chocolate bonbons. Alice was thin as a rail and no matter what she ate or how much of it, she never seemed to gain weight.

The cat stalked into the room, looking for a scratch and a cuddle. Alice obligingly picked him up and started stroking the soft fur under his chin and behind his ears. The cat purred contendedly, shutting his eyes in pleasure. If only someone would pick me up and stroke me like that, Alice thought wistfully. It had been a very long time since she had had a boyfriend and she missed the intimacy and other pleasures that came with it.

She put down the cat, washed her hands in the kitchen sink and thought about food. That was one pleasure she could definitely afford and was readily available. Her roommate, Gwendolyn, had just come back from shopping; the fridge was full of fresh produce and the pantry had been restocked. Alice considered what was available and then settled on a sandwich: aged cheddar, dill pickles and sprouts between two slices of fresh pumpernickel spread with dijon mustard. Her mouth watered as she set it on the table with a glass of milk alongside. It seemed somehow sinful, that she should enjoy the simple act of eating so much. This was why she preferred to eat alone, so that she could concentrate on the tastes, aromas and textures without being distracted by conversation. That first bite, even of simple fare, was almost an orgasmic experience.

Just as she was raising her sandwich to her lips, getting ready to savour that first explosion of flavours in her mouth, a man, a stranger who seemed somehow familiar, entered the kitchen. Alice quickly put down her sandwich as though she had been caught in a forbidden act, feeling guilty for no reason. She felt ashamed and angry at the interruption at the same time.

“Oh, hi,” blurted out the stranger, “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch. I’m Stephen, Gwen’s brother. I’m visiting for the weekend. You must be Alice.”

Oh my god, Alice thought as she blushed, how could she have forgotten? Gwen had told her that her brother was coming for a visit; that was why the larder was so well stocked all of a sudden. No wonder he seemed somehow familiar. The family resemblance between brother and sister was quite strong and they had the same inflections of speech. Alice looked down at her sandwich, afraid to bite it now for fear of revealing something about herself to this young man to whom she suddenly felt an overwhelming attraction.

“Um,” she stammered, “have you eaten yet? I could make you a sandwich.”

“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble,” replied Stephen. “What have you got there?”

Alice described the contents of her sandwich all the while looking at Stephen’s mouth, imagining the bread spread with the dijon, the thinly sliced cheddar, the salty pickle and the hairy sprouts passing between those lips, being tasted on that tongue. She was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. She wanted to be that sandwich.

“Look,” Gwen’s brother said suddenly, ”you eat your lunch, I’ll make my own. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just got here and Gwen’s gone to the bank, so I thought I’d get some food while I was waiting.”

Alice sighed and nodded. Quickly she chewed and swallowed her sandwich while his back was turned to her, preparing his own. For some reason, she didn’t want this young man watching her eat, and that took away from the pleasure she was anticipating in enjoying her chef d’oeuvre. She swigged down the last of her milk just as he turned around with his finished creation.

“It was nice meeting you,” she mumbled as she pushed her chair away from the table. “See you around,” and fled. In the quiet and solitude of her room, behind a locked door, Alice hugged her pillow and wept.

Burnt Offerings

2010-07-15T17:15:00.001-04:00

When I stopped eating meat, I had no regrets, and still do not. But every so often, of a summer afternoon when my neighbours are barbecuing steaks or burgers, the smell of charred flesh reaches my nostrils and I inhale the sweet smell of the burnt offering as Abraham’s god must have done, savouring the aromas without ever actually tasting a morsel. I will not eat meat anymore, but I still salivate when I smell it cooking. It is a strange thing, this self denial, this knowledge that what I do is right, knowing that I am not tempted, that the taste of a well-done piece of beef will not seduce me; but the aroma is heavenly. I cannot resist the urge to inhale, to take in the particles that drift on the afternoon breeze from my neighbour’s yard to mine.

Good dog, Chester. Good dog.

2010-03-16T09:47:00.007-04:00

Robina doesn’t want to be doing this. She’d rather be doing anything else, she thinks, than this. But there’s no other way.

She pulls her station wagon into a parking spot next to the big white building and turns off the engine, staring at the sign posted on the wall: PARKING ONLY FOR ANIMAL CLINIC. After a moment she opens the door of the car and gets out, feeling a twinge of pain in her arthritic hip, as if in sympathy for the golden retriever lying in the back. She opens the wagon door and says as cheerfully as she can, “Come on, Chester! Out of the car!”

Chester wags his tail once and looks toward her voice with his cataract-clouded eyes. She reaches in to scratch his head and he licks her hand. I can’t do this, she thinks. Then Chester heaves himself up and, so slowly, so painfully, gets out of the car, every joint protesting the movement, and she knows she must. “Come on, Chester,” she encourages him. “That’s a good boy.”

Once the dog is outside, panting and trembling, Robina snaps the lead onto his collar and gently tugs him toward the main door of the big white building. She wonders if Chester knows. She wonders how she would feel if she were in his place, except she doesn’t know what a dog feels. Loyalty, even devotion. But love? Isn’t that a human construct?

But she is certain that Chester feels love of a canine sort. He loves her, at any rate. He liked Raymond before the divorce, before he started lying and coming home smelling of booze and cigarettes and sex. When Raymond changed for Robina, Chester stopped liking him so much. When he moved out, it was as though both dog and mistress breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Robina opens the door of the animal clinic and the retriever hesitates at the entrance. He whimpers quietly and Robina thinks, he knows. Then the dog steps over the threshold and Robina lets out the breath she doesn’t realize she’s holding. Has he made peace with his unavoidable fate? Is there any part of him that doesn’t hurt, she wonders?

They stop in front of the reception desk and Robina announces herself in low tones. “Take a seat,” says the young woman. “Dr. Yip won’t be long.”

Obediently, Robina sits down in one of the chrome and vinyl chairs, Chester dropping heavily at her feet. Tomorrow she will go to the day care where she works, make lunches: soup, sandwiches, jello desserts; and she will come home to a totally empty house. No husband, no kids, no dog.

The door to the vet’s office opens. “Good morning, Robina. I’m ready for Chester now.” They both rise and make their way into Dr. Yip’s examining room. “Can you get him up on the table?” asks the vet.

Robina helps Chester climb onto the table, noting the effort it takes for him to do so. He lies down again and licks her hand. She knows he suppressed a whimper. Why is it dogs try to hide their hurt from us? Do they think that the other pack members will sense their weakness and go for the jugular? Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing now, going for the jugular, except more gently, with kindness and compassion? Am I putting him out of his misery or lifting a burden from the shoulders of the pack?

Robina has a sudden memory of her father hooked up to life support, beseeching her with his eyes to turn it off, to let him die, and the double standard stares her in the face: how people are forced to endure a life they no longer wish to live, and pets are put down.

She holds back a sob as Dr. Yip readies the injection. He mistakes her emotion and says, “Don’t worry. Chester won’t feel a thing.”

Robina attempts a smile at the vet and replies, “It’s not Chester I’m worried about, doctor.”

Not a Love Story

2009-06-27T15:13:00.001-04:00

Sam was a farm boy, a country bumpkin, his whole world constrained by the fences that kept the cows in the pasture and the straight rows of corn he drove the combine through in the fall. He was 18 years old when this story takes place, tall, easy in his lean, well-muscled body and unselfconscious about his good looks. He liked to spend evenings with his family, and occasionally on weekends he’d go into town with the farm hands. But when he turned 18, in order to celebrate his coming-of-age properly, Jake and Bill agreed that he should go to a real bar and drink real liquor.

“Well, Sam,” said Jake, as they were finishing up after the final milking and the cows were back in the barn, “doin’ anything special tonight?”

“Hadn’t thought of anything,” answered Sam. “You and Bill doing anything?”

“As a matter of fact, seeing as how you’re 18 and all now, legal you know, we were wondering if we could stand you for a whiskey in town later.”

“Wow, that’s really nice of you,” responded Sam. “I should ask my Dad if he needs me for anything, first.”

“Sure thing, Sam. We’ll pick you up at 8:30,” and the plans were laid.

It was a bit of a drive into town. Bill came in his pickup and Sam slid in beside Jake. He had showered and shaved and was actually a bit nervous. He’d been drinking beer on the farm with his dad since he was 16, but going to a bar for the first time, equipped with valid I.D. he could whip out if asked, was a novel experience. His social skills were a little awkward, not really having participated in extra-curricular activities at school, his folks always needing him to come home to work. Still, he did like people, and looked forward to the outing.

Bill pulled up in front of The Black Mule and, after a bit of searching, found a place to park. It was a Friday night and a new band, Evidence of Beavers, was playing. Sam gawked like a tourist as he followed the older men to the bar. “Whiskey!” they ordered, and Sam found a shot glass in front of him. Jake and Bill both lifted theirs to their lips and downed the contents in a single gulp, so Sam did likewise. He was unprepared for the sharpness of the taste, the way it burned his throat on the way down, and the tears that sprang unbidden to his eyes as the warmth spread through his chest and into his stomach. The two farm hands were watching him, though, so he smiled and said, “Wow!”

“Another?” asked Jake. “Sure!” Sam replied enthusiastically.

The room was starting to get crowded and the volume rose as the band tuned up their instruments. People were shouting to be heard, which only raised the decibel level. Sam had lost count of how many whiskey shots he’d downed, and was feeling unsteady on his feet. He also needed to pee.

On his way back from the men’s room he saw her, the girl of his dreams, like an angel, her blonde hair a halo around her Barbie Doll face, backlit by the decorative lights hung behind her. She was alone, but it was evident that her solitude was only temporary, for the places at her table were occupied by half-filled beer glasses. Her companions must have gone out for a smoke.

Sam, emboldened by the whiskey, made his way to one of the vacant chairs next to her. “Hi,” he said, shyly, “I’m Sam.”

“Hi, Sam,” the girl answered, her low husky voice sounding amused, “I’m Sam, too, Samantha. Pleased to meet you.” She extended a slim hand with manicured nails for Sam to take. He had never felt such soft skin, being used to the work-roughened hands of his own family members.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, her golden curls cascading down her open neckline to the generous cleavage it revealed. He leaned forward and drank in her musky perfume, overcome. “Will you marry me?” he blurted out, before collapsing with his face on her shoulder.

Samantha laughed and pushed him off her. “Sorry, honey,” she said, “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Ten a.m. smoking break

2009-06-10T16:37:00.003-04:00

“There are so many people outside, it looks like a fire drill.”

Louie laughed, exhaling a burst of cigarette smoke, and then lapsed into a coughing fit. “Except the fire is out here,” he commented to Réal, waving the lit tip of his cigarette in his companion’s face.

Réal took another drag and squinted up at the sky, the sun now peeking over the tops of the downtown office buildings. “This is all right,” he muttered, “at least it’s warm out, and it’s not raining. But I hate having to come outside to smoke in the winter; and now they won’t even let us shelter in the doorways. Nine metres. Bah!” He spat on the sidewalk.

Louie looked at the cigarette in his hand speculatively. “They’ve put the price of smokes up again. It’s getting so I can barely afford them anymore. I ran a budget the other day to figure out what this habit is costing me.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Réal. “How much?”

“A lot,” answered Louie, “enough that I could take my wife and my girlfriend to the Bahamas for a week at Christmas. Not enough for separate vacations, sadly.”

It was Réal’s turn to chuckle. “That would be something, eh? Claudette and Marie in the same hotel room. I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

Louie was quiet for a moment, gazing off down the street at all the smokers indulging their addiction. Some were talking with companions, like him and Réal, others were smoking alone.

“Réal,” he said, “I’m going to quit,” and as if to underline this decision he dropped his butt on the sidewalk and ground it out under his heel.

“I’ll believe it when I see it, Louie,” grumbled Réal. “You’ve been smoking forever. We both have been. I don’t think you can do it.”

“No,” said Louie, determination in his voice, “it just came to me. I could give those gals so much more if I wasn’t always nickle and diming it so I’d have enough for a pack of smokes. I could get rid of this lousy cough and I wouldn’t feel like a second-class citizen having to go outside every hour to have a cigarette. You ever notice how the others look at you when you’re heading out for a smoke? Like you’ve got a disease. I’m sick of it.”

Réal drew deeply from what was left of his cigarette. “I couldn’t do it. For one thing, I’d miss getting all this fresh air.”

A Silver Coin

2009-03-14T17:30:00.001-04:00

I’m just a regular guy who likes coins. Sometimes when customers give me change for their purchases at the Quickee Mart, I pocket the really interesting pieces and replace them with coins of my own. In this way I’ve made quite a collection of special minted issues and foreign money that would otherwise just have continued into circulation. My boss has never made a fuss about it, as long as the books always balance at the end of the day.

One day a customer came in and bought a few sundry items: a toothbrush, cigarette lighter, bottle of cola, bag of chips and a city map. He wanted one that showed all the street names and was very insistent about that, which is what made me notice him in the first place. He was extremely tall, with a long, thin face, very pale skin, and silvery hair sticking out from a soft felt hat that was jammed low on his head as though to hide his face. His clothing was also non-descript. I got one glimpse of his eyes which seriously spooked me. They were a pale, pale gray, almost white, like some huskies’ with silver lashes and one eyebrow with a scar running through it.

He paid for his purchases with a bunch of crumpled up bills and a handful of coins. As I was sorting them for the till, I noticed one in particular that was definitely not legal tender, even though it was the right size and weight for a 25¢ piece. I examined it closely and decided it wasn’t from any country I’d ever heard of, and it seemed to be pure silver, when most coins these days are made of nickel. I dug a quarter out of my pocket, dropped it in the till and slipped the silver coin into my pants and didn’t think about it again until that night when I was undressing for bed.

Taking off my jeans, the bright bit of money fell out of the pocket and rolled onto the floor. I retrieved it and looked at it under the light with a magnifying glass. On one side was the profile of some regal-looking personage with very aristocratic features. On the other was a swirling design that reminded me a bit of Celtic knotwork and also of oriental arabesques. There was writing around the edges on both back and front which resembled some form of Indian script, but which I knew wasn’t. I tried to follow the design, feeling that if I could just unravel it I would understand where this coin had come from. But as my eyes followed the twisting path, it seemed to get longer and longer, never meeting up with the beginning. I felt as though my consciousness were separating from my body and I was falling into the waving, twisting weave.

I had a very strange dream that night. When I awoke all I was left with were impressions of horses and tall people in irridescent cloaks, of torches and silver eyes glittering in lamplight, and of a wildness that I could not describe. It left me feeling empty, longing for something that I had lost, but I didn’t know what. The enigmatic coin was still on my bedside table and I pocketed it as I dressed for work.

When I got off the bus just a block before the Quickee Mart as I did every day, I felt a cool breeze blowing towards me out of an alleyway that I had to cross to get to the store. The smell was not of rotting garbage and the urine left by unwashed bums that I was used to; this was fresh and cool, carrying scents of the country, running water and woodlands. I stopped to breathe it in more deeply and the coin in my pocket suddenly became icy cold against my leg.

Shimmering in the air in front of me at the entrance to the alley was the same design I had examined so closely on the silver disc, swirling arabesques of Celtic-like knotwork. It beckoned to me and I stepped toward it, threading myself along the line of moving light until I was actually following a path, a real path under my feet, and I was no longer on a city street between a bus stop and a convenience store, no longer at the mouth of a dark and dank alleyway. The glyph faded from the air in front of me and I found myself in an open area with waving grasses, a forest off in the distance and the merry tinkle of a clear brook down to my left.

I stopped and waited. How had I got here? I was sure the silver coin in my pocket had had some hand in it. Off in the distance I heard the sound of horses, the creak of leather and the call of a silver horn. In a short time several riders were approaching, as amazed by my appearance as I was by theirs.

The leader stopped his horse and the others followed suit. Dressed in greens and browns with bows and arrows on their backs, they looked like Robin Hood’s merry men. But they, too, resembled my visitor at the store the day before, long faces with aristocratic features, pale hair and silvery eyes. I suddenly remembered my dream.

“Greetings,” said the leader. “I am Blaerieth. What brings you here to the elven lands from the world of men?”

“I don’t know,” I stammered. “I was on my way to work, and then I was here.”

“Do you carry a talisman upon you, perhaps?” the tall man asked me.

Suddenly I realized what he was talking about and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the silver coin and showed it to him. He looked at it thoughfully but didn’t touch it.

“You possess the medallion of Aleithien,” he informed me. “It was long-thought to be lost. How came it into your possession?”

I told him about the customer who had given it to me in a handful of change, how I had thought it interesting and exchanged one of my own quarters for it so that the right amount would add up in the till. Blaerieth listened attentively to me all the time, his gaze never wavering from my face. When I was done, he turned to his companions and said something in a language I didn’t understand. There was suddenly a horse standing in front of me and I understood I was to mount it.

I had only ridden a horse during the summers I spent at summer camp as a child, and was rusty at best. It took a few tries before I was able to get comfortable in the saddle and Blaerieth made sure that I wasn’t going to fall off. Then we were off, galloping across the meadow, racing the wind itself. It was exhilarating, and once more I remembered my dream of the night before.

We arrived at a large manor house and dismounted, our horses led away by grooms, and we were ushered into a large hall where other tall, aristocratic, silvery-haired men and women sat at tables and ate and drank or played cards or dice. On a dais in a large upholstered chair sat a man who was obviously the master of the house. It was him we approached and Blaerieth spoke to him in that language that I still didn’t understand.

The master turned his silvery gaze upon me and I felt chilled to the bone. Then he spoke in oddly-accented English.

“Welcome to my home, young man. I am Lord Thurien. It is a long time since anyone has crossed over from the world of men to the elven lands.”

“Thank you,” I answered. Everyone was being very polite, but I felt ill at ease, perhaps because I was the alien here. I started playing over all the things I remembered from fairy tales about mortals who had trespassed on faerie soil and began to get worried. Would a few hours in this place translate into a generation in the other? Would I return to find all my friends either aged or dead from the passage of time? Lord Thurien must have noticed the concern in my expression.

“Come, you must be hungry and thirsty from your ride. Give our guests something to eat and drink,” he called to the serving folk. The other riders and I were led to a table where we were served platefuls of fruits and nuts and given goblets of water. It was the iciest, purest, most refreshing water I had ever tasted. It invigorated me thoroughly and I fell hungrily upon the food which satisfied in a different way.

When we were done, Lord Thurien himself came and led me down a passageway to a small room that resembled a den or study. There were a desk and bookcase, comfortable chairs and a table with a fire crackling in the grate. He bade me sit and then asked to see the coin. I readily produced it and handed it to him.

After examining it closely for some time he turned to me and spoke. “This medallion once belonged to one of our greatest heroes, Aleithien. He was killed at the battle of Glasroth and it was believed lost with him. But now you have it. Tell me how you came by it.”

I told him what I had told Blaerieth earlier. He asked me for details about the appearance of my customer, but I was not able to supply them very well, since all these elven folk seemed very similar to me. But I remembered the small scar running through one eyebrow that interrupted the growth of hair. When I gave this detail to my host, he gave an abrupt start.

“Galashien!” he cried out hoarsely. “That is who stole the medallion . We always suspected, and now we know. I’m positive he did not knowingly pass it on to you, but had it hidden in the change in his pocket so that no one else would find it, and then accidentally handed it to you for his purchases.” The old elf lapsed into silence again and appeared deep in thought.

“We must apprehend him,” he said. “He will surely notice the medallion is gone and will come looking for it. He will retrace his steps until he reaches your store and then will demand its return. You must not give it to him, for he handed it over in fair trade and you in return traded what you believed to be equal value, at least in the world of men, so that you might possess it. But he will return, of that I am certain.”

I was escorted back to the hall where the riders waited patiently and were instructed to return me to the place where I had been found so that I might continue on my way. With the coin back in my pocket, I was soon riding the same mare as before and left to dismount where the riders had first picked me up. I did not know how many hours had passed since I had arrived there, but I feared that something would be terribly amiss in my own world, the world of men.

Blaerieth made a gesture and the same Celtic-arabesque knotwork as before appeared in the air. My gaze was drawn into it again and I stepped forward, almost colliding with a passerby on the sidewalk as I stepped out of the mouth of the alleyway. Once more I smelled the musty odours of rotting garbage and hobo urine.

Quickly I hurried to the door of the Quickee Mart, but it was locked. I fumbled for my key and opened it and glanced at the large clock over the counter. I was early for work. No time had passed at all since I had walked into the elven lands. I was pleasantly surprised after all my worries.

The morning passed uneventfully with the usual customers. It wasn’t until after I returned from my lunch break that the same man from the day before arrived in his run-down clothing, his hat pulled low over his silver-gray eyes. He seemed rather nervous as he approached the counter where I was rearranging cartons of cigarettes.

“Excuse me, young man,” he addressed me in strangely-accented English. “I was in here yesterday and I believe I gave you something rather more valuable in change than twenty-five cents. I would like it back, please.”

“I’m sorry,” I answered. “The till has been emptied since last night and the contents deposited in the vault. I can’t open the vault; only the boss can do that.”

For a moment the stranger, whom I now knew to be Galashien, bristled and a strange glow enveloped him. Then it disappeared and he seemed to sniff the air and looked straight at me.

“I know it’s here,” he said quietly, “in this room. I can feel it. I would appreciate it if you would hand it over and no one will get hurt.”

“It’ll cost you,” I answered back. “Twenty-five cents. That’s what it’s worth to me.”

He started rummaging around in his pockets, pulling out bits of this and that: a bird feather, a smooth pebble, a streetcar ticket, what appeared to be some precious gems. These all fell to the floor and rolled off or scattered, but there were no quarters or coins of any kind among them. He was starting to get desperate. The anger was building up behind those eerie eyes and the broken eyebrow stood out prominently. He suddenly raised his empty hands towards me and pronounced words in that language I could not understand that I had heard just that morning. A golden glow formed around his hands and shot towards me, only to be absorbed by the talisman in my hip pocket. It became icy cold and I felt the chill right through the denim of my jeans.

It became clear to me what I had to do. I pulled the coin from its hiding place and held it in front of my face. Then I said, “Heads it’s mine, tails it’s yours,” and tossed it high in the air. He watched in troubled fascination as it tumbled over and over, falling, falling, and then suddenly passed through a glyph in the air, the same Celtic-arabesque knotwork that swallowed up the shining piece of silver. Just as quickly as it disappeared, though, another shining coin fell into my open palm and I quickly slapped it over onto my forearm.

“Tails!” I shouted. “It’s yours. Here, take it,” and I handed him the now very ordinary quarter and smiled. He backed away, not touching the proffered coin, until he suddenly turned tail and fled from the store. I knew then that the talisman of Aleithien was now safely in the elven lands and my erstwhile customer would finally come to justice for his theft.

I still find and collect unique coins, but none quite as interesting as that one.

Waiting for Edward

2007-12-28T12:26:00.000-05:00

     I opened the door and walked into the lobby, the sound of toilets flushing behind me, my neck still damp from the cloth I’d held to the back of it, and I wished, not for the first time, that I had never met Edward, that we had never begun this tawdry affair, or that he would divorce that harridan wife of his and make an honest woman of me already.

     The bright lights of the crystal-dripping chandeliers made me squint and I fished around in my handbag for my sunglasses, the darkened lenses affording me some small relief as I made my way to a couch between two enormous potted palms where I could sit and wait for Edward to arrive. If only I hadn’t woken up with that damned migraine, if only I weren’t so weak and malleable that I leapt at Edward’s every beck and call.

     What did I see in the man anyway? Could I not have found love elsewhere, real love, with someone who wouldn’t keep me dangling on his every whim, meeting him for lust-filled weekends at fancy hotels like this one all over the country? Someone who enjoyed my company for my wit and intelligence and not just as a sex toy?

     At least, that was what I was feeling then as I waited for Edward to show up, late as always, my head pounding in pain, my left big toe blistered from my new high-heeled pumps (Edward liked me in sexy footwear). That would all change, I knew, when he swept me up in his embrace and carried me off to the bridal or some comparable suite to frolic for two days non-stop in satin sheets, whirlpool bath, with champagne, caviar and chocolate profiteroles. On that particular afternoon, I was not interested in the pleasures ahead. I only wanted to die quietly in a corner, preferably a dark and silent corner, but of course, that wasn’t part of Edward’s plan.

     As I sat on the couch, pretending to be interested in a sculpture of a cowboy on horseback lassoing a steer, not a badly wrought objet d’art, but the subject matter certainly not to my taste, I was joined by two men deep in conversation about some kind of pathology. It occurred to me that they must be there for a medical conference. I tried not to appear interested in their conversation, but I couldn’t help eavesdropping, medicine something I had begun studying before dropping everything to be available for Edward’s lecherous whims. What a fool I was!

     The doctor next to me looked at his watch, said something about catching a train, and was gone, leaving a gap between his colleague and me. For the first time I got a good look at him: youthful middle age, full head of hair starting to gray at the temples, a neat beard, also gray, and horn-rimmed glasses framing the most amazingly blue eyes I’d ever seen. I was so astonished I took off my sunglasses to see them better, when he caught sight of my own bloodshot eyes.

     “Miss, are you all right?” he asked. For a moment I considered whether or not I should answer him. Imagine, a stranger like that taking an interest in me, the proverbial mouse, Edward’s mouse at that. But then, there was genuine concern in his voice and expression, he was a doctor, and he did have those gorgeous blue eyes.

     “As a matter of fact,” I began, “no, I’m not all right. I have a migraine that would fell a horse, I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast, my friend is late and I have an annoying blister on my left foot from these damned shoes!”

     Suddenly, he was next to me, looking in my eyes, touching my head, all very professional of course, but I realized at that moment that Edward was over, he was a thing of the past, of no moment whatsoever, that the whole point to our tawdry trysting had been to put me in this particular place at this particular time so that I could meet this man and say to him, “Are you busy right now? Could I interest you in tea at the coffee shop across the street?” and for him to answer, “Why, I’d like nothing better.”

     And so, arm in arm, I with dark sunglasses on against the bright afternoon sunlight and limping slightly, we left the hotel lobby where Edward no doubt eventually arrived, only to find me gone, no one to slide around with on the satin sheets or feed oysters to, while I discovered that the adage “the good ones are all taken” was about to become true.

The Sybil of Cumae

2007-10-17T11:28:00.002-04:00

The story went something like this:

        During the seven years when the Theban prophet Teiresias had been a woman (he had encountered two snakes copulating on the path and had struck the female, immediately transforming into a woman; seven years later he came across the same snakes on the same path engaged in the same activity and struck the male, thus reverting to his previous state) he was said to have had a daughter, Daphne, radiant as the day. It is no surprise that she caught the attention of a god, Apollo no less, who granted her the gift of prophecy and anything else she asked for. She grabbed up a handful of sand and demanded to live as many years as there were grains of sand in her grasp, but neglected to ask for eternal youth. When she spurned Apollo’s love, he refused to grant the omitted boon, and she was fated to grow old. She became the Sybil of Cumae, in Italy, and continued to age, withering away until she was hung upside down in a bottle, saying only that she wished to die.

        Ruth folded up the tourist brochure and looked around the site. There wasn’t much left of Apollo’s temple at Cumae, near Naples, but she could appreciate the antiquity of the place. Over the tumbled stones and toppled columns lay an aura of great age. She imagined that if she were quiet enough, and patient enough, the stones would talk to her, but no matter how long she stood with eyes shut, hands on the rough rock, no voices spoke. The gods were dead, she decided, dead and gone. It didn’t just happen to gods; but people too, once dead and forgotten, ceased to exist as memories of them faded. Only very famous ones who had left great legacies, like Mozart and Michelangelo, were remembered, but more for the art they created. Their actual lives as people were embellished until one could no longer separate the truth from the fiction.

        It must be the same for dead gods, thought Ruth. In their heyday, the Greek pantheon were all powerful. Now they are relegated to myth and legend. Someday the same fate will befall our modern religions, no matter how fervently people believe in them right now. She wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about this revelation. It would be nice if some things lasted forever, but sadly, even the stones of this once imposing temple were being corroded by acid rain.

        As Ruth moved along the path following the tourist in front of her, she thought she heard a moaning sound coming from among the fallen rubble. It was very faint, easily mistaken for the sighing of the wind, or two branches rubbing together. She stopped and focused all her attention in the direction from which it came, shutting her eyes and closing out all other distractions. There was definitely a sound coming from the ruins. She took a step toward it and then stopped.

        What was she doing? This was an archeological site. She couldn’t start scrabbling around in the dirt, she wasn’t a qualified archeologist. But the sound was pulling at her now, filling her with despair, as though someone needed very badly to be rescued. Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, she stepped off the path and into the ruined temple. The sound was stronger here, and sounded less like the wind and more like a voice, a real voice, moaning in pain, terrible pain. Ruth took another step toward it and this time thought she could hear words, but she couldn’t understand them.

        There, under a fallen column, tucked in behind a chunk of rubble, was a bottle, bound in leather, ancient, looking for all the world like a piece of garbage. Carefully Ruth reached under the stone and grasped the neck, pulling carefully lest she break it. She was very nervous, afraid that a site guard would catch her, that she would be made to give up her find, be thrown in jail. She had heard stories about people who robbed archeological sites of their antiquities. But, when she glanced up, no one was paying her any attention. There seemed to be a gauzy curtain dividing her from the path where the other visitors were slowly wending their way, as though she had stepped across a threshold into a different realm and was invisible to everyone else.

        She picked up the bottle and brought it close to her face, examining the leather wrappings. Once it had been a harness of sorts with a loop, long worn through. It had hung from a hook. The bottle itself was earthenware, red with black figures etched on it. At home she had a book describing the different styles of Greek pottery, she could consult it later. For now, the sound had ceased. Making sure no one was watching, Ruth dropped her find into her knapsack, and slung it back on her shoulders, making her way as nonchalantly as possible back to the line of tourists working their way through the site.

        Later, in her hotel room, Ruth removed the stolen artifact from her backpack. She didn’t quite know what to do about it, thinking that maybe she could enjoy it for a few days, and then turn it over to the proper authorities before it was time to take her plane back to London. Carefully, she pulled it out and lay it on the bed. It was quiet. She hadn’t heard the moaning since she picked it up. It was a mystery to her what had made the sound in the first place. She attempted to remove the leather, but age had made it brittle and it would not slip over the rounded shoulders of the bottle. The opening was inside the harness, and it appeared that it had been hung upside down from the hook. How odd, thought Ruth.

        Finally, unable to contain her curiosity, she retrieved her pocket knife from her bag and cut through the hard substance, which finally separated under the ministrations of the sharp blade. The leather fell away from the pottery and revealed the painting on it, a beautiful woman sitting on an ornate chair, a look of utter disdain on her face as a supplicant knelt at her feet. Behind her, with an expression of combined disappointment and longing, was Apollo. She recognized the Greek letters for his name and looked for others, finally finding them: delta, alpha, phi, nu, eta. “Daphne,” she whispered aloud, letting her held breath out in a rush, “the Sybil of Cumae.”

        Ruth tilted the bottle to see the name better, and something poured out of the opening, dust, ash, sand, she could not tell, onto the hotel bedspread. She didn’t want to touch it, thinking that it could very well be the remains of the oldest Sybil ever, and yet found herself reaching nonetheless towards the small pile in front of her. As she gathered the dust into her hand, she heard a voice in her mind like the wind in lonely places, “βουλομαι αποθνησκειν.” * Then it was gone.

       As she watched, the bottle cracked and broke into tiny pieces, the leather casing crumbled into dust. All that remained was a pile of dirt on the bedspread. Oh dear, thought Ruth, how will I ever explain this to the maid?

Sibyl of Cumae, Andrea del Castagno, 1450, Florence , Sant’ Apollonia Gallery.

* “I want to die.”

Crystal Clear

2007-09-28T08:59:00.000-04:00

     If I were transparent, sunlight would shine right through me. I would cast strange shadows, like jellyfish floating in the sparkling sea, tendrils dragging the sand, their mauve brains surrounded by water-clear gel. Light passing through me would bend and refract, leaving rainbows in my wake. I could start fires just by clenching my fist and focusing the sun’s rays on a piece of driftwood.

     If I were clear as glass, I could stand perfectly still and become invisible, or I could play tricks on unsuspecting pedestrians, tripping them with a strategically placed foot, or sidling up behind them and whispering lewd nothings in their ears. I could sneak into movie theatres and concert halls, standing in the shadows and avoiding the rainbow-making light.

     There is no transparency here. We are opaque and obscured by our inhibitions and our fears. We do not reveal any more than we have to, lest we become vulnerable to attacks on our delicate soft souls. The jellyfish washed up on shore and left by the ebbing tide dies in the sunshine, exposed to the drying air and the sand shovels of holidaying children.

     We cannot risk leaving our own mauve brains to the elements, so we build shells around them, construct castle walls with ramparts and crenellated towers from which to launch our counterattacks. Then we feel safe, solid, impervious to light and rainbows.

Sounds of Summer

2007-06-11T10:41:00.000-04:00

       On a hot summer’s night when you leave the windows open hoping for a breeze to cool off the still air, when you twist and toss, throwing sheets off you, flipping your pillow for the fresh side, you hear conversations outside—perhaps neighbours are sitting on their front steps, chatting in the dark, or a couple is taking a midnight stroll, talking as they walk—and you are drawn to the sounds, maybe catching a word here and there, maybe a whole sentence or two. But it’s a distraction, a further distraction from the sleep that is held at bay by the heat and your sweat and the headache starting just between your eyes.

       You think about things, silly things, like the movie you saw earlier that evening, the cinema blessedly air-conditioned, or the comics in the paper that morning, or the plight of a character in the book you’re reading. You play over conversations in your mind, repeat the words of popular songs, recite poetry memorized in junior high school, speeches from Shakespeare learned for Mr. Gildner’s grade 10 English class, and you still can’t sleep.

       Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a real breeze comes through your open bedroom window and cools the sweat on your overheated skin. The neighbors have retired, the strollers long gone; it is quiet and you actually begin to feel chillled. So you pull the sheet up from where it lies bunched at your feet, smooth it out and fold down the edge, cover yourself and turn your pillow one last time before finally drifting off to sleep, so long denied, so welcome now.

Don’t Sit Under the Chestnut Tree...

2007-05-31T20:41:00.000-04:00

There was nothing for it, Marshall was going off to war and Deanna had made up her mind weeks ago that she wasn’t going to cry, that she would be strong, that she wouldn’t make a fuss. After all, if Marshall loved his country more than he loved her, she should at least be glad that he wasn’t running to the arms of another woman, although sometimes she wondered if this whole going-off-to-war thing weren’t in some way the same thing.

     Things hadn’t been great the past while. As a matter of fact, Deanna had been considering ending the relationship right up until Marshall got the letter telling him he was drafted. She realized that giving him back his ring and telling him she had changed her mind would not be a good idea just then. After all, he was going to be fighting for her freedom as well as everyone else’s and she owed it to him to give him something to hope for. Maybe her feelings would change with him gone. You know, they did say that distance made the heart grow fonder, although she had always subscribed more to the saying: Out of sight, out of mind.

     “Give me a kiss, Deanna,” said Marshall. The bus station was crowded and Deanna was feeling a bit shy about a public display of affection, but there were lots of young men in uniform and they were all hugging and kissing their wives and girlfriends, so she figured it was all right if she let Marshall kiss her this time. She stood up on her tiptoes, lips pursed, head tilted backwards, and he bent down and gently kissed her mouth.

     Suddenly Deanna felt lightheaded, maybe because of the pose she was in, her neck stretched to its full length like that, and she started to faint, everything going black. She didn’t feel the hard bus station floor as she landed on it, nor the bench as her head made contact with a loud crack. In fact, she didn’t regain consciousness at all until after Marshall and all the other soldiers were already gone, their bus having arrived and left while she lay inert, the general excitement ensuring that she didn’t receive medical care until it was already too late and she awoke with partial amnesia, the events of the past year totally erased from her memory.

A spring drabble

2007-05-25T19:27:00.000-04:00

Winter depleted my soul with its north-west winds, howling tempests bringing snow and sleet; it drained me of colour and desire. I became a shadow, a recluse, a haunting, seeking warmth by wood stoves, cocooning in quilts, never venturing abroad, held back by my need to hibernate away the months of bone-chilling cold. But then, subtly and softly, the sun broke through gray clouds, the monochromatic world blushed into brilliance once more: blue skies, green grass, purple crocuses; bees buzzed and birds sang. I emerged from my den and inhaled the smells of life around me and thought, “Welcome, Spring!”

Call me the wind...

2007-05-25T19:25:00.000-04:00

“Call me the wind, I will blow with the fury of a hurricane; call me the sea, I will lap the shore with gentle tongues; call me the earth, I will shield the seeds in my womb,” intoned the priestess as she raised her arms over the fields where the people had just finished planting grain for next season’s harvest. She sprinkled water from the sacred spring over the soil, a miniature rainfall, the drops glistening in the sunlight, casting fleeting rainbows as they fell from the ornate vessel she waved about.

Creta had been working with the other children just as hard as any of the grownups, breaking up hard clumps of soil, poking holes with the digging sticks, burying the seeds saved from last year. She was hot and tired and dirty and thirsty, and she watched the water fall from the priestess’ hands and licked her dry lips. She thought about going for a swim in the river and slaking her thirst under the waterfall that cascaded over the lip of the escarpment into the pool where she and the others splashed and dove and barely listened as the priestess concluded the ceremony that would guarantee a bounteous harvest in two months’ time. For Creta, two months seemed like an eternity.

Later she found herself at the pool under the waterfall, splashing and diving, dunking her friends, laughing and cavorting, letting the rushing river pound her head and shoulders as it leapt over the rocks above, massaging the soreness from the muscles she had strained while cultivating earlier that day. There was to be a feast that evening, and the children had been admonished to be clean for it.

As Creta pulled herself out of the pool and reached for something to towel herself off, her friend Sora stopped in front of her and said, “Creta, look!” She pointed at Creta’s thigh, and she looked down, seeing a rivulet of bright red snaking its way down to her knee from her crotch. “Oh Goddess, no!” Creta cried, staring at the blood. “It can’t be, not now!” She burst into tears, and Sora backed away, for all the children knew what the onset of menses meant.

Creta gathered up her clothing, wrapped herself in a robe and picked her way down the trail back to the collection of houses, careful not to get dirty again. Her head was swimming with what had just happened. This was so unfair. She wasn’t ready to become a grownup yet. In her own mind she was still a little girl, afraid of thunder storms, sleeping curled up with her kitten, playing with the other children. Now the matchmaker would start looking for a husband for her. A husband! She was barely 13 years old! What did she want with a man? She wasn’t ready for a husband, a home to look after, children of her own. She was still a child herself.

There was no way she could keep what was happening to her a secret. All the others at the waterfall had seen it. Her mother would know immediately that something was wrong. What was she going to do?

She had to stop walking at that point, feeling an ache in her lower back that had nothing to do with all the bending over and planting she had done earlier that day. Her lower abdomen was tight was pain and she wanted to cry. This was so incredibly unfair!

Eventually Creta came to her own house. Her mother was busy cooking over the fire pit outside the door, humming to herself, stirring a pot, tasting carefully, and throwing in pinches of this seasoning and handfuls of that. She watched her daughter approach and noted the tear-streaked face, the uncombed hair, and then her eyes caught the tell tale flash of red, and she understood.

“Oh, Creta darling,” she crooned, and dropping her spoon, opened her arms and gave her daughter a hug. “It’s started, hasn’t it?” she asked, knowing the answer already. Creta wept afresh into her mother’s shoulder. “I don’t want to grow up,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to!” “Shhh,” soothed her mother. “You don’t have to grow up just yet. These things take time.”

At the feast that night, the other children did not talk to Creta. Her friend Sora would not meet her eye, and none of them would sit with her. She had never felt so alone. Instead, she sat next to her mother, afraid that everyone knew, that just by looking at her they could tell that she had passed that threshold that separated the girls from the women. But once the food was served, the blessings spoken and the eating begun, she started to feel better. She even joined in the dancing afterwards, as the musicians played their flutes and drums under the starry sky.

Already she was starting to feel different, as though this wasn’t the end of the world. Just as the soil had received seeds today and would give up a harvest at the end of the season, she too would become a bringer of life. It wouldn’t be tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe even the next year, but eventually she too would be like the earth, and shield seeds in her womb.

Sometimes I worry…

2007-05-03T14:17:00.000-04:00

There is a place I like to be on windy days, a rocky pinnacle on a spit of land that juts out into the ocean, a lonely place where only gulls and curlews visit, the rocks spattered with their droppings, feathers and bits of fish skeletons clinging to the clumps of bushes that withstand the buffeting of Atlantic storms.

It’s a two-hour hike just to get there, so I don’t wait for windy days, the maritime weather being so changeable that it’s rarely the way it started out when I reach my goal. It’s a hard climb, too, so I don’t often meet other hikers on the trail, only the seasoned backpackers who regularly seek out near-vertical scrambles up the glacially-striated rocks. The spit is off the main trail anyway, a time waster for anyone anxious to get to the next exit to civilization.

That’s one of the reasons I like it so much: I’m never bothered there. I can go with my lunch in a knapsack, a sketchbook, writing pad, and spend hours in blessed solitude, communing with nature. And what glorious nature it is! Even when the sea is calm, the surf still crashes against the jagged rocks, upjutting blades that millennia of waves have still not worn smooth.

On stormy days the water is wild, the wind whips up foam and froth, the spray is spread even as far as the remote pinnacle where I perch, protected only by rain gear and a sou’wester tied under my chin. The gulls cry and wheel and swoop and the place is so desolate and god forsaken, I feel as though I’m the only human being in the world and nature is unaware that I am observing its bad behaviour.

When I am seated there on the rock, witness to the waves’ wanton wildness, I am free to draw, to write, or to think. The sketchbook is just an excuse if anyone asks why I go out there, and on occasion I actually do produce a drawing or two, but it’s really just a prop, a superfluous item without which my pack would probably be lighter. I spend most of my time there staring out to sea, watching the changing cloud formations, observing the gulls as they hunt for food to feed their nestlings. I like the way the water is never the same at any given moment, how it is constantly in motion. I never tire of watching the spray dash off the rocks below.

But sometimes I just think, totally unaware of my surroundings as they recede into the background and I get lost in the maze of my own mind. I think about anything: the events of the week, movies I’ve seen, books I’ve read. Sometimes I worry about decisions I’ve made and how they will affect the future. Sometimes I make up stories, tales of fancy that may or may not actually end up in that notebook I carry. Other times I paint large canvases in my mind that have nothing to do with the scene before me.

My favourite days are the ones where I return home from my trek tired, hungry, dirty, and with absolutely nothing material to show for it. It is my escape into a different world where time slows down or stops, where nothing I do can affect anyone else, where the call of the curlew and the whistling of wind are the only meaningful language.

The winter months when I cannot hike to my peninsula are painful for this reason, the summer that much sweeter therefor. If I could, I would turn my fur to feathers and become a gull, making my home by the ocean, nesting on the rocky crags, at one with the wind and the waves, letting my plaintive cry ride above the howling of the storm; and there, overlooking the ocean with my yellow eye, I wouldn’t worry any more.

The Siren Call

2007-01-12T10:37:00.000-05:00

With the passage of time, memory tends to lose depth and time flattens into a two-dimensional picture, the moment itself caught in a still photograph. A siren wails in the distance and I am immediately transported back to my childhood, before the sound calls up a different image, that of my own son, wanting so much to achieve independence, yet so easily discouraged when his attempts to fly ended in disappointment.

        When he was perhaps 10, he and his sister and I planned a bike trip into town to buy lunch at Subway, a treat he anticipated with relish. I had an ulterior motive, to get him to ride his bicycle, a vehicle that languished in the garage for the most part. We rode single file down the hill beside the cemetery, my son sandwiched between my daughter and me, she at the fore, I the watchful eye abaft, duly instructed to keep on or inside the white line that bordered the steep incline. There were places in the road where the pavement had buckled and cracked with winter freeze and spring thaw, and my son, so intent on following my directions and not experienced enough in the art of two wheels, did not swerve to avoid the uneven surfaces, but instead rode right over them, his front wheel suddenly twisting out of his control, and he was flung from his bike down the grassy verge into the graveyard. Instead of continuing on for the promised lunch, he walked his two-wheeler home, refusing even to ride it on the flatter return trip. It was years before he mounted a bicycle again.

        The memory invoked by the siren came from around the same time. There were no cookies in the house, not that that was anything unusual, but on this occasion my son wanted cookies and, furthermore, he was determined to make them himself. I went through cookbooks with him until we found a recipe that satisfied and for which all the ingredients were at hand. It meant grinding oatmeal in the blender to create oat flour, but that added to the fun. Then, remembering my own mother telling me of my older brother’s experiments in the kitchen, I left, made myself scarce, secure in the knowledge that my daughter could supervise her younger brother.

        When I returned, the aroma of fresh baking filled the house just as my son was taking the golden-brown biscuit laden sheet from the oven in order to transfer his creations onto wire racks. The first indication that things were not as they should be surfaced when the cookies did not remain whole, but disintegrated in yielding to the spatula, crumbling into smaller pieces. They had no integrity, and those crumbs tasted terrible. I knew immediately what had gone wrong, but needed my son’s confirmation.

        Opening the cookbook to the recipe in question, I queried him on every ingredient. He was adamant that he had made no errors. I got to the leavening agent, the recipe called for baking powder, and asked him, “What did you use?”

        “I used baking powder!” he cried.

        “No,” I insisted, “go to the pantry and show me what you used.”

        He reluctantly obliged, returning with the cardboard box of baking soda.

        “Aha!” I exclaimed. “This is not baking powder. It’s baking soda.”

        “What’s the difference?” my son wanted to know.

        “Baking soda is a base which needs to combine with an acid in order to raise or leaven baked goods. Baking powder has already both the acid and base combined in dry form and merely needs the addition of moisture to produce the desired chemical reaction. Here, I’ll show you.”

        I then put into two small bowls some water and a spoonful respectively of baking soda and baking powder. Into the former I added a splash of vinegar.

        “Watch,” I instructed. The chemical pyrotechnics did little to allay his disappointment, his sense of failure. I was reminded of another baking disaster, one that happened to me.

        When I wasn’t much older than he was, my mother had been sick in bed with the flu. It was her birthday and I was determined to do something to make her happy. Without telling her my plans, I decided to bake a cake from scratch. I really ought to have known better: so many of my attempts at domesticity had ended in disaster. Probably the most memorable was the time the automatic washing machine chose to give up the ghost the first time I ever did a load of laundry by myself.

        Growing up, I had very few responsibilities apart from doing well in school and keeping my room passably neat. My mother generally took care of everything else: the laundry, the cooking, the shopping. We had a cleaning lady for the housework, since my mother also worked all day, but we kids were not expected to contribute much. On this other occasion, though, my mother was also sick in bed with the flu and asked me to wash a load of laundry, giving me explicit instructions regarding the operation of the machine. I did everything exactly as I was told; but when I came downstairs during the spin cycle, in anticipation of putting the clean, damp clothes in the dryer, I was greeted with a flood. The basement floor was covered with water gushing out from the bottom of the machine, headed for the drain. I came upstairs and asked my mother, “Is the washing machine supposed to be spilling water out all over the floor?” The incident became known thereafter as “the time I broke the washing machine,” and precipitated the purchase of a new appliance, the old one pronounced irreparable.

        My mother also being bedridden on this other occasion actually aided my plan, so that I wouldn’t have the same problem that my cousin did when she attempted a similar surprise. She was from Ottawa but, for some reason that was never made clear to me, came to Toronto to complete her last year of high school and lived in our basement for the duration. She was older by several years, technically my second cousin (her mother and mine were first cousins), and I looked up to her a great deal. She wore makeup and sexy clothes, and everything she did was cool.

        Once more it was my mother’s birthday and, deciding to do something nice for her hostess, my cousin had baked a cake and decorated it imaginatively, adding the finishing touches just as I was getting home from school. It was to be a surprise, but my mother arrived from work earlier than expected and my cousin, anxious to hide her handiwork and mistaking the loud clumping of my shoes for my mother’s heavier footfall, headed in the wrong direction with the cake, only to practically collide with the birthday girl herself as she was hanging up her coat in the vestibule closet. To her credit, my mother played blind and dumb, pretending ignorance and acting suitably surprised when presented with the cake, aglow with candles, for dessert. She told me years later that she had not been fooled, but chose rather to save my cousin’s feelings which had been so well intentioned.

        I selected the recipe for my birthday offering with care, mixing my ingredients with love, to make a beautiful yellow cake. I made only one substitution, which proved to be my ultimate undoing. All her middle age my mother struggled with her weight. She first started gaining when she went back to work fulltime to a desk job when I was in grade one. Up till then, she ate immense quantities and remained thin. I still have a chain belt of hers which she gave me when the ends no longer met around her thickening waist. After she had her radical hysterectomy, the fat was attracted to her middle like iron filings to a magnet. She followed one diet after another, joined Weight Watchers and popped pills, with no lasting results.

        Obsessed with her appearance, she would constantly compare herself to strange women on the street, asking me, “Am I as fat as she is?” It wasn’t until she was in her late 70’s, early 80’s that the weight started melting off. The stress of caring for my father during his final years caused her own subsequent shrinkage. She is now shorter and lighter than I am, an abrupt turning of the tables.

        So, aware of my mother’s constant battle of the bulge and determined not to undermine it, I decided to use a product I found in the kitchen cupboard instead of the sugar called for in the recipe. It was called Sugar Twin and the directions on the box reassured me that it could be used safely for all my sweetening needs. Not realizing that I was tampering with the chemical makeup of the cake (I already knew about the difference between baking powder and baking soda), I switched one for the other, using a full cup of Sugar Twin in place of the higher calorie alternative.

        I was feeling pretty happy, anticipating my mother’s surprised face and eager consumption of the lo-cal treat. While the cake was baking, I washed my mixing bowls and utensils and got rid of the evidence of my arcane activity. As with my son’s disastrous experience, my moment of truth arrived as I removed the cake from the oven. A beautiful golden colour, there was still something terribly wrong. The top, instead of being convex, was sunken looking. When I flipped it out of the pan onto the wire rack to cool and peeled the wax paper off its bottom, it seemed to squish instead of land with the expected bounce. Tentatively I nibbled a few crumbs. They were terrible! I wanted to cry.

        Not knowing what else to do, I fled to my mother’s bedroom and confessed the whole story to her, how I’d wanted to make a cake for her birthday, how I’d wanted it to be a surprise, how I’d respected her diet and used a sugar substitute, how it hadn’t risen properly and tasted terrible, and how I’d just wasted flour and eggs and vanilla and baking powder, not to mention the cup of Sugar Twin. The tears flowed unchecked.

        My mother, to her credit, did not laugh at me, did not call me an idiot, nor did she immediately point out my error, that I should have substituted only part of the sugar with the synthetic Sugar Twin. Instead she comforted me, told me to put the disastrous birthday cake in the compost before my father found it, for he would surely salvage and eat it, and use instead one of the mixes she kept in the cupboard for emergencies.

        “But what about all those eggs,” I cried, “and the flour!”

        “Don’t worry about it,” she reassured me. “We can afford more eggs and flour.” And so I ended up baking a Duncan Hines cake for the birthday celebrations instead. But as I sat on her bed, being inconsolably sorry for myself and wallowing in my feelings of self pity, my mother sick with the flu and the cake that was meant to demonstrate my love for her collapsing on a wire rack in the kitchen, we heard an ambulance siren several streets over. After it passed out of hearing range, my mother turned to me and said, “No matter how bad you think you have it, someone else has worse trouble.”

        Thirty or so years later I sat at the kitchen table with my own son, heartbroken and despondent, discouraged over the waste of eggs, butter, oat flour so painstakingly ground in the blender, and at the ultimate lack of cookies in the house, and I remembered my own, similar experience. So I said to him, “I’m going to tell you a story about something that happened to me.”

        My son is a young man now. He’s gone on to bake many more batches of cookies successfully and never made the same mistake again. But now when I hear a siren in the distance, I recall two stories of overwhelming defeat, mine and his, and I still think to myself that no matter how huge and insurmountable my problems seem, there is always someone out there who is worse off.

A story composed exclusively from great last lines.

2007-01-05T15:40:00.000-05:00

The chicken coop stood empty now, door swinging, finally rid of those stealthy little foxes. Feathers still drifted lightly on the breeze, but the remaining hens were safe in cages on Farmer Bob’s truck, while the foxes were now just pelts hanging to dry in the barn.

Harold sat on the front porch, stroked the soft brown feathers of the hen nestled in his lap and rocked peacefully back and forth. Sylvia there was his favourite layer, and there was no way he would have let her fall prey to those nuisance foxes. On the other hand, those other birds that came and stole the grain, or left their droppings in the feed troughs, them he didn’t mind driving off, and liked to see them rise in a cloud when he clanged the dinner bell. Pesky crows and ravens. If you didn’t watch out, they would even attack the chicks who strayed too far from the main group.

The thought of straying made Harold think of his son Daniel, gone now these three years. Farming wasn’t the life for him, he had declared. He wanted to make something of himself, and had packed up grampa’s old leather satchel and walked off into the sunset. Well, he’d gone west in any case. Occasionally they got a card from him from sunny California. He was vague about what he was doing to support himself, but at least he hadn’t asked for money yet.

Harold turned as the screen door swung open behind him to see Eudora, his wife of 35 years, come out with the lunch tray. She had lovingly prepared his favourite repast: lemonade, a peeled orange, saltines with a thick slice of Velveeta cheese, and the biggest peanut butter and jam sandwich you ever saw, on Eudora’s delicious homemade whole wheat bread.

Harold carefully put Sylvia in her cage and went into the house to wash his hands. His wife remained on the porch, gazing at the chicken-filled cages on Farmer Bob’s truck. What a harrowing experience those poor birds had been through. Sylvia clucked softly to herself in her cage on the porch. From the rest of the feathered fowls came only a murmer.

“Well,” Eudora thought to herself, “there will still be lots of eggs for those orange cows Daniel used to love.” She smiled.

Death and the Maiden

2006-12-31T14:44:00.000-05:00

“There is too much confusion in my world,” thought Lila, as she wandered through her garden, checking which tomatoes were at the point of green perfection: large, firm and if left till tomorrow would start turning red. These she plucked from the tenacious vine, allowing others to continue with the ripening process. Her basket was heavy and she set it down on the step before sitting down beside it, her elbows resting on her knees, her weather-worn face in her hands.

As soon as she’d caught her breath, she figured she’d pick some summer melbas and get to work on an ovenful of pies. They said the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and Lord knows Elmer sure doted on her green tomato and apple pies, but why did it have to take so darn long? She had been waiting for that man to pop the question for 45 years already. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this up. If only she could somehow get him into that church, but he’d kicked over the traces of his Baptist past years ago and hadn’t set foot inside a house of worship since. Well, a civil ceremony would suit her fine, just as long as she had a ring on her finger and Elmer in her bed.

Lila sighed, feeling the ache in her arm from carrying the basket, the stiffness in her joints from the arthritis. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at them. Once she had played piano with those fingers, Elmer had complimented her on their deftness and cleverness with a needle. Now she couldn’t see to thread that needle and her fingers were gnarled, the nails ridged, and the backs covered with age spots.

“I’m not a young woman anymore,” she thought to herself. “Somehow, somewhere along the way, I got old. I’ve no husband, no children; I spent all my time waiting for Elmer, and now I’m an old woman.” She closed her eyes for a moment and let her thoughts drift, unaware as the sun moved across the sky and the wind changed direction.

Lila woke up suddenly as she was pelted with large, cold raindrops. “Oh dear, I must have fallen asleep!” she exclaimed to herself, quickly picked up the basket of green tomatoes and went through the screen door of the porch, taking off her muddy shoes and hanging her hat on a peg. The large clock in the hall said it was already late afternoon, and Elmer would be over for supper. She’d better get a roast cooking and get to work on those pies. There were still enough apples in the pantry that she didn’t need to pick more, and Elmer would likely bring her a basketful anyway.

As quickly as she could, Lila got the roast going in the oven in a large pan surrounded by new potatoes and chunks of freshly picked carrots. She just hoped there was enough time to cook it and the pies. Elmer hated to wait for his supper. Then Lila started peeling apples and slicing them, remembering that she didn’t have pie crusts made. Oh bother, that would take up more precious time! She put the sliced apples in a bowl, sprinkled lemon juice on them to keep them from browning, and got to work with flour, lard, and her rolling pin.

Suddenly she felt very weary and needed to sit down. “Just for a moment,” she thought. “The pies won’t take much more work.” She collapsed on one of the kichen chairs and put her head back.

At six o’clock on the dot Elmer drove his truck up Lila’s driveway, wearing his fedora at a jaunty angle. In his arms was a basket of apples from his endangered variety trees. He clumped up the porch steps in his favourite boots, the ones he kept so well-oiled and polished, and shouldered his way through the screen door.

“Lila,” he called “I brought you some more apples.” He set the basket down on the hall table, slightly surprised that there was no response from the mistress of the house. He smelled a roast burning and entered the kitchen where he found Lila quite cold in her chair, resigned to her fate to die a spinster and a virgin, and never to make another green tomato and apple pie for her indecisive suitor.

Against the Coming of Winter

2006-12-06T17:19:00.000-05:00

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
Geese and ducks fly overhead, honking falling from their bills;
Wrap the warmer woolens now to protect you from night’s chills
Against the coming of winter.

The flames of fall’s fleet foliage are quenched,
The iron fist of first black frost has clenched;
The glorious sheet of the autumn sky has been frenched
Against the coming of winter.

Black earth lies dormant under fallen leaves.
Ceres slips into sorrow as she mournfully grieves
Her daughter’s vernal sojourn with seducers and with thieves
Against the coming of winter.

And what rôle do I act in this seasonal play
As I watch the warm blue sky replaced with frozen gray
And anticipate the darkness of the shortened day
Against the fall of winter?

I shall be the seeds of the pomegranate red
That kept poor Persephone in Hades’ marriage bed
While the world above rolled over and played dead
Against the coming of winter.

Wedding Vows

2006-11-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the man you married,
that young man who vowed to be at your side
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health?
Do you remember that glow, that radiance,
the golden summer of our youth?

I sit by you now and press your hand,
limp and unresponsive,
the hand that trembled
when I slipped a golden ring upon it,
that stroked my cheek,
that stirred the soup,
that steered the wheel of the car
that did not quite kill you.

I gaze into your face, the same visage of loveliness,
resting among its tangled curls
on the embroidered pillows of our marriage bed:
flushed cheeks, lips parted,
forehead dewy, your eyes gently closed;
and I can almost imagine that you merely sleep,
that you will awaken and gaze upon me
with those dove-gray eyes,
and I will know that you love me,
that you always will,
and that you know that there is no limit
to the depth of my love for you.

Alas.

I cannot sit by your bed tonight holding your hand
for you are no longer the girl I married.
You are an emptied vessel,
devoid of memory, of joy, of tears.
I have decided our fate
--until death do us part--
for part us it shall;
and tomorrow
when the machines are turned off,
the tubes removed,
the connections unmade,
there will be only silence and memory:
my memories
of a golden glow, a golden ring
and your glowing smile.

“I know you.”

2006-11-16T13:08:00.000-05:00

I gave a dollar to a homeless person who looked up at me out of squinting eyes in his leathery face, his nicotine-stained fingers clutching my sleeve, and said, “I know you,” his voice hoarse from cheap whiskey and cigarettes he could ill afford, and a chill went up my spine that had nothing to do with the cold prairie wind whipping through the walking mall in downtown Calgary. I wanted to turn around, to walk away, embarrassement bringing more colour to my already rosy cheeks, but he held on fast and I could not move my eyes from his compelling gaze.

After what seemed an eternity, I said, “You do?”

He let go of my sleeve then to fumble for a handkerchief as a coughing fit siezed him and I took the opportunity to step back out of reach, although I didn’t turn and run as I longed to, but waited respectfully until he spat something into the soiled cloth and stuffed it back among his layers of clothing. I felt he deserved at least that much dignity.

“Sure,” he answered at length. “I seen you a few years ago, you was outside the big bank that used to be a record store, now it’s just empty. You was reading the sign on the pillar and me and my friend asked you for some spare change. You gave me a dollar. You was awful pretty then. You still are.”

I stared at him, my eyes tearing in the cold November wind, and remembered exactly the incident in question: two native men, bumming, but in a much better way than this poor derelict at my feet, his back against the outer wall of The Bay; and yes, I remembered he’d complimented me, making some joke about whether I was married or not. I never expected him to show up again in my life, but weird things like that happen, and even though Calgary is a big city and I don’t even live there, it’s a small world.

Feeling like I really should say something, I asked, “How’s your friend?” The beggar spat on the sidewalk and I winced.

“Jimmy’s dead,” he said, his hands trembling as he lit himself a cigarette and took a long drag that set off another attack of coughing. “He froze to death two winters ago.”

I continued to stand there, staring at this man, this human being, and I thought about how lucky I was and how fate or fortune could reverse our positions so that it could be me on the sidewalk bumming spare change from passers by. I unwrapped the thick woolen scarf from my neck and handed it to him. “Stay warm,” I said, turned on my heel, and walked away.

Knitting Needles

2006-10-29T10:19:00.000-05:00

Three women, like three sisters, fates, or norns, sit in an isoceles, making their own triangles of socks on straight needles. They do not exchange one eye that they may in turn see, or a tooth that each might chew. No lives are measured from the distaff and cut with mythic shears. Instead, over coffee and cakes, among forced flowers of far off spring, they tell tales, stitch stories, their yarns unravelling from skeins to produce something new, more than just a turned heel or a ribbed cuff.

“Did you hear that Doris lost her baby?” asked Brenda.

“Oh no, not again!” exclaimed Charlotte, her needles pausing mid-stitch. “That makes how many now?”

Brenda pauses to think. “Four. Or is is five?”

“There never was a woman who wanted a child as much as that girl,” commented Delia, her knitting smooth and uninterrupted, an even click click click in the sudden silence.

“Such a pity,” mourned Charlotte. “Those two have been trying for ever. Maybe next time.”

“There probably won’t be a ‘next time’,” Delia cooly informed the others. “I think the doctor said she wasn’t to attempt another, that one more miscarriage would likely kill her. Maybe they’ll just forget all this nonsense and adopt a baby girl from China.”

“Perhaps,” said Brenda. “That seems to be quite popular these days. The other day at the IGA I saw a woman with three daughters, all Chinese, all different ages, totally unrelated.”

“I wonder what it’s like for the girls,” mused Charlotte. “I mean, I know they were too young to remember China and being abandoned in a bus shelter or church doorstep or wherever, but to be so obviously different from their adoptive parents. I wonder if they ever feel like they totally belong.”

“Oh, that’s hogwash,” snorted Delia, “and you know it! Maybe when they get to be teenagers, but not before, not if they’re truly loved.”

“What about if they get it in their minds to go looking for their birth mothers, like so many adoptees do?” asked Charlotte. “That would be an impossible task.”

Brenda stopped knitting long enough to refill her coffee cup and help herself to another piece of cake. “Did I ever tell you about the woman I met on the train, the one returning from a first time visit to her birth mother?” she asked.

“Wasn’t that when you were coming back from your father’s funeral?” asked Delia.

“I didn’t hear it,” said Charlotte. “What about her?”

Brenda sipped her coffee. “I don’t really remember too much, since I was pretty full of my own state of mind at the time. She was in her 30’s, I guess, and she said she never really felt that she belonged in her adoptive family, even though her parents didn’t treat her any differently than their own birth children. She was half-black, half-white, and obviously different. Also, she had been kicked around in foster homes for a while before this family had adopted her, and she remembered that part a little too well.

“Anyway, after years of searching, she found out who her birth parents were. Her father was black, her mom was white, and they had had a relationship which, of course didn’t last, and when this girl was born, her mother put her up for adoption. It was done more frequently then than it is now. I don’t think it’s a good idea that teenagers and un-wed mothers without means of support keep babies who would do so much better with families where they would be wanted and given more advantages.

“She had also met her father before and discovered that she had a half-brother. She told me about him, the same guy who picked her up at the station when we parted ways, that she had gone out to dinner with him and his girlfriend. When the brother had gone off to the bathroom, the girlfriend said to her, ‘It’s uncanny! You’re so much alike!’ How’s that for nature vs. nurture?”

Delia nodded. “That would be interesting, connecting with family you didn’t know you had. So, what was the reunion with her birth mother like?”

“Well,” continued Brenda, “apparently it was rather emotional. I mean, what would you expect? Thirty-five years later the baby girl you gave up for adoption arrives on your doorstep and calls you ‘mother’. It would be downright freaky.”

“Wow,” said Charlotte. “That’s quite a story. I couldn’t imagine being in that situation, well any of those situations, actually.”

“I guess it’s not all that different from the Chinese girl babies left in bus shelters,” added Delia.

“Nope,” Brenda agreed.

The cure is worse than the disease, or is it? A mini-saga

2006-08-02T17:06:00.000-04:00

Simon hated needles. Ever since the humiliation of his third-grade vaccination at the hands of Headmaster Jones, he had avoided them like the plague. Ironically, here he was in the clinic baring his upper arm, teeth clenched and eyes squeezed shut, in order to be cured of that selfsame affliction.

The Dark: a mini-saga

2006-07-16T00:16:00.000-04:00

Photo courtesy of SilverSide

After days of tramping over rough country roads, the traveller reached a dark forest, the only light coming through the tangled branches reaching above him as far as he could see. He never saw the beast that slunk out from between the trunks. All they found was his walking stick.

In the kitchen

2006-05-25T08:52:00.000-04:00

Priscilla was in the kitchen, protected by a floral cotton apron with eyelet ruffles along the edges, preparing the dinner party her husband had sprung on her that morning as he kissed her on his way out the door to work. “Oh, by the way, I’ve invited my boss and his wife over for dinner tonight. He’s allergic to rutabaga.” Well, that meant she couldn’t make her renowned turnip pie, something she always got scads of compliments on from guests. So instead she planned a rutabagaless menu and proceeded to make a melon boat for dessert, using deft wrist action and a good quality melon baller to make short work of the honeydew and cantaloupe she’d bought at market that morning.

The iguana in his cage on the floor and the parakeet in its cage near the ceiling were unconcerned with Priscilla’s preparations: they were playing a telepathic game of “I spy”; the object now being sought out was the irridescent purple butterfly brooch pinned to Priscilla’s hat, a black felt, floppy affair hanging precariously from a hook on the coat tree to the left of the kitchen door, as though it had been unceremoniously tossed there when its owner had come in bearing groceries, which in fact it had.

Precisely at noon, Priscilla ceased her preparations and turned on the radio for the news. The iguana blinked, signalling a hiatus in their game, and the parakeet did a sideways shuffle on its perch and inquired of its mistress, “Cracker?” Priscilla obligingly stuck a saltine through the bars of its cage and the bird snatched it with its sharp beak, gobbling up the delicate pastry. Priscilla made herself a sandwich and a cup of tea which she ate and drank respectively while listening to the news, none of which interested either of the caged animals.

As the announcers wrapped up, however, the parakeet became obviously agitated, hopping up and down on its skinny feet and ruffling its feathers. As soon as the last words were spoken, Priscilla opened the cage and allowed the parakeet its freedom of the house. It immediately left its perch inside its cage to perch on top of it. Priscilla went back to her preparations as the radio played a Beethoven symphony conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The iguana looked bored and possibly slept. His scaled green torso rose and fell almost imperceptibly with his shallow breathing, but otherwise he was as unmoved and unmoving as a sculpture from oxydized copper.

The parakeet, convinced that its freedom was not just an illusion, flew into the hallway where its spindly claws found purchase on a ficus plant growing in a very large and ugly pot that had been a wedding present to Priscilla and her husband from his late great-aunt Mirabelle. As though expressing its own contemptuous opinion of the vessel, the bird “missed” the dirt and spattered the edge of the pot. Priscilla would have to remember to clean that up before dinner.

The music on the radio had changed to a Bach lute suite played by some lutenist Priscilla remembered having seen at a concert in Toronto, Paul O’Dette, or something like that. She liked the counterpoint of the composition, and the clean lines of his playing. She went back to her work, kneading dough for bread on a board of yew wood that she had lathed herself from the tree that had once grown in their yard and had been felled quite tragically when the municipal dumpster tipped over onto it. Priscilla did not think about that now, enthralled by the baroque music and the rhythm of her hands. The parakeet only thought about snatching some bread dough for itself. The iguana thought of nothing at all.

Can bloggers make a difference?

2006-04-20T19:40:00.000-04:00

While perusing the morning paper, my husband has a habit of reading out loud things that he finds interesting. For instance, this morning he read an article about how scientists are planning on creating their own “big bang” in a particle accelerator (I think this is a very bad idea; haven’t these people read any science-fiction stories, cautionary tales of how the creation of a baby universe will totally anihilate our own?) and how all the information collected and burnt onto CDs, when stacked up, will create a pile 10 times higher than the CN Tower. Unfortunately, when he is reading these things aloud, I am rarely paying attention. Usually I am doing the crossword puzzle or reading the comics or still not completely awake. This story finally got my interest towards the end of the telling and I had to ask him to repeat himself, which is why I am able to relate it here.

However, he did hand me the newspaper at one point and said, “You have to read this,” and showed me an article with the heading “Why Iran wants bomb: The Shia regime in Tehran believes its nukes will speed the second coming of the Mahdi”. Well, I read it, and I advise you to also, although there is much you can skim. However, the important point is this: The Islamic government in Iran is creating an arsenal of nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of wiping out the “infidel”, i.e. the U.S. and its allies, and for totally destroying the State of Israel (which, I may add, has a very large population of Moslems) in the rather twisted belief that this will hasten the second coming of the Prophet.

There was one thing that rather struck me in this article. I wonder if it will strike you the same way. Let me quote something from it for you: “Islam also has four-fifths of the world’s oil reserves, and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel.” Do you not think, my intelligent and astute friends, that the time is well nigh for the “West” to finally develop and produce a non-petroleum based fuel technology, an alternative to the wasteful combustion engine? If we ceased to purchase oil from the middle east, the effects to Iran’s economy would be even more devastating than we can imagine. Why should we finance our own forecast destruction and destroy the already-depleted ozone layer at the same time?

The technology is there, it’s been there for quite some time, to produce a hydrogen powered engine, or alternative fuels, such as gasohol, or vegetable-oil based gasolines. I do not understand this reluctance, or is it just obtuseness, on the part of the wealthiest nation with the greatest resources, both in materials and brain power, in the world to be so off the mark in this business. Come on, guys, is there nothing we lowly bloggers can do about this?

Cuba on my mind

2006-03-07T09:25:00.000-05:00

Without the use of time machines, we are still capable of time travel, going from one season to another in the space of a few hours. On Sunday at 5 o’clock in the afternoon I was eating a grilled-cheese sandwich in my bathing suit, ruing not having worn sunscreen on the beach, enjoying cool ocean breezes, while a mere six hours later our plane was taxiing into P.E.Trudeau international airport where the local temperature was -1°C. Now I understand the reason for the sad faces we saw in the travel lounge when we exited our arrival gate a mere week earlier.

Cuba, my friends, is amazing, a subtropical island paradise. Our hotel was on Varadero Beach, a long key that is home to tons of beach resorts, and ours was especially luxurious, at least by Cuban standards. We were in what is called a standard room since part of the resort, including the junior suites, is under renovation, but this standard room was plenty large enough. It was at the end on the second floor of what I lovingly called “cell block D” and included a king-size bed with lots of room to get around it, something you don’t always find with that size of mattress, a TV nook with a desk and chair, a separate “coffee room” with a convertible daybed, and a balcony with two chairs and café table where I spent many a morning writing leisurely in my journal while my husband was out having a tennis lesson.

Wanting to find others to play tennis with, he checked in at the court and was informed by the pro that there were no other tennis players that week, but he would gladly work with him. It turned out that this pro was once the national champion for Cuba off and on for 22 years. No lucrative promotions or commercial endorsements for this player, instead he teaches tennis at the university in Matanzas, a nearby town, and at the hotel. Andrew felt honoured. They ended up having a lesson practically daily, sometimes twice.

The beach was fabulous, white sand, blue blue water, blue blue sky, lounging on beach chairs under royal palm-thatched umbrellas, nipping over to the nearby grill for a bite to eat or a freshly made mojito (recipe to follow) or cerveza fria. Truly a decadent lifestyle. Most of our meals were taken in the buffet, where the lavish spread was embarrassing in its excess. Although we tried not to overeat, it really is a temptation to heap your plate up with all the goodies provided. Many of our fellow vacationers did just that, and you can tell by their girths that it’s something they do often. My husband and I, even though the same age as many of the other hotel patrons (and younger than many as well) were among the thinnest, and that’s not counting the teenagers accompanying their parents or the few couples younger than us. Since booze flowed freely, people would sit by the bar and just drink all day, starting in the morning and continuing way into the night. I suppose I didn’t really take advantage of that part of the all-inclusive aspect of the package. There was always music playing by the swimming pool and piped down to the beach, this Carribbean salsa music that is so typical of that part of the world. I felt as though I were a character in the computer game Tropico that my son plays.

Three nights we dined à la carte in two of the different restaurants for which we had to make reservations. The first was a la fresca on a terrace protected by palm trees, but it was still brisk, that being the end of one of the two days where the weather was less than perfect, windy and overcast part of the day. The food was excellent (I had salmon, my husband had red snapper), grilled to perfection and served with charm and grace. As at every restaurant we visited, there were musicians serenading the patrons, a very beautiful young woman singer and her handsome guitar player. Andrew bought one of their CDs (that was just the beginning) and chatted with them about music.

The next two nights we dined at the Cuban restaurant, where the food was again fantastic, and we were entertained by two older musicians, both tenors (one a light high voice, the other more dramatic who could be an opera singer anywhere he was so good), the one on guitar, the other on maracas. Andrew got to talking to the guitarist and ended up buying one of their CDs as well.

We made two excursions, one to Havana where we toured the old city, wandered through the market, and lunched in a courtyard restaurant just off of a square with the only wooden street in all of Cuba. Again there was live music, this time a whole band, and the mandolin player picked Andrew out as a music lover and soloed right in his ear, picking up his empty water glass and using it as a slide. It was hilarious. Our waiter, a man in his 70s, asked if any of us were from Montreal (we’re close) and showed us the plasticized “passport” he carries in his wallet from when he was a waiter in the Cuban pavillion at Expo ’67, almost 40 years ago, showing a much younger Roberto. The food at this eatery was also excellent, and we shared a table for six with two other friendly couples, all Canadians.

On the bus ride to Havana, our guide Ernesto talked nonstop, pointing out sights of interest along the way and also expounding at great lengths on how socialism in Cuba works and how the people live. To us as residents of the free market world, it seems rather horrific, but for the most part Cubans really believe in their system, and it seems to work for them. There are two currencies in Cuba, both pesos, one the m0nidad naci0nal (or MN), 25 of which make a c0nvertible peso (or CUC) which is almost the equivalent of a US dollar. At the airport, for example, we changed our Canadian money for CUCs. The minimum wage in Cuba is 250 MNs per month, which would come out to $10. This seems like a paltry amount; how could anyone live on $10 a month? However, there is no rent to pay, there are no taxes. Food can be obtained freely with government-issued coupons (a holdover from various times in Cuban history when rationing was necessary, and now just a courtesy), or extremely cheaply as can other necessities of life.

However, if a citizen wants a C0lgate smile, that toothpaste is very expensive to buy. Anything not provided in government stores is paid for in CUCs. Clothing is extremely expensive, and yet we saw Cubans everywhere wearing designer jeans. This is where most people have a second income, one that helps them buy those things they would otherwise not be able to afford. Usually this second income is based on what we would consider theft. For instance, a cook at the hotel would have two boxes of fish to put out for the buffet, but instead only puts out one and sells the second one on the black market. A truck driver might be rationed enough gas to make four trips carrying goods from point A to B. Instead he hooks up a trailer and overloads his truck, managing to complete his task in only two trips. He then siphons off the unused gas and sells it on the black market. When asked if people get caught, Ernesto answered that there is a whole way of life fueled by this. For instance, the cook leaves the hotel with the pilfered fish and slips the guard some money so he looks the other way. Everyone gains, everyone is happy. No one considers it stealing, since in a socialist country, eveything is owned by everyone anyway. How can you steal from yourself?

I left many toiletry items for the room maid, for which she thanked us when we passed her one day as she was cleaning our neighbour’s apartment, including toothpaste, toothbrushes, soaps, bath cubes, body lotion, shampoo and conditioner, lipsticks and nailpolishes. I also left a pile of clothing, all new, that Ilana and I will never (all stuff given to us by my mother-in-law) wear ourselves, and I know that what the maid can’t use herself will end up on the black market. That’s fine with me.

In Havana we were constantly accosted by people with their hands out, not for money, but asking for soap, Ivory specifically. I don’t know any Spanish, unfortunately, and I was starting to get rather upset with this harrassment. I am going to have to learn to say “Please go away” before we return. But now I also know what to bring in quantity when I come back, a Costo quantity of Ivory soap.

We also took the bus around the newer part of the city, visiting a huge cemetary with extravagant mausoleums and memorials, passing the American embassy with the forest of black-draped flagpoles hiding it from view (the Cubans really hate Americans because of the US embargo and their naval base at Guantanamo Bay), and all the hotels that were once owned by the famous gangsters of the past, Al Capone, Meyer Lanski, et alia, which once housed casinos. Everywhere in the city is evidence of restoration, former mansions that were totally falling apart have been renewed and made into beautiful multi-residence buildings.

The other outing we took was to go snorkling in a coral reef, something Andrew did when we were in Tobago last year and thoroughly enjoyed, but which I eschewed because I have a fear of smothering and would not put the mask on over my nose, especially since I was already suffering from boat-induced motion sickness. This time I was determined I would do this thing, since it meant so much to him, and donned the flippers and the mask and the snorkle. At the beginning it was horrible. I felt like I was suffocating with the mask on, and I kept getting a gagging reflex with the mouthpiece between my lips and teeth. Finally, after forcing myself to follow the guide’s directions (breath slowly through your mouth), I was able to tip my mask into the water, inhaling and exhaling, and watch the beautiful sea life beneath me. It truly was spectacular. I still had to yank the mouthpiece out every few minutes when the gagging thing would get to me, but otherwise I managed admirably. Andrew was the one with problems: his mask leaked and his snorkle had a crack in it. I saw beautiful fish of all sizes and colours and markings. Something with teeth even nibbled my elbow once. The guide opened a plastic bottle filled with mashed banana and the fish just made a beeline for him like flies to honey.

This was followed by a dip in a freshwater-filled cave, probably originally hollowed out by sea action, but then over the æons decorated by limestone stalactites and stalagmites, the walls covered with limestone “draperies”. We wore our masks and snorkes, able to see right down to the bottom quite a distance away (the guide warned us to hold on tightly to our masks as one dropped could not be recovered). I love caves anyway, and this was just so beautiful. It turned out to be a very good experience for me, and I won’t shy away from it again. I just have to figure out some way of controlling that gagging reflex.

In the evenings after dinner there was always a show at the buffet, sometimes music, sometimes magic or dancing, but afterwards Andrew and I would adjourn to the piano bar adjacent to the hotel lobby, wherein we found a grand piano with a counter built around it where people could sit sipping their drinks and requesting tunes from supplied lyrics book which they would then sing into a karaoke microphone, accompanied by the pianist in residence. Andrew goaded me into singing something, and the pianist suddenly came alive, a gleam came into his eyes, and he started to enjoy himself. We exhausted the jazz standards he had in his book (most of the songs were more popular, the kinds of things I have heard but never learned), and then Andrew started writing out chord charts for him for other tunes. We went back night after night, and by the last night (Guillermo came in special, even though it was technically his night off) we were hot. The other patrons were also enthralled, and the few other good singers who came in all wanted to do duets with me. I never thought that I would end up “working” on my vacation. Afterwards Guillermo gave us his coordinates and we promised that we would send him jazz charts in the mail so he could learn more tunes. He was very appreciative.

When we arrived in Montreal, after waiting what seemed an age for our luggage (our plane was jam packed), we found our automobile in long-term parking, the battery totally dead as my husband had accidentally left an inside light on the previous week. Luckily our cell phone was still in the car, with enough of a charge that I was able to call CAA, which sent a truck around within 10 minutes (CAA has its own truck at the airport, fancy that), the driver boosting us, and we were on our way.

Mojito
1 tsp. sugar
lime juice
generous sprig of peppermint
ice cubes
jigger of white rum
soda water
dash of Angostura bitters

Take my hand

2005-12-26T13:46:00.000-05:00

Reaching for his morning coffee, Arthur suddenly realized that the hand he observed protruding from his checked flannel shirt was not his own. Sure, it was his wrist; there was the scar he had received at age eight from the scythe in his uncle’s barn that day he and his cousin were jumping out of the hay loft. It had faded much over time, but had never totally disappeared, a lifelong reminder of a moment’s youthful recklessness. But this hand, this right hand, was a stranger’s.

The skin was pale, unfreckled; the back was hairless and the palm and fingers smooth and uncalloused. There was no obvious join, as though a mad scientist had performed vivisection on him while he slept, but the bizarreness of this discovery helped to keep Arthur from panicking. He turned the hand over, examining it closely. The nails were manicured and it was obvious that the previous bearer had never known hard labour. “A white-collar sort of hand,” Arthur thought to himself. He wondered if it played the piano or the flute, if it wielded a pen or paint brush.

It was most decidedly not his hand though, and that did concern him. He picked up his coffee mug, noting that it felt hotter than usual before attributing it to his new hand’s lack of protection in the form of thickened skin. This was not the hand of someone who hauled timber and groomed horses, split firewood and baled hay. What if the original owner of the hand wanted it back? Was Arthur obliged to keep it in the pristine condition in which he’d discovered it?

He felt a sneeze coming on and reached up his left hand, which was thankfully his own, to put a finger under his nose, when he realized suddenly that something was terribly wrong with his face. He put down his coffee and pulled the shiny chrome toaster towards himself and peered into its reflective surface. Sure enough, the nose in the middle of Arthur’s face was not the same appendage he had seen in the mirror when he was brushing his teeth the night before. Whereas it had been large and pitted, rosy from his bedtime scotch and hairy of nostril, this one was narrow, aquiline, aristocratic and unblemished. It was obvious that it went with the hand that reached up a tentative finger to prod at the shiny surface.

Suddenly Arthur burst out laughing. Sure, it was funny enough, a country bumpkin like himself suddenly sporting the body parts of an English lord, but how did that same bloke feel about having Arthur’s hairy hand and sizeable schnoz decorating his otherwise elegant form? “Poor bastard,” he thought to himself, and dismissed the mystery from his mind. There were horses to be groomed, wood to be chopped and hay to be baled. It wasn’t his problem.

Saint Beatrice: Virgin Martyr of the first Christian Centuries

2005-12-26T13:36:00.001-05:00

I was just a child then. I suppose I will forever be a child, for death puts an end to one’s growing. I may even have been beautiful, but that wasn’t important to me then, and it certainly makes no difference now.

I took orders very young, possibly against my will, for death makes you forget much. I cannot even remember if I had begun my monthly bleeding yet. I was a quiet girl, obedient and studious. My family was poor and my mother fecund, so I was the obvious choice to send to the convent. I had a brother who entered the priesthood as well, but I’ve forgotten his name. I barely remember my own. Was it Clara, Elizabeth, Beatrice, Josephine? Yes, I have forgotten. That doesn’t matter now either.

At the nunnery I no longer saw my parents or my siblings. The sisters became my family, but I still pined after my natural relations. There was not much in the way of warmth among the inmates and many was the night I cried myself to sleep on the hard palette in my small cell. I especially missed my puppy and the cat that kept the mice from the grain. The mother superior would not let me befriend the convent cats. She was a mother in name only, possessing little of any milk of human kindness for me and the other young initiates.

Eventually I fell into the routines of the convent and got used to the bad food, the lack of sleep, being woken up at all hours to troop down to the chapel in bare feet on the freezing stone floor. As I said, I was a quiet girl and my silence must have been taken for piety. I started spending much time alone in the chapel meditating, remembering carefree afternoons with my sisters, my lips moving silently as I mouthed the songs we sang together. My rosary reminded me of a necklace my older sister had given me but my vow of poverty prevented me from now owning, and I would finger it as I knelt and dreamt of lost freedom.

Everything changed when the war broke out. The bad food got worse, there were no new habits and small clothes to replace the ones I was rapidly growing out of, and suddenly we nuns were required to turn our cloisters into hospital rooms. The little joy I took in my privacy was set aside for a shared cell with one of my fellows. We girls learned how to clean wounds, to sew severed skin together, to bandage and, on occasion, to amputate. The work disgusted me, but I said nothing as always, and the soldier patients found my manner and my silent stolidness reassuring. They would even ask for me by name, the name I have since forgotten. This did not go unnoticed by the priest and the mother superior.

Then one day our makeshift hospital itself was attacked by the enemy. We were dragged outside into the smoke-filled yard as our convent was set to the torch. The soldiers, boisterous in their conquering mania, did not care that we were servants of God, but proceeded to have their way with the sisters. I was sickened by what I saw, more so even than when I had sawed off a festering leg, as I watched my cellmate stripped naked and raped by an armed man. Her screams cut deeper than the bone saw, her tears more draining than the blood that spurted out of his arteries, and when it was my turn I would not yield, but seized my would-be rapist’s weapon and slashed my own throat, hoping for a quick oblivion that would end my adolescent suffering. Alas, my death did indeed end the lustful violence, but the mother superior quickly canted my own life blood as it spilled from my wound. My broken body was spirited away and I was declared a saint, for I had died a martyr, defending my chastity as Christ’s virgin bride.

There is not much left to tell. My bones now lie in a glass case beneath this altar, clad in silken raiment. Pieces of my crushed skull are hidden inside a beautiful wax head, the rest are in a bag hanging around my spine and resting inside my empty ribcage. Golden locks the like of which I never possessed in life adorn this effigy, golden mesh gloves encase my skeletal hands, and a bottle decorated with a cross guards the dried blood that flowed from my corpse. I cannot sleep, I cannot leave. There is no rest and there is no exit.

The last time I saw her…

2005-12-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

The last time I saw her she was wearing a flowered summer dress and a straw hat, her honey-coloured hair hanging down her back and over her shoulders in ringlets, her feet clad in open sandals and a basket of berries hanging from her arm. She was standing beside the road, picking the wild blackberries growing among the service berry trees, her fingers stained, popping a ripe black-lobed fruit between her purple-stained lips every so often.

It was a hot day, summer already on the wane. Yellowjackets buzzed around the ripened fruit, but she did not mind them. As I recall, she was not deterred by much, not by stinging insects, nor spiders, nor by worms in the garden. She could pick up hot pots and dishes with her bare hands and cleaned out drains by plunging her fingers into disgusting sludge. That always grossed me out, but to her it was business as usual.

I never saw her again. That evening a deer crossed the road in front of her car and she tried to avoid hitting it, only to spin out of control into an oncoming vehicle. The medics said she was already dead when they arrived at the scene, her neck broken. The other driver, in a pickup truck, was unhurt, and there was no sign of any injured deer.

I shall always miss her. Every time I see honey-coloured curls or a flowered dress, my heart leaps in my breast until I remember she is dead. How can I forget? Father was never the same after. My brother and I eventually grew up and moved away to make our own lives, but that spot our older sister occupied has always been vacant, like a wound that won’t heal. Summer ended that day and winter has not yet ceased.

One argument you can’t win: A mini-saga

2005-11-05T10:58:00.000-05:00

“Complaining is good for you as long as you’re not complaining to the person you’re complaining about.” - Lisa Alther, Kinflicks, 1975

At the bottom of the sea lies a shipwreck. Hidden within are the worldly possessions and untold stories of lost lives, grave goods of submerged sailors and drowned travelers. The prow bears the evidence of the argument lost, the errant iceberg long ago melted, uncaring and unhurt by the complainant.

Ophelia speaks

2005-11-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

Woman in White by Pablo Picasso (1923)

I am Ophelia. I watch and I wait. I love and I yearn. Yet I fear that I am not loved in return. O Hamlet, can you not see that I would comfort you, that I would fill that place inside you where there is darkest night, a black hole that sucks the joy and the light from everything you touch? I would fill it with joy, with love overflowing. You grieve, yes, and rightly so, but I, Ophelia, I love you, my lord, lord of my heart, to whom I would swear obeisance and pledge my troth with the last of my breath.

Even as I watch, even as I maintain my outward appearance of calm and unconcern, I writhe inside, for I am not allowed, nay! am prevented from expressing myself. My foolish father would constrict me, would cloister me away, forever spewing forth his platitudes, those empty words of common sense, until I wish to be deafened by thunderclaps and ocean swells. My brother, dear Laertes, loves me I know, but cares more for my virtue than my happiness.

Oh Hamlet, I would come to you in your chambers, my hair unbound, clad only in the thinnest of silks. I would that you possess me, make me yours. I am burning with passion, yearning for your touch, for the heat of your lips, your answering lust. Alas, I am destined to watch, worse, to be banished. You cast me forth with such cruel words, words that sting, that flense me like the thorns of the brambles were I to enter their thicket naked, my hair my only protection.

Can you not see that I am in anguish? Nay, you cannot, for I am a lady, I am expressionless, I am carved from marble and alabaster, my face as devoid of anger as of love. Perhaps, just perhaps, if I stand so still, so quiet and do not breathe, perhaps if the air ceases to circulate in my lungs, the blood in my veins, my heart ceases its endless pumping, then maybe the gods will pity me and I will truly become marble or alabaster, Pygmalion reversed, the living, breathing girl become the cool, unfeeling statue.

I can stand it no longer. You have rejected me, o Hamlet, I who would have lavished such love on you, who would have bathed your feet with my tears and dried them with my hair. If I must love, it must be fluid as the oceans, as the tidal rivers where our waters mingle, the salt and the sweet. I will leave, I will enter the river and let it take me to its mouth where I will kiss the tide, for I am denied yours.

Elgin Marbles: A mini-saga

2005-10-20T21:43:00.000-04:00

It is interesting that the defacement of statuary, often the only extant art of bygone cultures, is done for reasons of religious intolerance. Zeus no longer owns his head because Jesus became the godhead, and Buddha no longer looks over the hills and valleys of Afghanistan because Allah is great.

The Formula for Success: A mini-saga

2005-10-11T13:03:00.000-04:00

“Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.”
- Arthur Rubinstein (1886 - 1982)

Wearily Dr. Dombrowski removed his glasses and rubbed the sides of his nose where they had left red marks. In front of him was a long page with the heading “Invisibility Formula” filled with mathematical equations. He picked up his pencil once more, added a final number and promptly disappeared.

Smoking: A mini-saga

2005-10-06T10:34:00.000-04:00

A woman sashays into a bar, leans her generous bosom over the counter and calls out seductively to the bartender, “Hey honey, pour me a drink! I’ve got heartburn!” The bartender eyes the bleached-blonde hair, the low-cut neckline and says, “Lady, you ain’t got heartburn. Your tit’s in the ashtray!”

Dorothy: A mini-saga

2005-10-05T08:27:00.000-04:00

“...if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any farther than my own backyard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!” - Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz

Scrabbling in the grass, frantically pawing at the ground underneath; where had she hidden it? Burying her heart’s desire so that none other could have it, she could not now find it herself. Such irony! There it was! Dorothy grabbed the bone in her teeth and ran off to gnaw.

Divide: A mini-saga

2005-10-04T08:47:00.000-04:00

(Photo credit to SilverSide)

Tired of the singles-bar scene, Sarah decided to create the perfect man using software she wrote especially for that purpose. The results were so overwhelmingly satisfactory that she spent more and more of her time at the computer, until she became old and gray and no one wanted her anyway.

The Three Graces: a mini-saga

2005-09-30T11:02:00.000-04:00

Three beautiful women posed for the camera. “My neck is stiff,” said Angelina of the straight, black hair. “I feel as though my dress is falling down,” complained Margaret of the ebony waves. “I have to pee,” murmured Juanita, hands crossed demurely in front. Obviously, the photographer was a man.

“Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.” - Aristotle: a mini-saga

2005-09-29T09:35:00.000-04:00

All his life Theodore had studied the cream of classical literature. He was conversant in both Latin and Greek. Homer and Virgil kept him company through his slow descent into senility and, even when he no longer recognized his wife and son, Dido and Telemachus continued to visit every day.

The Pope: A mini-saga

2005-09-29T09:29:00.000-04:00

“An unflinching advocate of human and civil rights, as well as the controversial promoter of both the conservative values of the Catholic church and its need to adapt and reach out to the contemporary world, John Paul II both inspired and exasperated--but left few indifferent.”

As head of church and head of state, the Pope is in charge of two municipalities: the sacred and the profane. Does he concern himself with the levying of taxes, the improvement of roads and waste management? Methinks they are probably as indifferent to him as he is to them.

A mini-saga: Certain fashion faux-pas

2005-09-25T10:10:00.000-04:00

After Amanda joined Weight Watchers, she observed her generous curves give way to angles and straight lines, her plump, apple-round cheeks become fashion-model gaunt. As her soft flesh became firm and her belly flattened, she started dressing in light pink workout wear, even though the colour made her look fat.

“Why does any of this make any sense to me? Because once, while drunk, she told me she thought I was magic.”—A mini-saga

2005-09-18T12:09:00.000-04:00

Convinced that this one was her prince, Patricia tenderly kissed the lipless mouth of the green bullfrog she had scooped out of the pond. Suddenly, she felt herself transformed into a butterfly, the promise of freedom in her irridescent wings cut short by the prehensile tongue of her erstwhile lover.

Be careful what you wish for—A retelling of a popular myth in the form of a mini-saga

2005-09-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

Apollo’s gift of immortality, accepted with enthusiasm, turned out to be a double-edged sword; for although Sybil continued to age, she would not die, and shrank into a wizened homonculous, encased in a leather bag hung over the entryway of the temple shouting ominous imprecations at the supplicants passing below.

In the Employees’ Lounge—A mini-saga

2005-09-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

“Sorry, I’m such a klutz,” she apologized, as she accidentally poured hot coffee down the handsome fellow’s pants, the one from marketing whom she had been trying to impress for weeks. “Wow!” he answered, feeling as though heaven had suddenly delivered an angel for a soulmate, answering his sado-masochistic want-ad.

Feelings of fall.

2005-09-06T22:37:00.000-04:00

Summer, while not over according to the distance the earth has traveled around the sun thus far this year, is officially done now that Labour Day is past and school has started again. This always leaves me with a feeling of melancholy; the days are getting shorter, the air cools quickly after the sun sets, and the leaves are starting to change colour: reds and golds on the maples, browns and russets on the oaks.

I sit here at the computer, the windows open to let in the chilling evening air, and I hear the wail of the train whistle. It is a plaintive sound, matching my mood. I feel the distance, the loneliness of empty track, the romance of the hobo who rides the rails. Summer is over. Soon the leaves will fall, covering the ground with their colourful bounty. Then the skies will become increasingly gray, animals will look for warm burrows in which to hide away for the coming months, and snow will eventually cover everything.

We are infinitely inconsequential, at the mercy of the elements. Our fine houses, warm hearths, insulated clothing, are as nought to the timelessness of winter and the slow grinding down of mountains and movement of glaciers. Our grand arrogance against this backdrop is as laughable as the fate of the ant crushed under our feet. Yet we do not know it. Perhaps it is better that way, for if we all realized the truth, that existence is purposeless, we would all despair. Live for beauty, for the change of seasons, for the sounds of the train in the distance. Enjoy the moment, for soon it will be winter, and all will be cloaked in a seamless blanket of snow.

I am a Canadian pirate, arr!

2005-08-19T16:05:00.000-04:00

Pretty Canadian
You scored 90 Canada speak and 82 Canadianess!

You know a lot about us. You probably know someone who owns a Ski-Doo up at their cottage.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on Canada speak
You scored higher than 0% on Canadianess

Link: The Ultimate Canadian Test written by echox2 on OkCupid Free Online Dating

My pirate name is:

Black Jenny Flint

Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Update

2005-07-26T11:46:00.000-04:00

I haven’t posted anything here for quite some time, not because I haven’t wanted to, but because I have written nothing new in a “creative” fashion. Writing group is finished for the summer, our last session meeting at Janice’s house and using the inspiration of her orchard as fuel for our pens. It was a small gathering, just six middle-aged (and up) women swatting at mosquitoes and waving away flies as we listened to the birds in the apple trees and the occasional car pass by.

We moved inside after our second write, breaking for tea and cookies, before finishing off in Janice’s living room. Except for the first exercise, which is two below this entry, I found the evening a bit of a letdown. I would like to write on my own, but I find that, although words flow out of my ballpoint easily enough when it comes to descriptions, plots elude me.

I am reading a very fine book at the moment, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, which I started while I was on vacation with my family on the shores of Lake Huron. I admire an author who can pluck stories out of the air, invent characters and events and spin the disparate parts into a seamless whole. This is also my goal. Perhaps someday I will achieve it.

2005-07-01T13:02:00.000-04:00

Writing about nature and Nature not caring on the longest day of the year.

2005-06-23T09:46:00.000-04:00

I hold in my hand a sprig of weed that grows in Janice’s yard. It is small, recently cut down by the lawn mower which does not differentiate between grass and not grass: clover, chickweed, creeping charlie, dandelion and plantain. You wouldn’t notice this little bit of greenery underfoot, but here in my grasp, all alone above the lined white paper of my notebook, it takes on a larger significance.

The leaf, while perhaps a half-inch across at its widest, reminds me of geranium, the way it and its fellows grow out of the main stem: very like geranium. And that is it. I turn it over and trace the path of the veins with my eye as I listen to the red-winged blackbird across the way and songs of robins and sparrows among the trees. The wind has picked up and I hear it soughing through the branches and feel it caress my skin. Apart from the birds and the wind and the occasional rustle of paper from my colleagues, it is quiet. There is no traffic, no sound of industry, so that any artificially-made noise is an intrusion. A cow moos, a dog barks and the blackbird calls incessantly.

On this longest day of the year it is already getting dark at 7:30; the feel of rain is in the air. The birds know, as do the insects, the flies annoying in their excitement. The few cars that pass in front of the orchard are enclosed worlds, the drivers unaware of the sounds of nature which are making themselves so obvious to us as we sit here quietly writing our inner thoughts. Each car that passes now seems like an affront to the peacefulness of the nature around us. Even the three-legged cat, posed on the log like a lion observing his domain, is part of nature. Occasionally twitching an ear at an annoying insect, he watches and waits. He is one step away from becoming feral.

It is we who are the intruders here, waving at the flies, slapping at the mosquitoes, feeling the cool breeze on our bare legs. I realize suddenly that I am still holding the sprig of tiny geranium-like creeping charlie. I would rather paint it, I think, than describe it. It’s as though it loses something in translation.

Haiku

2005-06-22T10:11:00.000-04:00

Under an apple tree
Five women write about nature.
Nature doesn’t care.

Uta Regoli
June 21, 2005

Fishing with my Father

2005-06-19T14:33:00.000-04:00

Gorse bushes. I do not know what they are. They figure in English literature, they decorate the countryside, and in my mind’s eye I see a rounded shrub with prickles, although I have no idea of the leaf size or shape, and if the fruit it bears is a berry or a plum.

My father took us fishing when we were small on those occasions when the conservation area stocked the river and opened its doors to avid amateurs. We never caught anything, and my father was vigilant about hooks and barbs. He carried wire cutters with him to snip the fish hook should it enter an unwary child’s finger and emerge from torn flesh. I am amazed that a man who did not believe in spending money frivolously would buy fishing rods, reels and line with an array of hooks and weights. Even now the word “lead” conjures up the little lead weights hanging with the lures from the colourful cork floats.

Some fishermen were successful on these outings. I remember seeing people with trout hanging together in a bunch like grapes, as in the painting of the fisherman found in the ruins at Akrotiri. My father would have loved to see those ancient frescoes, but he would not travel, either because he feared it or because he was too cheap to spend the money.

He was clever at many things, resourceful so that he could do his own repairs and avoid the costs of a third party. Traveling through Ontario with him and my mother once, we experienced a flat tire, and as the two of them put on the spare I wandered through a patch of wild raspberry bushes, eating my fill. The warning from my father that we were in rattlesnake country did not diminish my enjoyment and no rattlesnake made its appearance during my impromptu lunch, but my father revealed how he carried a sharp razor blade in his wallet to slash an X above the site of a snake bite and suck out the poison from the wound.

My father has been gone for over four years, and we had very little to say to each other when he was alive. Yet I find myself missing him when I experience something that I know he would have enjoyed hearing about. My sister-in-law told me recently how she once asked him why he didn’t go to see the places and things that most interested him, and he answered that the knowledge itself that these things existed was enough for him. I can see how that was true. It describes a lack of curiosity but a confidence in existence in general. He did not need to rush around the world, making sure that the wonders travelers spoke about were as they described them. For him the descriptions in themselves were enough, and he didn’t feel the need to have a first-hand experience. So now when I travel and see geological wonders or man-made monuments, I want to share my experiences with him, to describe something he will never see. But I cannot, and the story remains untold. It becomes a gorse bush, an unidentified shrub known only by its name, or it disappears down the stream of time like the lucky trout who escaped our hooks and nets on those long-ago fishing trips.

A Restless Night

2005-05-18T21:02:00.000-04:00

The door opens on tomorrow;
I prefer to stay inside.
The windows peer into next week;
I will stay in bed and hide.

There lingers in my mouth
A bitter, acrid taste
Of ashes, fire, smoke and fear,
People running, making haste.

Children leapt from parapets
To escape the roaring flames:
Hungry tongues of liquid fire
Playing terrifying games.

I too jump from some great height,
My wings are now unfurled
As I grasp the crying children,
One with straight hair, one with curled,

Her angelic features
Contorted with her fear;
But I am the angel now,
I am the saviour here.

Suddenly the scene changes
As it often does in dreams.
I’m wandering in my mother’s house,
But it is not as it seems.

I know this place, at least I should,
I’ve lived here all my life;
Except this isn’t my mother’s house.
In the kitchen I find a knife

Covered in gore and sticky still.
I shudder at the touch,
And lay it with the other tools
Of torture on the hutch.

This is all a dream, I think,
Soon I will wake up.
But until morning I am caught
With bile in my coffee cup.

And so as one weird scene morphs
Into a weirder yet again,
I frantically await the dawn,
Be it sun or be it rain;

And when I do wake up at last
There is a heaviness in my head.
I rise and pull the curtains closed,
Then return once more to bed.

Dustmotes

2005-05-18T20:45:00.000-04:00

Isabelle scrubs the bathroom floor. She starts at one end, near the shower, and works backwards so as not to paint herself into the proverbial corner. The water in her bucket is rapidly cooling, even though she drew it as hot as she could stand from the bathtub tap, and the suds disappear as the water goes from clean to dirty. She has done this before, countless times, in countless bathrooms. Some are more interesting than others. Some go very quickly, those with tubsurrounds and cabinetted wash basins. Others seem to take forever, the ones with the footed bathtubs and pedestal sinks. There is comfort in routine: dip the rag into the bucket, wring it out, slap it on the tiles, swish it around, drop it back into the bucket, move on to a different piece of floor.

Isabelle starts at one end and carefully washes around the baseboards and in the corners and under the shower door where the most dirt seems to collect. There is always an abundance of hair: curly short body hairs, long fine silky hairs, bits of beard trimmings and eyebrow pluckings. There is always dust, dust that is caught in the hairs and caught in the inevitable soap scum left from the splashing of baby’s bath. Sometimes there are other things besides hair and dust and soap scum: little pieces of toilet paper in hard-to-reach places, toenail clippings, dryer lint, a button, the cap from a discarded shampoo bottle, bobby pins, safety pins and a sock that missed the laundry basket and ended up behind the bathtub. They are all eventually caught up in Isabelle’s rag.

Once she found an earring, a beautiful delicate thing of diamonds and filligree and was almost tempted to pocket it, but at the last minute refrained--far be it for her to be labelled a thief. The same with a stud from a man’s tuxedo shirt, mother-of-pearl and sterling silver.

The area around the toilet she always pays especial care to. This is where the mistress would notice if she has been remiss. She sits on her haunches for a moment, easing out the kink in her lower back, wiping a whisp of hair away from her brow. The tiles of the floor glisten in the sunlight, tiny flecks of gold dance in their matrix. Isabelle watches as the water dries in one spot and the reflective surface changes. With her wrung-out rag she gently wipes the area in front of her, then observes how the tile changes colour as it goes from wet to dry. She pulls her finger along the grout, feeling the gentle bevel of the porcelain. She is mesmerized by the play of light on the gold flecks as she moves her head slowly from side to side.

With her rag now she wipes the dust from the baseboard heater and then pulls her cloth along the window sill. There is a collection of dirt where the condensation has pooled. She notices the transparent wings of a fly on the window as it wipes its eyes with its forward legs. Everything has slowed down. Dust motes drift in a beam of sunlight, the same sunlight warming the fly and illuminating the gold flecks in the tiles. Isabelle watches, the rag hanging limp, forgotten.

There is an abrupt throat clearing and the maid looks up suddenly, guiltily, as the mistress says, “Will you be done in here soon? I have to go!”

Argyle Waterfall, Tobago

2005-05-12T19:18:00.000-04:00

By the time the tour guide finally brought the group to the Argyle Waterfall, after talking incessantly about the flora along the side of the dusty path, Dierdre’s head was pounding from the heat and constant chatter and she wasted no time in stripping out of her tee-shirt and shorts and wading into the pool at its base, still and deep enough to totally immerse herself in the refreshing coolness, surrounded by the curious gazes of freshwater mullet. The other tourists in her group were not so adventurous, or perhaps this was too tame for them. So Dierdre put her sandals back on and followed the others up the path and over the rocks that brought them up to the second and third pools filling with the cascade as it spilled over the lip of the escarpment out of the rain forest. It was heaven. Already her head was pounding less, her skin had lost that hot dry feeling and her forehead the tightness from squinting against the too-bright sun. This was heaven.

She noticed right away that the bottom of the pool was uneven: there were large rocks hidden in the water that tripped her up. Under the falls themselves the sensation was intense. The water pelted her head and shoulders like an avalanche of pebbles and she half expected to come away with bruises. But like after the ministrations of a muscular masseur, she felt the tension leaving her body, her own muscles relaxing after the long trip in the car, the enforced sitting. Conversation was impossible beyond shrieks of pleasure and Dierdre frisked and frollicked under the falls, finally retreating to calm waters close by where she lay on her back and looked up at the blue sky framed by the tropical vegetation. “I’ll be back,” she thought to herself.

Cywydd llosgyrnog

2005-05-10T09:02:00.000-04:00

When the weather is warm and fine
I hang my laundry on the line
In the sunshine till it dries.
The sounds of nature soothe me there.
Fresh smells of laundry fill the air;
A bird lands there, then it flies.

Symphony No. 1: The Red Guru

2005-04-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

On September 11, 2001 the world was horrified when two passenger jets were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, resulting in the death of everyone aboard and thousands of people in the office complex and on the grown below. It was not just the sudden and senseless loss of life that affected the world, but the malicious intent behind it and the inability to comprehend how other human beings could conceive of the act that has come to be known simply as “9/11”.

Andrew Paul MacDonald’s first symphony, The Red Guru, attempts to describe that event, evoking the emotional reactions so many of us experienced on that day, in a programmatic way in the first part, starting with an aural representation of a city coming to life in the early morning, the sense of impending disaster and shocking fortissimos as the world ended, followed by the confusion and horror as the enormity of the event reached around the globe.

The second part expresses the grief engendered by 9/11, followed by a sense of reconciliation and healing. The piece ends with the individual musicians of the orchestra playing melodies of lullabies from diverse cultures accompanied by the clanging of bells and a brass choir intoning a prayer for peace.

The symphony is inspired by David Sorenson’s painting of the same name: amid the chaos and distraction of violent brushstrokes of vivid colour, the red guru floats serenely, a symbol of hope and peace.

Thaw

2005-03-30T16:08:00.000-05:00

by Ralph Gustafson (1909 – 1995)

Procrastination fumbles
Every frond
Of forest-snow; across
The frozen pond

The plane of sunlight scrapes
Concealment thin,
On north-banks cuts away
Each ravelin.

The tooth of April chumbles
In the mud,
Razing history where
A footstep stood;

The crusted runnels sag
Beneath the weight
Of sun; the brittle drifts
Disintegrate.

Abrupt, the cables of
The landscape lapse,
The hidden girders of
The frost collapse

And like a blast of gold,
A clarion,
A thousand startled waters
Take the sun.

Small Town by the Lake by Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958)

2005-03-16T09:56:00.000-05:00

As I stumbled through the woods,
suddenly the trees parted,
revealing the vista before me:
the reflection of red roofs
and pastel plastered walls
on the still waters of a lake.

There was no boat to ferry me across,
no vessel at all to mar the mirror perfection
of the glassy surface;
only the reflected town itself
and the fluffy whiteness of a lowering sky.

The arching trees under which I stood
mimicked the cathedral spire,
or perhaps it was merely
a country church belfry
which strove to impale the passing clouds.

Off in the distance,
beyond the town,
I spied farms and fields
fading into the far horizon.
The town crouched under its cover of cloud,
admiring its image in the silent lake.

I gazed upon its perfection,
but eventually turned aside,
allowing the trees to close behind me
like a heavy green drape
hiding the village, obscuring the lake,
as though it had never been.

Hurrah hurrah!

2005-02-18T07:49:00.000-05:00

Yay! The editors of that illustrious publication, in their great wisdom, have decided to publish In a Tavern in The Mitre. Whoopee!

What Colour is the Future?

2005-01-21T09:03:00.000-05:00

Peel back a few more layers, like an onion, which, if you think about it, is only layers, layers of white or yellow or purple, starting with a dry, papery skin and changing to thick, fleshy, crisp portions encircling another layer, until you finally reach the middle of the onion, which can be white or yellow or green, but which is truly the future, the core which will sprout and send up a stalk which will flower and produce black seeds, which are again another manifestation of the future. Therefore, if we are to use the onion as our analogy for the future, the hue in question must be green, the colour of chlorophyl, of life itself using pure sunlight for food.

Sunlight, yellow, white, brilliant sunlight, which fuels the solar-powered batteries, the energy of the future; but what is the future? Is it tomorrow? Is it next week, next year, is it what we meet as we cross the street or turn the corner? The future does not rightfully exist, for it is only potential, like the stored energy in those solar-powered batteries, and as soon as we wake up and look at the calendar and realize that yesterday’s tomorrow is today, the future becomes the present and is soon relegated to the past with every tick of the clock. A life cut short is suddenly devoid of any future, any potential ceases to exist. The books one had planned to write, the paintings he would have produced, all fade into gauzy non-existence since they will never now be realized. They cease to be a part of the future. They lose all colour, and evaporate like the morning mist off the river.

How can you realistically answer the question “What colour is the future?” We already have fixed metaphors: His future was bleak. Her future was rosy. The future held a golden promise. We cannot talk about the colour of the future any more than we can describe musical sounds as colours, and yet we do. “A dark pall hung ominously over the future like the far-off fringed clouds raining on distant fields.” This is only a projection, for the future arrives steadily and inexorably, revealing itself to be a sham, a masquerade for our own fears and expectations. “The worst or the best is yet to come.” But what if the worst comes and then something even worse happens, or conversely, the best is followed by something even better?

I think I would prefer to go back to the original onion analogy and say that the future is white like an unmarked page or black like a blank slate. The future is pristine and unsullied, and that snow-white page or black, chalk-free slate only becomes filled with description after the future has already travelled its distance and become the past.

In a Tavern

2004-12-19T23:38:00.000-05:00

Pyotr stepped out of the cold into the warmth of the smoky tavern. His glasses fogged up immediately and the frozen sleet on his mustache began melting, running in rivulets onto his lips and into his beard. “Hey, Vladimir,” he called out to the man behind the bar wiping the counter with a striped dish towel, “coffee! I’m half frozen!” He polished his glasses on a large handkerchief he produced from his pocket and made his way to a table, placing his outer garments on the back of a chair.

“Pyotr, it’s been too long!” said a large, gaily-dressed woman as she wrapped her ample arms around him in a bear hug. “We hardly ever see you anymore!”

“Yes, Damiana, I’m sorry, but the baby’s been sick and Maria is pregnant again, so she’s not feeling well. I’m only here for a moment to warm up, then I must go home.”

Damiana held him off at arm’s length and gave him a practised evaluation. “You sit, I bring you some hot borscht. Vladimir, vodka for Pyotr!” Before he could protest, she was bustling off to the kitchen, barely squeezing through the wide door frame. Soon, she was back with the soup, a plateful of potatoes, thickly-smeared black bread, a mug of beer, and a bottle of vodka.

Unwilling to appear rude, Pyotr dug into the food. The tavern was filling up with regulars and the band started to tune up. He recognized Fredrik on accordion, Ari on fiddle, Stephan on drums and Taras with his guitar lighting up a cigarette. My, how that man could sing, and Ari, his violin could bring down blessings from the Virgin. Maybe I’ll just stay for a few songs, thought Pyotr to himself.

The room was dim, lit only by the candles in red smoky glasses on the checked-cloth-covered tables. As the men smoked, the air became filmy, as though a gauze curtain hung just in front of their faces. Feeling mellow from the hot food, relaxed from the vodka, and his feet finally thawed out, Pyotr began enjoying himself. The room got smokier, the music wilder and the conversation louder. Soon there were two empty vodka bottles on Pyotr’s table, the other chairs now occupied by acquaintances happy to see him and share a drink. When Taras launched into a song about the unfaithfulness of women, Pyotr suddenly remembered Maria at home with the sick baby. He dug his watch out of his pocket and realized he had been in the tavern for three hours! Oh no, she would kill him!

“Vladimir,” he yelled at the barman, “black coffee!”

Damiana bustled over. “Pyotr, have some more vodka!”

“No,” he cried, “coffee, black! I have to go or Maria will kill me!” He quickly fumbled on his outerwear, wove his way through the now crowded room, and stumbled into the clear, cold night.

One building, two perceptions

2004-12-03T09:07:00.000-05:00

1. The revolving doors swallow and expel: people go in, people come out. They are oblivious to the gorging/disgorging action the doors mimic. They all seem to have so much purpose, so much direction in their gait. Just above the endlessly-twisting turnstiles the windows start, great soulless eyes that stare out on the street below, spattered with rain, tracking the soot and dust of city grime like tears on a child’s face. The windows go on forever; the building rises upward, almost featureless, like a slab of granite ready to be cut for a tombstone. Whose names will be inscribed here? Do the people appearing like ants when viewed from the upper storeys think about those blank, lidless eyes as they scurry to and fro? Probably not. They have only the thoughts they think in their individual heads, those heads bowed against the rain or protected by umbrellas. I wonder about their own private sorrows, the disappointments of their lives, if they are so different one from the other. The one in the gray overcoat with the fedora, what darkness lurks in his heart and mind? The woman walking the other way with the yellow umbrella seems out of place in this dreary environment. I ride the elevator upwards and downwards in this stele-like hive of glass and steel and marble. My fellow passengers do not converse, there is an unspoken law of unspeaking. They do not make eye contact. The silence is almost funerary. The only relief is the young man next to me with the bouquet of flowers, their brightness an afront to the subdued colours of this place. It is good to be on the main floor, hard polished granite underfoot, and regurgitated through that revolving maw into the dreary rain outside.

2. This is the place, the temple, so to speak, where I bring my offering of posies. It is raining when I arrive and people are scurrying in and out through the revolving doors, pulling up collars, jamming hats on more firmly or unfurling umbrellas. If you throw your vision out of focus, it seems like a show of swirling colours, patternless but always moving in the same direction. The building is very tall and huge glass windows cover all sides. They throw back myriad reflections and still glint and sparkle in the rain. They are tinted gold and seem to glow with their own light. Perhaps they do. In the elevator there is a feeling of cameraderie as we nod and smile at strangers. Only the old man next to me seems lost and out of touch with the humanity around him. But he is soon gone and I admire the spacious lobby with the polished granite floors, sparkling where dayight glances off flecks of quartz in their matrix. People bustle about continuously, calling, greeting. I am overwhelmed with the sense of the place, of community. As I emerge I look up and notice a patch of blue through the overcast. Soon there will be sunshine and the building will shine like a golden box of delights.

In one life, how many times can the heart break?

2004-11-28T09:12:00.000-05:00

In one life, how many times can the heart break? Samuel looked up from the grassy mound at his feet and read the inscription on the stele in front of him:

Martha Bagget
1943-1986
Loving wife and mother
Resquiat in pace

Next to her tombstone was a smaller stone, a child’s stone:

Catherine Baggett
1972-1980

and another:

Joshua Baggett
1976-1986

Samuel sighed and raised his eyes farther, looking past the other markers in the small cemetary, seeking the distant hills, the dark woods and the high cirrus clouds like gauze curtains in the bright sunlight. How many times indeed? He whistled once and Brandy came bounding back from where he had been inspecting the scents left by others of his race, leaving his own signature atop theirs.

Samuel leaned heavily on his cane as he descended the hill and found the path to his own cabin. So many years of labour and loss weighed heavily on him. Somehow he had managed to keep going. First Cathy died of scarlet fever. That had been a terrible blow. She had been the apple of his eye, the delight of his soul. She ran to him through the apple orchard of his memory, golden curls framing her cherubic face, apple blossoms caught in their folds. Then it was Joshua, swept away by measles. Only it hadn’t been the measles that had killed him, but the meningitis that followed. He had been Samuel’s little man, his future. Samuel had shown him the manly arts: how to whittle with a pen knife, how to test the wind with a moistened fingertip for direction, when the fish bit; and Martha, Martha his partner in life, through thick and thin, sickness and health, who had caught Joshua’s measles and cared for him even when she could do nothng for herself. Gone. All gone. As though they had never been, except for the stone markers on the hillside.

Samuel settled into the wicker chair on the porch and watched the sun lower itself towards those distant hills. He too would be gone soon. There was no reason to hang around. Brandy whined as though sensing his master’s thoughts and Samuel scratched him behind his ears. It’s like water under the bridge, he thought to himself. The river gets dug deeper, but the water that did the digging is long gone. There was no point breaking Brandy’s heart too. Samuel could wait at least that long.

A Rainy-weather Renga

2004-11-26T09:17:00.000-05:00

The man wears a hat,
His coat is black and quite worn,
His shoes are broken.

He carries an umbrella,
The pointed spokes extruding.

It rains cats and dogs:
They meow, bark, chase each other;
Streets are awash in chaos.

But the homeless man uses
His umbrella like a shield.

He does not notice
The kitten curled ’round his hat
Or the small puppy

Which clings to his frayed pantleg
As he splashes through puddles.

This is so common,
That the sky deposits pets
On the city streets:

Pet stores have lost all business
Since dogs and felines are free.

But, fortunately,
Equipped to deal with downpours
The City’s sewers

Have extra large openings
And empty in the country.

The homeless man walks,
Shrugs off the cat and puppy,
Seeks some dry shelter,

Tends his garden of catnip
And his diary of bones.

2004-11-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

The End of the Affair

2004-11-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

Mary sniffled as the chopped onion stung her eyes and the tears dripped off the end of her nose.

“Could you pass me a tissue, please?” she asked John, who was seeding a tomato at the other end of the counter.

“Uh, sure, here,” he handed her a paper towel, slightly damp with tomato juice. “So, what did you think of the play?” he asked.

Mary threw the chopped onion into the wok, where it sizzled on contact with the hot oil. “It was okay,” she said.

“Just okay?” sputtered John. “MacBeth is a classic!”

“I know,” replied Mary, as she went to work on some cloves of garlic. “We studied it in school.”

John wrestled with the cork from the red wine. It suddenly slid out of the neck of the bottle with a resounding “pop”. “Wine?” he offered her a glassful.

“Sorry, I don’t drink when I cook,” she answered, putting the glass far back on the counter out of danger from the spattering oil. She quickly turned down the heat.

“Well, what did you like about it?” asked John.

“About what?”

“About the play!”

“Oh, I thought Duncan was really good, and MacDuff too, but the others were kind of weak,” Mary replied as she gave the vegetables a stir.

“Yeah, but what about the fight scenes?” asked John.

“I don’t remember,” she answered.

“Oh, come on, they were the best part!” he insisted.

“Could you pass me the carrots, please?”

Mary proceeded to peel and chop the carrots before adding them to the wok with a sprinkling of salt.

“Hey,” exclaimed John, “aren’t you going to add rosemary?”

“No,” said Mary, “I hate rosemary.”

“But I always put rosemary in my stir fries!”

“Well, if I’m going to eat it, no rosemary.” Mary quickly peeled and diced some new potatoes and tossed them in. Now she added a pinch of dill.

“So, what else did you think of the play?” asked John, starting on his second glass of wine. “What about Lady MacBeth?”

Mary stirred the contents of the wok, sniffed appraisingly, and threw in a handful of dried parsley and a bay leaf. “I thought she acted really well, but I hated her dress.”

John looked thoughtfully into his wine. “I don’t remember her dress.”

“How could you miss it?” exclaimed Mary. “Her boobs looked like two enormous bags hanging off her chest!”

John said, puzzled, “I thought she looked nice!”

Mary rolled her eyes and added the celery she had just finished chopping. “Would you please check the rice, John?” she asked sweetly. She glanced sideways at him and watched his glasses steam up as he lifted the pot lid. While his vision was thus obscured, she measured out a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper and added it to the now fragrant vegetables.

Replacing the pot lid and retrieving his wine, John said, “What do you say we go to a movie tonight after dinner? That one about the motorcycle racing looked really good!”

“Maybe,” said Mary. “We’ll see.” She now added to the wok the seitan which had been marinating in tamari and ginger and the chopped tomatoes, turned the heat down and covered it. “I believe I will have that wine now,” she said, and sipped it carefully. “I was thinking I’d like to see that new Hugh Grant movie, actually. I’ve got a newspaper; we could check the times.”

“Hugh Grant! You mean a chick flick?”

Mary noticed that the wine bottle was mostly empty. She quickly rose, got out the plates and cutlery and set the table. She emptied the rice into a china bowl and set it on the table. Then she removed the wok from the heat, placed it on a cork mat in front of John, handed him the serving spoon and said, “I hope it’s hot enough for you.”

The Wingmen of Tyndall

2004-10-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen the wingmen of Tyndall? You haven’t then, I thought not. Very few get to see them, most have the opinion that they’re just a myth, a fairy tale, but I swear I’ve seen them on a summer’s evening flying westward as though chasing the setting sun. I was visiting my Ukranian cousins in Winnipeg, looking forward to Aunt Rita’s potato pieroghies and maybe a moment or two in private with sweet Debby. She was engaged to an orthopedic shoe salesman, but that didn’t stop us from a little organ practice in the choir loft of the Ukranian church after the Sunday service. I had driven my old Volvo west from Beauséjour, Dixieland jazz loud on the tape deck, when I noticed what I first took to be bats swooping in the golden light. Then I realized that they were the wrong shape for bats and farther away than I first reckoned. I kept driving west, glancing at them from time to time, still mystified when the light began to fade and I had to pay more attention to the road than the scenery.

I saw them again a couple of evenings later when Debby and I were examining some breastwork, having told Aunt Rita we were going out to play croquet, when I saw them again. This time there was no doubt in my mind that I was looking at people, people with wings, swooping and soaring like shore birds over the grassy prairie. Their carmine capes fluttered out behind them, making them look like avian supermen. Debby and I got comfortable on a hay bale and watched them untl they departed with the sun set. I still don’t know where they went.

When we got back to my Aunt’s, we didn’t know if we should mention our discovery or not. The shoe salesman’s car was in the driveway and we had a quick job of making sure there was no hay in our hair or clothing. Also, the fiancé was a bit of a pragmatist, and the situation wasn’t conducive to a discussion of winged westerners. Instead, we said nothing, planning that we would return to that spot on the morrow with a camera to document this irregular occurence.

Alas, it was not to be. It rained the next day and the next, and I was obliged to luxuriate in the lap of familial warmth. Debby’s fiancé thankfully did not appear during that time, and we were able to study synaptic responses to various stimuli. On the third day we packed a picnic lunch and headed out for a hike; and there, as we emerged from the trailhead facing west, we saw them, the wingmen of Tyndall, ebullient with the joy of flight, flashing red from their capes, glorious in the Manitoba sunset.

So you’ve never seen them, eh? Well, it’s a special thing all right. I never saw them again myself. Debby married her orthopedic shoe salesman and moved to Calgary. Aunt Rita sold her house and moved into a retirement home and stopped making pieroghies. There hasn’t been much call for me to drive out there recently, and my old Volvo finally gave up the ghost chugging through the Crow’s Nest Pass. But that’s another story, and if you’re ever back this way, I might tell it to you.

Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki, Op. 36

2004-10-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

De profundis clamavit. From out of the depths I cry to thee, but though I walk in the valley, the mountains do not move closer of their own accord. Mohammed must go to the mountains and shout from their summits, “Let my people go!” For as I lay dying, I heard the strains of heavy machinery wailing in the distance and the sounds of silence wove a fortress about me. The crying in the wilderness did not deter my search for the engine of happiness, the joy of sex, nor the scarlet pimpernel. “I am a god,” said Claudius. “I fly and I fall earthward, but I soar aloft on angels’ wings, wings of lapis and azurite and turquoise, jewelled by Hopi who hope for more.”

There is no more, merely a descrescendo and descent back to the depths from whence cometh our lord, for thine is the kindom, the power and the glory, glory hallelujah! For mine eyes have lifted up to the hills from whence cometh the ice and snow, the glacier that flows and the arctic wind that blows. “I am invincible,” said Old Man Winter, as he clambered out of the depths, de profundis, crying out, O Lord, a mighty fortress; but the fog lifted and rose, wafting away in the sunshine, leaving the blue and green and yellow and all the colours as pink as a baby’s bottom, until one voice called out of the wilderness, “See me! Hear me! Touch me!” and we did. We saw, we heard, we touched, we were admonished, and we bowed down defeated.

But the angel said, “Fear not, for I bring you tidings of great joy,” and the sky filled with light and a multitude of the heavenly host had tea and crumpets and smiled benevolently on the shepherds shitting their pants from fear. For lo, the ground opened and out spilled a great light, the illumination of Gutenberg, the flowing outward of words, words, words, and Hamlet bowed his head to the outpouring and was humbled.

There are mountains and there are valleys and there are trolley cars that travel through city streets, filled with the dregs of humanity wending their way homeward, anxious for hearth and home, the pipe-bearing dog. Yea verily I say unto you, pack up your sorrows, for only the answer is blowing in the wind, the dust has cleared, the fallen masonry is gone, there is nothing left; only the barren sands stretch far away, there is no pedestal to stand upon, no soap box to preach from. We fall, we crawl, we return to the depths from whence we emerged, our voices silenced; there is nothing left to say, just starlight and gaslight. De profundis clamavit.

Intruder alert!

2004-10-12T17:46:00.000-04:00

In the early morning light Tabitha squinted at the invading photons inexorably undermining her continued attempts at sleep. Whose idea was it to have sheer lace curtains instead of sensible, heavy drapes? Oh, it was hers. She had said something about elegance versus utility to her mother, who had warned her that the summer sun would do just what it was presently doing. Tabitha had felt so independent, flaunting her mother’s advice. After all, her bedroom did face east. It was inevitable that sooner or later she would be exposed in the full light of day.

As Tabitha tried to bring her eyes gradually more open, the objects in the room took on more focus. The clothes hanging on her coat tree lost the appearance of the gardner whom she had inherited with the house and turned back onto her bathrobe and the fancy, feathered headdress she had tossed on top after Saturday’s costume party. The objects on her dresser gave up their masquerade as stalking predators and turned back into the various boxes, brushes and perfume bottles they were supposed to be.

One item in the room took longer than the others to resolve itself into an understandable shape. It was an antique milk can Tabitha had picked up at the local craft fair, painted black and then decorated with stylized leaves and flowers. It had two handles so it could presumably be strapped onto a horse or made fast in a wagon. Tabitha had fallen in love with it as soon as she set eyes on it, even though, or perhaps because, her mother had questioned the wisdom of purchasing such an outrageously-priced piece of junk, no matter how it was painted, and bringing it into a beautiful home such as Tabitha’s when it properly belonged in a barn. The younger woman was not to be deterred though, and the painted bucket was duly loaded into the trunk with the other “objets d’art” and set up in the corner of the bedroom as a receptacle for a long bouquet of pampas grasses.

Now, as Tabitha’s morning vision cleared, she could see the white awns swaying in the breeze from the open window like the beard on a grizzled dwarf. The dark flowered bucket, obscured still in shadow, looked like patterned trousers, or perhaps merely paint-splattered. Try as she might, this superimposed image would not fade, and Tabitha finally sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and jammed her glasses on her face, grateful that the bearded dwarf had finally reverted to pampas grass once more.

Musical musings

2004-09-03T13:10:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I posted here. I wanted to use this particular blog for my creative work, short stories, poetry, that sort of thing, but I guess I’m just not prolific enough to justify saving it for that purpose. I am loathe to write personal things here because people who know me, particularly my daughter and her friends, have access to this site, and I generally unburden myself in my personal diary elsewhere. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t still use this space for other reflections and recollections, as I have already done.

The new music ensemble of which I am a member will be performing a concert in November (the rhyme was unintentional) and will feature compositions for electronic, as well as acoustic, instruments. One of the pieces, Terry Riley’s In C, consists of a page of musical fragments, all in the key of C, which must be played in order by all members of the ensemble at the same tempo, but out of sync. When one person decides he has played one fragment long enough, he goes on to the next one, thus prompting other players to change as well, in their own sweet time. The second piece is Cassiopeia by George Caccioppo, and the score itself is the star chart of the constellation of the same name. Certain main stars are labelled with pitches, while other connecting sections are performed ad lib. by the musicians. I’ll actually be singing in both of those pieces.

The third work has yet to be written; it will be a world premiere by my husband (who, for general information, will be playing electric guitar in the other two pieces) utilizing the computer program MAX MSP (or something like that) and will be an interactive piece between musicians and computer. My job in this composition is totally different from my previous rôles. I have been charged with the composition of a short story, based on a theme of my husband’s choosing, to be written ahead of time so that he can use certain phrases or individual words to trigger certain reactions in the computer program. During the performance itself I will sit at the keyboard and type the story so that it appears on a screen for the audience to read in real time, and for the computer to react to those preprogrammed words as they come up. It should be very interesting.

The “plot” for the story has to follow the idea of a secret flower. I am waiting for my husband to give me a list of words he wants included in it, otherwise I have absolutely no inspiration for this thing. He wants it a certain length, which means I should get to work immediately, but still I don’t know what to write. This will prove a challenge, I’m sure.

In the meantime classes start next week, I will find out exactly how many students have been assigned to me, and I will arrange my schedule around Latin 101 which I have decided will be my academic pursuit for the next while, at least. It can’t be any harder than ancient Greek was, or maybe it can. There are more cases, but the vocabulary will be more familiar to me. I’m actually getting quite excited about it. This should be fun. Hard work, but fun.

One Afternoon in the Library

2004-08-11T09:41:00.000-04:00

It was very quiet in the library. Daylight slanted in through the second-story window, and golden dust motes danced along its blinding beams. The books on the shelves glowed in the afternoon sun, glinting gold themselves as the gilt lettering on a spine or the gold leaf along the top of the pages reflected a gleam of light. A smell of leather binding and dry paper hung in the air, and the general silence was punctuated regularly by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the entryway. It read 4:44 p.m., getting close to closing time.

The few remaining patrons would be thinking about leaving soon, gathering up their belongings, putting on coats and hats, checking out books and going home for supper. But right now it was calm and peaceful. Miss Pringles in the English literature section was completely engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities, occasionally making notes on a pad as she deciphered Dickens. Jenny Bealey was quietly poring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the reference section, also taking notes as she researched the human digestive system for biology class. In the periodicals, Mr. Grub was lazily turning the pages of this month’s Car & Driver, stopping now and again to look hungrily at pictures of the Lamborghini he could not hope to afford on a vice-principal’s salary.

At precisely 4:45 p.m. the grandfather clock broke the stillness by striking the three-quarter hour. The door flew open, and a tall man entered the library, carrying a large bag over his shoulder and smelling in some indefinable way of cat urine. A gust of wind followed him into the building, and a lone oak leaf fluttered in and came to rest on the rotunda floor as the heavy door swung to. Miss Hobbs, the librarian, looked over the tops of her little, half-moon glasses and said in a voice barely above a whisper, “May I help you?”

The tall man put his sack down on the floor and took off a cap, revealing deep-sunken eyes in a craggy, emaciated face. His jacket was mustard yellow, his pants brown, and his shabby shoes looked down at heel and out at toe. In a voice that sounded like coarse sandpaper being rubbed on a rasp, he said, “Have you got any books on Italian Renaissance art?”

Old Man Partington and young Sarah Billingsworth

2004-08-07T10:40:00.000-04:00

The old Partington place sits alone off the road a ways. You can approach it from the weed-ridden driveway, but Sarah Billingsworth always comes at it through the brush and woods that have grown up around it over the years of neglect. It’s not that the place is vacant, boarded-up windows staring blankly as the world continues on around it. Oh no, old Mr. Partington still lives there and keeps up with its basic maintenance. On a summer day you can see a lace curtain flutter through an open window. In the winter smoke curls out of the brick chimney, fed by the wood stove the old man keeps fueled with the logs he gathers and chops each summer from the adjoining wood lot.

But it’s a big, rambling house, and the old man gets lonely. Once the house was full of life, when he and Mrs. Partington were younger. They had five children who filled the rooms with laughter, and eventually a myriad of grandchldren would come to visit. But those days are over. Mrs. P. is many years dead, the children moved away, the grandchildren caught up in their own adolescent lives. Old Man Partington gets very few visitors these days, but he does have one regular.

Sarah Billingsworth isn’t from around here. She came to the town from England to work as an au pair at the Stilton house. The work meant that she could escape her oppressive family life in Manchester and strike out in the New World to make her fortune. She discovered the Partington place quite by accident when she was out in the woods with her little Stilton charges looking for blueberries. Mr. P. was chopping wood, stacking it neatly behind the house on the lee side where it was less likely to get rainsoaked, when their eyes met. Sarah, 18 and Old Man Partington, 72, stopped thunderstruck as an unspoken recognition passed between the two of them. For a moment the rest of the world did not exist, the three Stilton children forgotten, the axe dangling loosely from the old man’s hand. Suddenly a blue jay called from a nearby tree and was scolded by a chickadee, and time resumed.

But from that moment, the unlikely pair became very close. Sarah would come and visit Mr. Partington evenings after her charges were in bed and on her days off. She started helping him around the house, and he saw in her a reincarnation of his departed Nellie. When they made love, as it was inevitable they would, there were no fireworks, just a feeling of homecoming. It was their secret, and it was special.

Surprises

2004-08-01T11:59:00.005-04:00

Giving birth is full of surprises. Of course, some of them are expected, if you can anticipate being surprised. But there are sudden, wonderful occurrences totally beyond our ability to imagine. The whole pregnancy phenomenon is so well documented that there is very little pre-natal class does not prepare you for. Even that first flutter of movement in the womb at 16 weeks is anticipated, but always unexpected. That is the first unmistakable sign that you are harbouring a life other than your own, something separate, uncontrolled, and therefore surprising.

But the birthing itself is an adventure in unpreparedness. First you go to the hospital, armed with Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, having been told, “We don’t want you to go past your due date, so we’ll induce labour.” The wait, after the nurse has made a mess of your left hand trying to get the intravenous in right, is interminable. The surprise there was how little it hurt, as she pushed and pulled and jiggled that needle about. The resulting bruise is not surprising.

You wait, as you read about the boat on the Thames picking bodies out of the water, and then the first contraction slams your body like a full frontal football tackle. Where were the gentle contractions, the timing by the watch? What the hell did you learn in pre-natal class that would help you deal with this indescribable pain? “Breathe,” your partner says, keeping eye contact until the pain subsides. Then there is calm, briefly. Once more, a mine explodes in your abdomen, leaving you sweating, short of breath.

“Please,” you implore the nurse, “I’m not trying to be a hero. You can give me something for the pain.” So they inject you with something in your thigh that actually works, makes the contractions bearable, but just barely. All the pre-natal preparation is for naught. Effleurage with a monitor strapped to your belly? Forget it. Walking around the delivery room with an I.V. drip in your wrist? Impossible. The drug has worn off. But there is a giant goose egg at the site of injection, an obvious allergic reaction. The medical staff is loath to give you another. You get a shot of Demerol® instead.

As the new drug takes effect, you find yourself shunted off to the side, not aware anymore of your situation. Then the next contraction grabs you with jackhammer force, sending blinding pain into your befogged universe. There is no respite. There is no time to steel yourself against the next contraction because there is no warning. One moment you are barely conscious, the next you are battling the undertow in a sea of pain.

The talk of the doctors, of your partner, is happening through a haze. They are asking him to sign a permission form so they can perform an emergency cæsarian section. “Oh no,” you think to yourself, “they’re adding injury to insult.” Another surprise when the epidural enters your spine: there is no more pain. But you are shaking like a leaf and feel as though you will never be warm again. And then the nurse lays a hot blanket on top of you and the warmth is like a hug, a surprise kiss from a loved one.

Surprise! All of a sudden a baby is wailing where there were only adults a moment before. You think, “Another soprano!” and then that baby is wrapped up, lying in the crook of your arm, eyes closed, long blonde hair framing a heart-shaped face, tiny rose-bud mouth pursed, ready to root when hunger strikes. A life that emerged from your poor, torn flesh, another human being. The most wonderful surprise possible, that through an incredible ordeal of pain comes such perfection, such poetry.

This is not about my diet!

2004-07-25T16:35:00.000-04:00

I got into an argument today with a stranger in a chatroom who asked me why I lied to people when I told them I was a vegetarian and that I eat fish. As far as I am concerned, I am not lying. I am a vegetarian and I also eat fish on occasion. It is not a major part of my diet, and it is a good compromise when I am eating out and there is nothing else on the menu that appeals to me or falls within the confines of what I consider to be vegetarian. She said that I was not a vegetarian if I ate fish, hence I was lying.

I have learned that many different styles of eating may be called vegetarianism. My own particular brand is pescevegetarian, a vegetarian who supplements her diet with fish. That does not make me any less of a vegetarian than one who supplements her diet with eggs and dairy products. Yet this chatroom stranger only considered me a liar because I ate fish, which is technically speaking an animal, and not because I ate animal products, which are technically not vegetables. Even when I explained that the original meaning of the word “vegetarian” is derived from the Latin vegetus and means “whole foods” and said that my own diet was more on those lines, she still would not let up on the fact that I was “lying”.

The question then pertains to the meaning of the word “lying”, not “vegetarianism”. Looking up the word “lie” on Dictionary.com, I get these two definitions:

1. To present false information with the intention of deceiving.
2. To convey a false image or impression.

When I tell people I am a vegetarian, I am not intending deceit. I even tell them that I eat fish. This is so much easier than saying, “Hi, I eat fish, but I don’t eat any other animal foods, except for milk and eggs.” If I say, “I am a vegetarian,” they already know that I don’t eat meat. When I add that I eat fish, they breathe a sigh of relief because most non-vegetarians cannot conceive of preparing a meal which doesn’t contain some sort of animal protein. As a matter of fact, I recently lunched for the first time at a new acquaintance’s house and was fed spinach quiche, loaded with cheese and eggs. In my normal day-to-day meal preparation, I avoid cheese and eggs because they are so high in saturated fat. On the other hand, fish is good for you. So my definition of myself as a vegetarian is linked more closely to the original meaning from the Latin than from being an eater of solely vegetable matter. We have a word for that kind of person, “vegan”.

So, am I a liar? This is what I most want to know. Am I purposely trying to deceive by calling myself a vegetarian even though I eat fish? Am I trying to present a false image or impression of myself?

Most of us lie on a daily basis. When asked how we are, we reply, “Fine, thank you,” even if we are not technically-speaking in the best of health. When asked, “Does this dress make me look fat?” we know damned well to lie through our teeth. A friend returns from a trip to the hairdresser with a new coif that you consider frightful but which your friend is all excited about, and you lie, saying it is very becoming. We lie specifically so that we do not hurt people’s feelings, so that we do not reveal information about ourselves which we feel is confidential (such as our state of health) and because it is sometimes just faster and more convenient to let an untruth go by that does not in the end hurt anyone or change the space-time continuum in any appreciable way. To say that we are honest 100% of the time would in itself be a lie.

Therefore, I did not lie about being a vegetarian. I just didn’t tell the whole truth.

I have become a chatroom junkie. I am so ashamed.

2004-07-10T09:33:00.000-04:00

The other blog where I keep my day-to-day diary has a chatroom onsite which I visited infrequently at best until just recently. It was frequented by kids anywhere from age 10 to 17 for the most part, and I have found myself in private conversation with the younger children asking me if I have a “crush”. It is actually very funny. Often when they find out that I am in fact a grown-up and I have not shunned them, they ask me for advice about their love life and other teeny-bopper problems. I am usually very polite to these kids and treat them seriously. It’s a difficult age for many.

However, in the past week I have been in this chatroom almost daily, and often for many hours at a time. There is an older crowd, still teenagers, but more mature, who are actually interesting to talk to and joke around with. Being with these guys virtually makes me feel like a kid again to a certain extent. They appear to accept me as one of them, even though some of them definitely know that I have kids as old as they. It’s exhilarating, and I have become addicted to it.

Then there are the abusers, those sorry souls who go into chatrooms for the sole purpose of uttering misogynistic profanity at the participants, usually with caps lock on. There is one such young man who keeps a diary at the site. He is extremely articulate in his writing, shows quite a bit of intelligence, but is obviously suffering from some kind of personality disorder or is dealing with past baggage. His entries show that he hates women, uses them if he can, and make me think that he was abused as a child or had a very bad experience where his mother was concerned. In the chatroom, however, he sounds like a moron. Every exchange breaks down to the ultimate “SUCK MY COCK, BITCH!” that typifies him. Women are “fat bitches” and his answer to everything is a demand for fellatio. A very sick man. I have had a few altercations with him, but I think that in the future I shall just avoid him completely.

There are other sad cases as well who, while not as bad as the young man mentioned above, always seem to be picking fights. This I do not understand. Among the regulars there is rarely any attempt at real information sharing. Talk is often merely banter, or discussion of popular culture: movies, music, etc. The younger ones are always asking “asl”, and the older ones are always refusing to reply or giving obviously bogus answers. It has become a joke.

I have made virtual friends with a highschool student from Finland who wants to go into the recording industry, a teenaged boy from California who is interested in swords and martial arts, a girl who takes marvellous photographs and several others. It is an interesting mix. They all know each other, I presume from repeated interactions in the chatroom, often by their real names as well. Some keep online diaries, others have signed on just to use the chat. It’s an interesting community. I just have to ask myself what I am really doing there.

Tipping and tailing snowpeas for a stirfry, remembering my father.

2004-07-08T11:04:00.000-04:00

Peas were one of the earliest-ripening crops in my father’s vast garden which took up most of the backyard, and they were delicious, as long as you didn’t let them overripen and become tough and starchy. In order to open the pod easily to get at the little green pearls of goodness inside, he instructed me to grasp the tail end and pull back, effectively removing the “zipper” along the top edge of the pod. It then opened easily with a little pressure from the thumbs.

He also taught me how to remove the inner membrane from the pod, rendering it edible. It was sweet and crunchy, and a just reward for the tricky job of peeling back that translucent layer of cellulose. Little things, like preparing snowpeas for a stirfry, bring back these memories of the man now dead four years who played such an important rôle in the formation of who I am today. He taught me how to husk corn fresh from the yard; how to crush grapes to make wine; how to save tomato seeds for next year’s crop; and how to wear a can on a string around my neck to free up my hands when harvesting raspberries.

So many memories of my father are connected to the garden, perhaps because he was truly happy there among his plants which responded to his loving care, which did not answer back or question him, which unconditionally gave of themselves without asking anything in return. He was not comfortable around people unless he was the centre of attention, telling jokes or giving lectures. He was not comfortable around us, his family.

Growing up, I had feelings of ambivalence at best toward this parent. He was a strict disciplinarian, possibly making up for an inferiority complex fed by his own childhood emotional baggage. He could not stand to be contradicted, and so offered his opinions hardly at all. I cannot remember having deep philosophical discussions with him, or any discussions at all that did not somehow centre around the things that interested him: his garden, the Castle organ, the Canadian Shield.

And how has this all affected me? I love growing things, although I am not as conscientious about my own garden as he was about his. I am not trying to escape though, as he was. I love geology: rocks, caves, mountains, the stories written thereon that outlast us. It is the sense of age and timelessness that awes me. I do not know what awed my father. He never said.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet.

2004-07-05T21:03:00.000-04:00

Food. Such a wonderful thing. Eating is a pleasure, or it should be, since we have to eat to live. But what about those who live to eat?

The other night I viewed Fahrenheit 9/11, and while I don’t want to review it here, I do want to mention something I could not help noticing throughout the film. America is full of fat people. Lots and lots of fat people. It is shocking, but perhaps not wholly unexpected. In the land of plenty where there is too much food available and affordable, people overeat. In a land where one needn’t chase one’s dinner, but can drive up to the take-out window instead, it should not surprise us that people take in more calories than they expend and are, as a result, obese. It appears to be a sickness.

Actually, obesity is the cause of much preventable illness, from diabetes to heart disease, high blood pressure and all their attendant evils. It is so avoidable, just like the ills associated with smoking and drinking, and yet the population continues to balloon outward at an alarming rate. It all comes down to corporate profits.

Food companies keep coming out with new products aimed at different segments of consumer society. Just take a trip to the supermarket to see how we are influenced. Candies in bags at the checkout counter have joined the chocolate bars and breath mints. Snack food comes in ever larger packaging. You cannot buy a bag with one serving of potato chips inside. Instead you get an economy-sized bag that is supposed to feed 20 people. How many people will polish off half of that bag in one sitting? Do any of them actually read the side of the package to find out what a recommended serving is so that they can measure it out very carefully into a bowl, close up the bag and store it away for another time?

The food companies make their products just too damned delicious and irresistable. “Bet you can’t just eat one” is all too true. But the same companies are coming out with products aimed at those fatties who are leaping on the diet band wagons with low-carbohydrate snacks (which are only marginally lower in complex carbs than their regular products). It was the same story when low-fat foods were put on the market. People intent on losing weight just switched to low-fat versions of what they were already snacking on. But because the lower calorie versions didn’t fill them up as much, they ate more. Who gains? The fat people gain more weight, and the food companies gain more profits.

No, my friends, the only way to defeat this cycle of corporate greed and national obesity is to shun all these products. Do not get sucked into eating snack foods. Period. Get used to being hungry between meals. It’s healthy. Eat more fruits and vegetables, less meat, cheese and eggs. Say “Yes” to complex carbohydrates. They are your friends. Say “No” to potatoes and white bread for you will resemble them. And in all things, practise moderation. For life is short, and we have to enjoy ourselves a little bit, after all.

The Peace Moth

2004-07-03T08:32:00.000-04:00

One day many years ago there was a beautiful visitor hanging around the lantern on the front of the house. He (or she) looked a lot like this guy here:

Hyalophora cecropia
The cecropia, or peace moth, is the largest moth in North America. The particular visitor we had refused to leave, having become enamored of our light, and pined away as his love was unrequited. Eventually he became a mere shadow of his former self and expired for lack of food and drink.

Is it worth it? Is love worth all that?

Frustration at the delays

2004-06-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

I have another on-line diary somewhere in cyberspace in which I write chatty, conversational entries pertaining to my life, including my family, my work and my friends. I like it over there. It didn’t take long to develop a sense of community with other bloggers of like interests and temperaments. I now feel as though I have a circle of friends with whom I exchange ideas at times and whose lives are laid bare for me to see the most intimate details thereof. Of course, I hide nothing from them either, except that the names are changed to protect the innocent. The chances of meeting any of these bloggers in person (except for the couple whom I knew before I started blogging there) is pretty slim. There are some I would love to meet, who seem to have interests similar to and lifestyles compatible with mine.

So what’s the problem? The site has overloaded servers and it makes adding a new entry a hit-and-miss affair. One can upgrade one’s account by paying money to the site, and these “gold members” are able to update more easily than the rest of us cheapskates, although they are experiencing different problems. In my case, I click on the add-entry button and get an error page, over and over again. It is very frustrating. At the same time, the ability to change templates is compromised as well. The same error page comes up. Sadly, I hit the add-entry button by error earlier today and a white box appeared immediately, which I banished. Now I want that white box, and it is as elusive as the proverbial butterfly of love.

Cactus Flower

2004-06-29T09:42:00.000-04:00

It blooms in the dark, releasing into the air its subtle scent, enticing nectar seekers who are unwitting players in the courting dance of pistils and stamens. For one brief night the cactus flower plays out its lust, and then it is gone, hiding its shame with the morning light, soon to wither and be replaced by the pregnant globe of its indiscretion.

Coyote Music

2004-06-23T19:45:00.000-04:00

Coyote smoked his cigarette,
And as he watched the smoke
Rise spiralling to the stars,
I could tell he was planning a prank
From where I sat across the fire.

“We’re going to grab us some moonlight
And put it in a bag;
And when Nokomis finds it’s missing
We’ll just play wide-eyed,
You and I.”

“Coyote,” I said, “how in the world
Do you go bagging moonlight?
That’s like trying to capture a sigh
Or a ray of sunshine,
Or a passing breeze.”

“You just leave it to me,” he said
With that glint in his golden eye.
Then he turned up his furry face
And gave a howl into the night.
It echoed off the hills.

Then he whipped out a leather pouch
And opened it wide to the night;
And just as quick he drew the drawstring tight,
Tucked it back behind his belt,
And took another drag.

“You haven’t got anything there,” I said,
Smirking at him through the flames.
“Whyn’t you show me.”
“No way,” said he, “the light’ll get out
And there won’t be any trick!”

Just then Nokomis entered the circle,
A scowl on her ageless face
And something else, a smudge,
Darkening one cheek.

“Nanabozho,” she said, her voice like cool silver,
“Coyote,” she shouted, now the anger clear;
“Trickster,” she thundered, a vein pulsing in her neck,
“What have you done with my light?”

Coyote bayed at the stars,
Yipped like a kit,
Danced on his hind legs and laughed
And turned to me,
“Now do you believe?”

And I sat there, mouth agaping,
As the fire died down to coals,
As Nokomis waited for her answer
And the stars wheeled above
And the night owl hooted in the trees.

Coyote leapt up and danced;
He pulled out the leather pouch,
Tossing it from hand to hand,
And when Nokomis was fit to burst
He pulled the string,

And out burst a blaze of moonlight,
Silver and brilliant and clear,
And Nokomis burst into brilliance
And outshone the stars as she glowed,
Her light restored.

But of course you don’t believe me
Like I didn’t believe Coyote.
How do you capture a moonbeam
And hide it in a rawhide pouch
On a starry, moonless night?

I am not Cassandra

2004-06-22T14:20:00.000-04:00

Cassandra was a beautiful woman, a Trojan princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, who was endowed with the gift of prophecy. Wooed by Apollo, she spurned him and was punished: Even though her predictions invariably came true, as in the case of Troy being invaded by the Greeks, no one believed her until it was too late. She was carried off to Mycenae as a spoil of war by Agamemnon and murdered along with him by her captor’s wife Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus, who sought vengeance for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphegenia in order that the Greek fleet would have good sailing winds.

Poor Cassandra! The worst part is that she saw it all coming and was powerless to do anything about it. She even saw past her own death to the tale of bloody revenge exacted by Agamemnon’s children, Electra and Orestes, the subject of Aeschylus’ famous trilogy.

And what is the moral of this sad story, you may ask? Do not spurn the love of a god.

I rage at the phage which devours me: Age.

2004-06-20T20:57:00.000-04:00

Long conversation with my mom today. More like a monologue with appropriate insertions by me. She is extremely self centered. I don’t mean conceited, I mean that the world revolves around her, and her world is very small.

Her eyesight is deteriorating because of macular degeneration. That means that she still has peripheral vision, but there are problems with it. The doctor has declared her legally blind in her left eye, 50% sighted in her right. Apparently this is still legal to drive, but at 85 she is not about to hop into a car and start barrelling down the 401, even if she had a car, which she doesn’t anymore.

For quite a while we have done the same crossword puzzle every Saturday (hers from the Globe, mine from the Gazette) and compared notes on Sunday. Every Sunday for a long time now she has been complaining about how difficult it is to see. It’s been getting worse. She has now decided that it is too painful and has given up the Saturday crossword. I am saddened by this. It was something we could do over the distance that brought us together.

Since her heart attack she has been on a very restricted diet: no salt and no fat. One of her few pleasures in life, eating, is no longer a pleasure. I hear her complain about her problems and I think, “Why go on? If there is no joy in existing, why continue to do so?” Yet, she changes topic suddenly and starts talking about how beautiful the trees are in a certain park where my cousins took her picnicking, or how lovely the paintings are on the walls in her house.

Then I realize that the poor eyesight, the tasteless meals, the painful hip and the angina do not lessen in any way her continued zest for life. Her mind is still clear, even though her memory is faulty, and her determination to remain independent as long as she can has not diminished.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the Devil’s bargain; and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

Bathroom musings

2004-06-19T12:44:00.000-04:00

When we were in Greece five years ago, we started rating establishments such as restaurants on the basis of how appealing were their bathrooms. Sometimes the nicest dining room with the most delectably prepared food would score the lowest marks in the restroom category while the highest marks, believe it or not, went to the facilities in the McDonalds in a suburb of Athens.

The biggest detractor for Greek plumbing is the fact that the sewage systems could not handle toilet paper. This entailed having a little covered can in every stall for the disposal of used toilet paper, not a pretty sight (or smell). Greek people are pretty used to the system, since the same situation applies at home as well.

But, unfortunately, tourists from more septically-advanced countries were not always cognizant of the rules, and would flush all sorts of forbidden items into the void. Hence, it was usually public toilets that scored lowest on our list: the ones at museums, national monuments and archaeological sites. The very worst was the ladies’ room at Epidavros: toilets running non-stop, full of paper towelling. Who throws paper towelling into a toilet? And of course this would be the time when you were desperate for a washroom. We did a lot of knee crossing during our Greek sojourn.

But back to the McDonalds for a moment, if you will. Not only was the washroom clean and in good working order, there was no little wastebasket in which to deposit spent toilet paper. They must have paid for it somehow, perhaps with daily plumbing procedures. But the illusion of American convenience and expertise was perpetuated there under those golden Athenian arches.

When stone speaks

2004-06-15T17:25:00.000-04:00

While cleaning up my desk I found a brochure from an art gallery specializing in works by Native Canadian artists advertising a show by Joseph Jacobs, an Iroquois sculptor. My brother and I were at this gallery, just looking, and just by chance, when we saw this man’s sculptures. To say we were blown away would be an understatement. We were amazed. This artist’s ability to give an inaminate material life was just short of miraculous.

There were several pieces of his in the gallery, all beautiful, all complex. The gallery owner, unfortunately, felt he had to keep up a constant patter explaining the symbolism expressed in the carvings, how it related to Iroquois religious belief, the mythologies behind it, et cetera. Neither my brother nor I could care less at that moment. We were just enthralled by the depth of feeling imbued in the stone through this man’s exemplary craft. I have included his website as a link on this page, since I feel more people should have the opportunity to view his work.

I understand that religious beliefs have played an enormous rôle in the production of art over the ages; early European painting was all about Christianity. At some point I would like to learn more about Iroquois beliefs, and I must admit that Joseph Jacobs’ art has been the inspiration. However, even without understanding what inspired him, I can still appreciate the finished product as a work of exceptional talent and a thing of beauty.

How I control the weather.

2004-06-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

Yes, I control the weather. I have supernatural powers. If I want sunshine, I just have to get a sunburn the day before. If I want rain, I just have to hang out a load of laundry. Today I did the latter. It will probably start raining within the hour. Do I care? Do I sound like I care? Rain is good, my flowers will slurp it up and reward the heavens by lifting their colourful faces skyward in abundance. The grass will grow, the river will run high, and all will be green and shiny in the world. Except for my laundry, which will be sodden and heavy and depressed hanging from the clothes line.

On the line right now, apart from the socks, underwear, tennis clothes and bathmats, is a Hallowe’en costume: Death’s black, hooded robe. It flaps in the wind as though the Grim Reaper himself were wearing it on his rounds, although it is as empty of an occupant as Death is empty of compassion. Once wet, it will be mournful, morose, melancholic. It will drag groundward as it tries to enter the nether realm. It will be unsuccessful. Because eventually the sun will come out and do its thing, and Death’s robe will revert to its innocuous form of a Hallowe’en costume.

What happens to the light when you turn off the switch?

2004-06-11T19:29:00.000-04:00

Where do the words go when they disappear from the screen because your sleeve caught some keys when you were talking on the phone? What happens to your ordered thoughts, your proper syntax and grammatically correct phraseology when you hang up the receiver and notice that the white box has gone completely blank? Do you start over? Do you try to recreate what was so spontaneously spewed onto the page, knowing that it cannot match that first attempt? There is no hope. We must say no for today and try again tomorrow.

Peachy

2004-06-09T19:07:00.000-04:00

It’s all about the peach, the fruit that is. Today it was their smell that enticed as they sat nestled in their respective indentations in the plastic liner of the cardboard box: ripe California peaches. The smell was heavenly, the epitome of “peachiness” that perfumers of candles, hair products and body lotions can only hope to approximate.

And then the flavour as the slightly acid, gently sweet, oh so juicy pulp floods the taste buds. My god there is no description for it as the juice drips down your chin, trickles down your throat. Let us rejoice in fruit, revel in the joy that is the peach, the perfection, nay the apex of ripe ecstasy.

Unsullied splendour

2004-06-08T17:07:00.000-04:00

Ah, the very first page of a brand-new weblog, not dissimilar to the first page of a brand-new notebook, a promise of creativity in the same way that the first act of sexual intercourse ensures the end of virginity and the possibility of new life. Celebrations are in order! Pop the cork on the champagne, drink from the glass slipper, indulge in the nuptial spread. We begin life with joyful exuberance and optimistic anticipation. Let the party begin!