The Temptation of Words

Pre-Christmas Nibbles

2011-12-15T13:08:00.001-07:00

Some random thoughts to share, in the hope that writing them down will cease their noisy rattling in my head. Last night on television, a duck breeder who supplies supermarkets with a less-expensive version of the traditionally goose-produced foie gras said something so quintessentially French that I have to put it here. I hate to translate it because it just won’t have the same je ne sais quoi, but here goes:

“One must be democratic about foie gras in order to make it accessible to all French people – but not to the point where it lapses into mere paté.”

And speaking of democracy, who would not marvel at the medical egalitarianism of treating my 57-year-old malfunctioning knee with the same careful attention as, say, a 14-year-old’s anorexia nervosa? Every now and then, somebody raises the spectre of merit- or age-based medical treatment as a way of addressing the huge financial burden that threatens to sink public health care. Sorting out the smokers and the overeaters from the careful and consciously fit, and assigning priority to those who are in ill health through no fault of their own is more than a slippery slope – it’s a sheer drop into an abyss of calculated indifference. Replacing an octogenarian’s hip might not seem to have the same value for money as doing it for someone with, presumably, more time in front of them, but to my knowledge, age alone is not a determining factor for receiving treatment in any countries where public health care is a bedrock principle. One wonders how private medical insurers sleep at night.

If it’s not too late, slip ‘Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” into your mate’s stocking this Christmas. Kathryn Schulz, ‘the sickeningly young, forbiddingly clever and vexingly wise’₍₁₎ journalist who writes brilliantly about the need to make mistakes has turned my smug view of other people’s wrongness into humble pie. It’s no exaggeration to say that this book is a relationship-saver, and maybe even a life-changer. Plus she’s got a damn good explanation for why some people can tell outrageous lies while the minor equivocations of others are writ large upon their face.

And still on the subject of books, I finally did something with the recommendation of my literate friend at Spit and Baling Wire to get ‘Reading Like a Writer’, by the deliciously-named Francine Prose, and have been glued to it for the past four nights. She starts with the importance of the single word, moving on to sentence structure, paragraphing, narration and who knows what else – I’ll let you know when I get there. The risk of taking a book like this to bed is that the excitement generated by the possibilities Ms. Prose’s analysis raises might evaporate by morning, although it could presumably be funnelled elsewhere in the interval. An absolute must if you’re serious about being a good writer – a ‘here’s how’ instead of a ‘what not to’ guide.

Cats are masters of the slippery slope, I have noticed this week - again. Our bedroom door has been kept shut since the day we were adopted by a large, unattractive tabby (a refugee from next door, something we only discovered after she’d been living with us for a year) in order to keep her hairiness off the bedcovers. Neither is she allowed on the new couch, the dining room table or my favourite Belgian’s computer keyboard, none of which she takes to heart. Last week, having left the bedroom door ajar, I found her on the bed, tucked up prettily with a paw over her nose and smack in the middle of a sunbeam and my favourite scarf. The hardest heart would soften at the sight. Since, the scarf placement has been adjusted to accommodate for the earth’s rotation around the sun, and the cat happily snoozes the mornings away.

I intend to submit an addendum to the Human Genome Project, having proof that diagnostic skills – or a lack thereof – is an inherited inability. When the middle child was an adolescent, I swore on a stack of hot water bottles that her abdominal pains were just Mother Nature’s way of reminding her that it’s tough to be female. When the surgeon said that it was good thing she hadn’t come to emergency any later than she did, I had to admit that acute appendicitis hadn’t even been on my radar. This same child has misdiagnosed herself any number of times, the latest being a fever she was sure was due to a common virus, but was in actual fact a subtle signal beamed to her brain by an infected blister on her foot, which she hadn’t really noticed was several sizes larger than the other one. (See merit-based medical treatment, above). And in the ‘Men and Women Inhabit Different Planets’ mould, her mother was ready to jump on the next plane to keep vigil at her bedside, while her father laughed uproariously at the prospect of the family’s first-ever amputee.

McDonald’s moved in down the road a while back. Like many here, I was disgusted by this display of globalization – Americanization, some think –in my own back yard and swore never to frequent the place, but my principles, rarely rock-solid, have crumbled like so many chocolate chip cookies. With a friend, I spent the whole of Tuesday afternoon there, taking advantage of free Wi-Fi and large tables to spread out notebooks and laptops and mutually support our literary efforts. There’s nothing like getting out of the house to focus the mind and besides MacDo, as it is referred to here, serves a more generous coffee than the French are generally willing to.

Ploughing up and down the abbreviated pool at the spa yesterday, I was thinking about territorial instincts, moderation, and that damn book that tells me how frequently wrong I am. The basin is only 15 metres (50ft) long, and just wide enough for three swimmers to do lengths, four if you abstain from the breast stroke. I arrived at 2:15, much later than my preferred slot of 12-1, when all French are sitting down for lunch, and found that I had competition for the space. Three middle-aged women were already in the dressing room – which is unisex, by the way, something I hadn’t realized the first time I stripped down in front of my locker – headed, quite properly, for the pre-pool shower. Their hairdos gave away the fact that they were not serious swimmers and would only swan around the pool, all arched necks and chit-chat. (Did you know that hair is cited most often as the reason women don’t exercise?). In less than a minute I was in my suit, cap and goggles in hand, hurrying across the wet floor, geisha-like, to be the first in the water. Never mind washing off all those pH-disturbing creams and perfumes that I never use anyway, I wasn’t going to let anybody encroach on MY lane.

One hundred tedious lengths, intolerable were it not for a rich inner life. Reviewing a long discussion I’d just had with a young woman whose capacity for straight talk has been a revelation to me, I realized that I’d been wrong on a number of counts. About what exactly doesn’t need to be revealed here, the point being that the beliefs that had informed my point of view were based on plain wrongness. It’s both freeing and humbling to find yourself so exposed, as long as you’re in safe company when it happens, which, as it happens, I think I was.

As for moderation, ‘in all things’ was the caboose on that particular train of thought. In consumption, acquisition, prevarication, procrastination, scepticism, yes - but not affection, appreciation or toleration (sic). However, moderation is not my default mode when it comes to eating banana bread or drinking coffee, and most unfortunately not when it comes to my expectations, particularly of others. This may be due to a family legend about the uncommon self-discipline of the Norwegian patriarch, a man who only needed to hear once that smoking had been proven to be bad for the lungs to give up, immediately and without apparent difficulty, a long-standing habit, and whose fondness for alcohol was despatched with equal ease when it threatened to become a problem. The story made a big impression on a little me, but in the way a blinkered horse has a limited perspective, his example became my excuse to be critical of others for their presumed weaknesses while remaining blind to the best of my own. Thank goodness for people who write books about the self-deception we practice on ourselves.

And now I’d like to wish everyone in this delightful world of writers and poets, artists and thinkers, comedians and cooks, a Christmas that reminds you of how well you are loved and appreciated. That there is much to be grateful for even though Canada has backed out of the Kyoto accord, a decision that may alter the landscape in more ways than one. After Durban, it might Chinese and Indian flags that bloom like algae on the backpacks of traveling Americans, since it’s certainly not cool to be Canadian anymore. I apologize to the world for my government’s shameful act and intend to make my own compensatory effort by starting a compost heap, at last.

Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noel!

(1) from a review in The Guardian

All life is math, really

2011-10-31T05:45:00.001-06:00

I admire commitment.

I’ve always suspected I haven’t got what it takes, and the dozen unfinished posts in my blog folder are pretty strong evidence that follow-through and staying power are not my strong suits. There are people out there in the World Wide Wilderness who are so absolutely reliable about writing that I wonder if they ever do anything else. And if the signal of their latest post pricks my mild resentment – that grubby cohort of envy – it’s only because it means I’ll have to use some of my writing time to read and comment.

Writing a recent draft on the magical aspects of analogies, I couldn’t decide where it was going. I like things to be joined up and for essays to circle back and complement themselves, which might be the only lesson from high school that has stuck, apart from remembering how to solve a quadratic equation. (I’m not saying that to show off but to salvage my own self-respect. ‘You don’t have a math brain’ remains one of the most egregious insults I can imagine. Despite thinking, back then, that learning how to manipulate X and Y was a waste of time, I did have reason in 1987 to formulate my very own equation in order to solve a word puzzle in the International Herald Tribune. That gave me pause, and in the years since I have reconsidered my short-sightedness about mathematics).

The analogy I had fixed on was particularly apt to my situation and I was able to explore and develop it for some nine hundred words before reaching a dead end, where the grit of true commitment abandoned me, again. I didn’t really want to give it up, but neither could I find the motivation or the energy to do all the thinking that was needed for the whole thing to make sense, to give it some meat. To maybe even be the catalyst for some reader’s Aha Moment.

But I made myself go back to it day after day, or, more precisely, morning after morning. Afternoons and writing are mutually incompatible, I have found, and there are better places to nap than on my computer. The weeks sped by while the essay inched along, on average, by twenty new words a day, nullified by the thirty or so old ones that were rearranged, reconsidered and often rejected. This process – if it can even be called something so constructive – is somewhat discouraging, although I recently discovered that, for Kurt Vonnegut, writing makes him feel ‘like a legless, armless man with a crayon in his mouth’. I felt better knowing he and I shared some common ground.

I had been writing about a real-life adventure on a river which involved being swept along by the current while, by contrast, others in my group diligently practiced manoeuvres with the aim of becoming better practitioners of their sport. Gradually, I began to realize that my little treatise on the analogy of life as a river and me as a kayak was linked to an existential question.

I wanted to take the literal meaning and figurative sense of ‘going with the flow’ and develop that theme, with some background music appropriate to my (mild) anguish over my difficulty to be self-directed. You know what I mean, don’t you? After the rush and tumble of white water rafting, haven’t you ever found yourself drifting in a limpid pool of placidity, unable to do much more than raise your head now and then to sip your lemonade?

Having moved from analogy to metaphor, and never sure where the line is between the two anyway, I think it’s better to speak plainly.

Mid-life. Retirement. Le troisième age. You’d done your growing up, helped the kids to do theirs, maybe gone back to fine-tune your own again, and now you realize that many of the imperatives of your life-thus-far have up and left. And if, belatedly, you recognize that all that time you spent looking after others was pretty gratifying (even though at the time you might have resented not having any time to yourself and might even have suspected that your very self would be permanently subsumed by the general stuff of life), you also have great hope about the potential that lies in these calmer waters.

It might even have been an exciting thought. At last there would be great chunks of time to devote to what had heretofore been only dreams. Things you had only thought about while swimming laps and waiting at long red lights. Something you might have confessed to a friend, self-consciously , over a coffee at Starbucks. I’d like to write. Um, yeah, I have an idea for a book. Rolling your eyes, before she could do it for you.

At first it seemed do-able. You might even have got to the point where you described yourself as a writer, because in the void left by the departure of children and the close of a career, you did more writing than anything else. And that’s what makes a writer, isn’t it? The act of writing. It might even have felt like a reasonable truth after a few repetitions. The novelty of it carried you along for a good while, and when your interest began to falter, you gave yourself the first of a series of pep talks.

When you found out that you could commune with others like yourself, you learned that self-doubt is pretty much a given in this solitary, reflective occupation. And that it’s often hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything at all, even when forty thousand words have somehow managed to accumulate in a folder optimistically – euphemistically, even – entitled ‘The Novel’.

That’s where the existentialism comes in. (I admit that my grasp on what ‘existentialism’ really means is tenuous, and that this disclaimer may be redundant for those of you who do understand it).

Eventually the leap is made between ‘what have I accomplished?’ to ‘why am I doing this?’ And as you know, that’s sometimes a ‘what’s the purpose of life?’ question in disguise. And what a humdinger of a contemplation that is! I don’t know the answer and am sure that, even if I devoted my remaining years to serious study of the issue, I would never arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The relatively little time I’ve already spent thinking about it has only convinced me that whatever rationale I could come up with would only be valid for me, and wouldn’t be provable, in any case.

You don’t have to be a writer to get into this morass. You could be doing something far more helpful, making your corner of the world a better place, for instance, and be faced with the same conundrum. You might spend your days mentoring wayward youth, keeping the wolves from other people’s doors and knitting teddy bears for African children and still be unsure that a backward look would leave you satisfied with your contribution.

But of all the things it is possible spend time on, writing seems particularly useless. Self-indulgent. Pretentious. An activity without any particular benefit to anyone, save a momentary pleasure if the result is well-crafted or illuminating or funny. And I’m not even talking about pleasure for others – let the writer among you who has never re-read her own emails just to snuggle up with her own cleverness raise her hand!

And while we’re at it, how about all those ideas you’ve talked yourself out of writing about because they weren’t fresh or original or interesting to anybody but you? And how far down that road did you go? Did you get to the point where you questioned the worth of all but the most luminous or learned writings? Were you ready to write off – pardon me – your blog, blogs in general, writer’s workshops, creative writing classes, writing just for fun (my favourite contradiction in terms) , and especially writing for profit?

Not having the requisite mental firecrackers to consider how all of this ties in with the raison d’être of the human race, I took a philosophical shortcut. Never mind if I don’t have a calling, a higher purpose or even a really good reason to get out of bed in the morning. Never mind if my most useful moments on earth have been spent in the service of small children, or that I can’t envisage ever being or doing anything that will change the world. Never mind that when my kids’ memories fade to black, all trace of me will disappear.

Some might build bridges, solve unsolvable puzzles, find a cure for apathy, and for their contributions they’ll be rightfully lauded. Some might go to sleep most nights knowing that they have helped someone feel good, made a life better, or at least be relatively sure that they’ve done their best at doing what they do.

But for me, the trick is to think that, despite not believing I’ve been put here for any particular purpose, I am free to create one. To commit to doing what I do, no matter how often I suspect the futility of it. To pack up the doubt and the cynicism and the unanswerable questions about the meaning of life and just get on with it.

On crabapple jelly and memories

2011-10-12T22:55:00.001-06:00

Under the arch of red-gold leaves, the old metal gate is still the same, flaking paint and all. When I push it open, the hinges squeak just like they always did. I almost laugh out loud. It’s been twenty-three years since my last visit to this house and I didn’t expect this trigger of memory. The broad steps up to the front door are cracked but still solid, and the house number - one-three-oh - is still etched across the glass globe of the overhead light. In a corner of the generous porch, a wicker rocker faces to the south-west, my grandmother’s habitual placement. I marvel that despite the evidence of extensive renovations to the second storey, the place seems unchanged.

The sound of the doorbell sets off wild barking inside the house, and a moment later two wet black noses nudge the curtains aside. An attractive woman in her forties opens the door, her guarded expression relaxing into a smile when I explain why I’m here. She tells me to go around the side and that she’ll meet me in the back yard.

The side gate is the one I remember, too, although it’s been moved a few feet towards the front of the house. In the back yard, a flagstone patio has been added around the base of the crab tree and a low fence separates the lawn from the vegetable garden, but otherwise, little has changed.

For weeks I’ve been thinking about this. I planned to first check if the tree was still there; if not, that would be the end of it. There was no one around when I parked in the alley behind the house and I hoped that the neighbours, if they were even alert enough to notice me, wouldn’t find a middle-aged woman suspicious. I peered over the back fence; even standing on tiptoe I could barely see into the yard, and I couldn’t see the tree. Maybe it had been unappreciated, cut down to make way for a deck, or had simply died. How old would it have been when I was a kid? It was certainly mature even then, half a century ago.

I moved a little further along, and there it was, partly obscured by the garage. It was smaller than I remembered, its spindly branches outstretched in a brave display of dying foliage, and strung with Christmas light-sized apples. It seemed that I wasn’t too late in the season, as I had feared.

Now I stand under it, telling Melanie about the tree, how it’s a particularly good variety – a Dolga crab – rich in pectin, whose bold red fruit makes gorgeous jelly. The tree had been seriously pruned the previous fall, she explains, and is the reason for the scanty crop. She hands me a step-stool and tells me to pick as much as I can reach.

My grandmother was of a frugal, productive generation of women, canning vegetables, baking bread, pickling and preserving, and always making jelly from the crabapple tree. Nothing was wasted, certainly not the pulp that remained after the last slow drops had fallen from the cheesecloth bag. Apple sauce – apple butter, as she called it – was the delicious by-product, but the deep claret jelly was a thing of beauty and my favourite spread for toast. Don’t squeeze the bag, Grandma warned, or the jelly won’t be clear.

Every fall my mother and I filled two or three large buckets of apples from the tree. It was tedious work, although perversely, I was put out by the greater claim my aunt’s large family laid to the tree. But the rules were clear: no taking more than your share, and no picking all the low-hanging fruit, either.

After my grandmother’s death and the sale of the house I lost my supply of crabapples, although I had rarely taken advantage of it. I didn’t inherit my mother and grandmother’s homely habits, and the few times I had made jelly, I ignored my grandmother’s instructions and hurried things along, forcing the juice through the bag. The result was tasty enough but the colour was opaque and lifeless. Years later I lucked into a regular, if small supply through a piano student whose mother sent along a jar of crab-apple jelly every Christmas. I shared the chocolates I got from other students, but the jelly was hidden at the back of the fridge; my children had no idea what they were missing.

I pick everything I can but it’s not a lot – maybe enough for one small jar. Melanie invites me to come back next fall when, she hopes, the tree’s usual fecundity will return. We talk about the house and she wants to know what might be behind a boarded-up section of the basement wall. Skeletons, I’m tempted to say, but it might have been a root cellar. I tell her how much the house sold for after my grandmother’s death and her eyes widen; the neighbourhood has become trendy and upscale, and the house turned over for ten times more than that twenty years later. She is kind enough to listen to my reminiscences and I promise to ask my aunt about the root cellar.

It’s not often that you can go back again to find things almost exactly as you remember them. Every subsequent owner of the house has respected its Arts and Crafts style and resisted the urge to make it over. The place is so familiar that I imagine I can see my grandfather sitting in his favourite spot by the fence, hands on his knees, his leathered face turned to the sun. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see his chair still there, painted the same robin’s-egg blue as the ’36 Packard he used to drive. To my uncles’ dismay, he refused to sell the car to either of them, selling it for a song, they suspected, to a collector who’d been after it for years.

I take a picture of the front gate as I leave. Somebody set fire to the vine on the archway once; it might have been Granddad, it may or may not have been an accident. I don’t remember, although I do recall Grandma being pretty mad about it. I’ll ask my aunt to fill me on that, too. What will be lost when I no longer have her memories to mine for family history!

I make a stop to buy cheesecloth and spend an hour in a coffee shop writing about my morning; the car is redolent of warm fruit as I drive home. Tomorrow’s breakfast will be tinged with nostalgia - maybe I’ll even commune with my mother and her mother over toast spread with wobbly red jelly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Note: Four days later I finally got around to cooking my little stash of apples. Not paying enough attention to the recipe, I added sugar at the first stage – too soon! The cooked pulp began to jell even before I could get it in the bag, which had to be squeezed to convince the sluggish juice to drip. Oh dear. But with eyes closed, it didn’t matter, the taste was exactly right.

Our best hope, unless we mess them up.

2011-09-22T12:01:00.001-06:00

Scene One

In a long line-up at TV/Cable company service office.

Cast of characters:

Me, middle-aged, white woman with World Policeman complex.

In front: Twenty-something South Asian couple with child

Behind: Middle-aged pot-bellied man

Behind PB Man: Middle-aged white woman with penetrating voice

Me, engrossed in fashion/food magazine, waiting to return cable modem not even my own, overhears…

Ms. Penetrating Voice: Yea, I called them to make an appointment and they said somebody’d be there between 1 and 3 so of course nobody showed up even though I waited until a quarter after and then left the house cause they never come when they say they will. So now I hafta waste my time standing here when I gotta lotta other better things to do.

Pot-bellied Man: Nope, you just can’t get good customer service anymore, can you?

Me (to myself): That’s funny. In 15 years of dealing with this company, I’ve always thought their service was top-notch.

Ms. PV: Ya know, ya call these so-called customer service centres and ya end up talkin’ to people who can’t even speak English.

PB Man: Yes Ma’am, that’s the truth. Things sure aren’t like they used to be.

Ms. PV: No matter where ya go, ya just get more and more of ‘em. They work cheap but they can’t even speak English properly.

PB Man: Hah! Even when I call the credit card company I end up talking to India.

South Asian twenty-something man flexes heavily-tattooed bicep.

Ms. PV: And they got the taxicab companies all wrapped up, don’t they! Mind you, I’m not sayin’ what they are, but we all know what they are.

PB Man: Mmmm.

Twenty-something man mutters to his companion, clearly irked.

Ms. PV: Yup, I was gonna take a cab home after I had to go to the hospital the other night and when I told the driver where I wanted to go, he says to me…..

Me, heart racing, wonders how long PV Woman is going to rant on before somebody (me??) calls her on her behaviour.

Ms. PV::…. ‘Cash only’. What the hell??? I says. How can they get away with that? So I had to walk home.

PB Man: (unresponsive, shuffles feet)

Ms. PV: Blah, blah, blah, people come here blah blah blah these companies can’t even do their own shit – they just farm it out blah blah blah can’t even speak the language properly blah blah blah

PB Man now completely ignoring PV Woman. South Asian twenty-something turns to glare in PV’s direction. Me, astounded by how blithely some people reveal their bigotry, wishing I could come up with just the right thing to simultaneously deflate and educate Ms. PV . Saved from my dilemma by efficiency of cable company customer service in the form of lovely South Asian staff member speaking perfect English.

Scene Two

Forty minutes later, in a long line-up at Costco, gargantuan wholesale supermarket.

Cast of Characters:

At left, young English-speaking couple with blond toddler in shopping cart.

At right, young Mandarin/Cantonese-speaking (how would I know, really) couple with dark-haired slightly younger toddler in shopping cart.

Blond Boy (loudly): Mommy! Mommy! Look! A baby!!

Dark-haired toddler looks around, spots Blond Boy, face lights up.

Blond Boy (waving): See, Mommy? Over there! It’s a baby!!!

Dark-haired boy smiles toothily, waves back.

Blond Boy (bouncing in his seat): Hi, Baby!! Hi, Baby!!

Toddlers beam happily, waving energetically at each other. Indulgent parents smile. Me, unloading the two items I came to buy, and the fourteen others I didn’t, thinking how nice it would be if nobody ever pointed out to these two the differences that they care not a whit about – not yet, at least.

Scriptus Interruptus

2011-07-15T14:19:00.000-06:00

The yellow notebook I write in – too occasionally – is half-full of half-finished pieces. What should I call them? Essays, opinions, stories, scribbles – whatever they are doesn’t matter as they will probably never make the move from hand-written page to blog. Every single one of them started out with the stimulant of a new idea, and every single one was interrupted by something: a conversation, an empty stomach, the drying-up of inspiration, and more often by my most familiar nemesis, distraction.

Once again I’m trying, leaving the house and its temptations to do anything but write, to sit in a little restaurant in St. Paul-en-Forêt, a village whose single bakery is shuttered and where the only traffic is on its way through to somewhere else. From a second-story window, a baby’s fretful squawks issue; it’s close and hot, and my hand sticks to the paper. Wooden planter boxes stake out the boundary of the cafe terrace and separate it from the road, but my table is only a few feet from the passing cars. A coffee-stained copy of a StoryFix post called ‘The Thing About Sub-Plots’ slips from my notebook. I must have thought it important enough to print and so re-read it, wondering for the zillionth time what stands between me and fiction-writing. I suspect my poor spatial reasoning has something to do with it: planning the details, seeing the big picture, holding onto an idea long enough to develop it, that sort of thing. Lack of imagination is not the problem, if my dreams are anything to go by. I’ve stopped describing them to my Belgian who, at the beginning of our association, was intrigued by them, but who I suspect might now just think me mad. And so we become accustomed, even inured, to each other.

A portly cyclist pedals by, so close I can see the rivulets of sweat on his determined jaw. His cohorts are a common sight here, all colourful latex and hard-muscled legs pumping along the narrow, twisting roads. Approached from behind, they look like thirty-somethings, but in my rear-view mirror the grizzled faces and grey hair tell the true story. This one must be a tourist, given his girth and the fact that he’s riding alone. It’s an idle game, spotting the tourists who invade the Côte d’Azur between June and September. That they’re not locals is obvious, but to assign them a nationality is trickier. The stereotypes help: the Dutch are tall and fair, the unilingual English look anxious and apologetic, the Germans sturdy and competent, and the Italians behave like they just bought the place at a fire sale.

An interview in this morning’s paper has given me some impetus to write. An 80-year-old woman has just had her first book published, a memoir of growing up in a ‘dysfunctional, Communist family’ and the further unconventional turn her life took when she followed her mother out of the family home and into a peripatetic existence at the age of fourteen. The author – whose mother also published her first book at eighty – felt ‘frozen’ and unable to tell her story for most of her life, intimidated by the writers in her family and the weight of her responsibilities to others. It sounds familiar.

While I was hanging out with the laundry after breakfast, I was thinking about the curious effect that praise has on the unmotivated and uncertain writer. It supplants, in my case, the gratification that should only come with real accomplishment. It takes the edge off the hunger for success (for which my definition is ‘the successful completion of a project’) just like a six o’clock snack cuts my appetite for dinner. And if praise is effusive enough, the writer fears never meeting the same standard again, although it must be pointed out that her own laziness comes to the rescue, stepping in to save her from having to prove the truth of her own suspicions.

I also blame ‘The Secret’, the premise of which I knew without knowing it from the time I was old enough to rest on my laurels. Just think and believe and visualize and as surely as there is a man in the moon, you shall realize your dreams. But Laurie Lewis, pragmatic octogenarian, knows that you actually have to do something to make that happen. She revels in her new status as a published writer because she also knows that it’s never too late as long as you’re still breathing. I like this idea. It’s not new, but it’s still reassuring.

A gust lifts the terrace canopy, surprising me. I look up to see thunderclouds piling up over the tiled rooftops; there’s weather coming in and with some luck it will mean rain and not lightning-sparked fires. But too soon, there’s my Belgian back from his errand, come to pick me up. Should I say I’m disappointed to see him? No, better to just apply the lessons of Ms. Lewis and finish what I start.

On The Ultimate Decision

2011-06-03T07:22:00.001-06:00

Dr. Jack Kevorkian died this morning, in a Michigan hospital to which he had recently been admitted for treatment of pneumonia and a liver condition. His work as an advocate of assisted suicide is well-known, and for many years his views and actions have fuelled a polarized debate about euthanasia, pitting those who consider him a murderer against others who champion his belief that we all have a right to determine how and when we die.

To put a very human face on this issue, I would suggest you go to Vision and Verb, where Ginnie wrote earlier this week about her wife’s cousin, a Dutch woman who chose to be euthanized rather than face an slow, agonizing death. The question of whether euthanasia should be allowed and under what circumstances continues to preoccupy lawmakers, philosophers, writers, religious figures and most importantly, many who suffer from acutely painful or limiting medical conditions -and the people who love them.

Because this is a topic which will never go away, and which, as more of us grow older, may even become personally relevant, I would like to share the story – first posted in September 2009 – of a woman who became a great friend of mine after I moved to France, and who, in life and death, provoked me to examine my own views on many subjects, and especially this one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last week, an old friend finally got what she wanted most. Death was her wish, and it arrived in the way she had hoped it would—in her own bed in the apartment where she had lived for more than fifty years, with the person she loved most by her side.

A year ago she had tried to end her life, and the intervention that saved her was not welcomed. She had always been a fiercely independent person and the thought of becoming increasingly reliant on the small community in which she lived was untenable to her. Her vision of her situation was realistic and pragmatic. She had no living children to care for her, and was adamant that she would not become a burden to her only relative, the grandson she had helped to raise after the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Her home was a walk-up apartment in central Nice where she had lived in with her lover of 40 years –they married only shortly before his death – and she would not consider any other, under any circumstances. She gauged her ability to cope with her advancing age by the frequency with which she was willing to go down and up four flights of stairs – over the last few years it had dropped from four times a day, to once, then to only a few times a week, until finally she had only enough energy to leave the building when absolutely necessary.

The first time she spoke to me of suicide was several years ago, when she revealed that she had accumulated enough prescription medication to deliver herself a fatal overdose if and when she reached the point where life was no longer liveable on her terms. My first reaction was shocked rejection of her intention. In remarkably good health for someone in her late eighties, she walked to the shops every day, went to the cinema regularly and had ‘her’ table at a favourite local restaurant. She was keenly interested in politics, changing societal mores and the influence of the internet, and her plan to choreograph the end of her life seemed completely incompatible with her engagement in the world.

But over many discussions with her, I began to see how suicide could be considered the reasonable act of a rational person who refuses to be taken hostage by diminishing physical capacity and declining health. She was clear-eyed about the future and would frequently remark that, at the age of ninety, there were no miracles left.

After she failed in her first attempt a year ago, suicide became a frequent, almost obsessive reference in her conversations. She still went to the hairdresser once a week, still watched the evening news, still took an interest in what went on around her – but she had started down a path from which she would not be diverted.

A few months ago her eyesight began to fail rapidly and although she was willing to undergo treatment to try and save what was left, the effort so exhausted her that she stopped following the treatment after the first session. We had lunch together a few weeks later and she talked about her distress at no longer being able to read a newspaper, a bank statement or watch television. It was difficult not to protest her single-minded intention, or to offer her empty reassurances, but I had no basis from which to argue that her life could be improved or would even be bearable. As much as I could try to put myself in her shoes, it was impossible for me, at my age and in good health, to imagine how hostile her future had become and how untenable was the prospect of needing help to function in her daily life.

Obliquely, she asked for my help. She knew of all kinds of ways to put an end to her life but was afraid of suffering pain, or of not succeeding. I was extremely uncomfortable but told her I could take her to Switzerland, where under rigorous scrutiny, there is a medical clinic with the legal and practical means to accommodate a person who wishes to commit suicide. There is, however, a residence requirement of several months, and it’s an expensive process. She already knew all about it, and said she couldn’t afford it, in terms of money or time.

And so she tried again, alone. She didn’t succeed immediately, but during the brief period of hospitalization that followed her second deliberate overdose a cancerous tumour was discovered. She refused both treatment and nourishment; her grandson acceded to her wishes and took her home, where she died a few days later. I don’t really know if I—or others—failed her, but I doubt she would think so.

I came to believe she had the right to do whatever she chose with her life and that it was no one else’s place to judge her circumstances liveable, or not. I only wish she had been felled by a heart attack in her sleep and been spared her terrible decision.

~~~~~~~~~

Note: My friend could have availed herself of free, state-subsidized services, including in-home care, assistance with shopping, accompaniment to medical appointments and daily cooked-meal delivery. She did have some housekeeping help, but the presence of others – strangers – in her home bothered her. For a time she accepted the meal service, but ultimately decided that her quality of life depended on doing things herself, her way.

10 things that interfere with writing a bestseller

2011-05-23T05:02:00.001-06:00

1. Having to wash and blow-dry my hair every single morning. This is not vanity, but a stark reality of my life. The time spent on basic personal hygiene in general. Does Stephen King even take showers?

2. Emails, Google, Facebook, Youtube etc etc

3. The wrong font. Because novels just about write themselves once you’ve found the right one.

4. Living in the south of France

5. Dominique Strauss-Kahn – as well as Manitoba floods, American politics, Japanese car parts, African aid policies, British fashion, Syrian demonstrations, Pakistani double-cross and German polar bears.

6. Breaking for lunch, just when I’ve finished reading the newspapers and am ready to get down to it. Then afterwards I’m too sleepy to write.

7. Spider Solitaire

8. Reading other people’s books. Not only does it cut into my writing time, but they make me realize that the world doesn’t really need another novelist.

9. A messy desk. Clutter clouds creativity.

10. Rationalizing.

Brave New World, by Google.

2011-04-12T23:20:00.001-06:00

Sorry, hit the ‘publish’ too soon and posted to the wrong blog. If you’re intrigued, go to Fridge Soup.

The Other Side of Japan’s Agony

2011-03-24T13:59:00.001-06:00

The letter below was written this week by an English teacher who has lived in Japan for the last decade. I do not know what her nationality is, or even who she is. I’m not even sure the writer is female, although I suspect that is the case. As happens with emails that get forwarded and re-forwarded, the provenance is difficult to establish, although I have tried.

It is the first-person accounts of what Japan and her people are facing that I have found to be the most moving, and for that reason wanted to share this with you.

Update: Thanks to Dan Baker, the first commenter on this post, I now know that American Anne Thomas is the author of the letter. Read her reports from Japan on her blog.

***************************************************************************************************************************

Hello My Lovely Family and Friends,

First I want to thank you so very much for your concern for me. I am very touched. I also wish to apologize for a generic message to you all. But it seems the best way at the moment to get my message to you.

Things here in Sendai have been rather surreal. But I am very blessed to have wonderful friends who are helping me a lot. Since my shack is even more worthy of that name, I am now staying at a friend's home. We share supplies like water, food and a kerosene heater. We sleep lined up in one room, eat by candlelight, share stories. It is warm, friendly, and beautiful.
During the day we help each other clean up the mess in our homes. People sit in their cars, looking at news on their navigation screens, or line up to get drinking water when a source is open. If someone has water running in their home, they put out sign so people can come to fill up their jugs
and buckets.
Utterly amazingly where I am there has been no looting, no pushing in lines. People leave their front door open, as it is safer when an earthquake strikes. People keep saying, "Oh, this is how it used to be in the old days when everyone helped one another."

Quakes keep coming. Last night they struck about every 15 minutes. Sirens are constant and helicopters pass overhead often.
We got water for a few hours in our homes last night, and now it is for half a day. Electricity came on this afternoon. Gas has not yet come on. But all of this is by area. Some people have these things, others do not. No one has washed for several days. We feel grubby, but there are so much more important concerns than that for us now. I love this peeling away of non-essentials. Living fully on the level of instinct, of intuition, of caring, of what is needed for survival, not just of me, but of the entire
group.

There are strange parallel universes happening. Houses a mess in some places, yet then a house with futons or laundry out drying in the sun. People lining up for water and food, and yet a few people out walking their dogs. All happening at the same time.
Other unexpected touches of beauty are first, the silence at night. No cars. No one out on the streets. And the heavens at night are scattered with stars. I usually can see about two, but now the whole sky is filled. The mountains are Sendai are solid and with the crisp air we can see them silhouetted against the sky magnificently.

And the Japanese themselves are so wonderful. I come back to my shack to check on it each day, now to send this e-mail since the electricity is on, and I find food and water left in my entranceway. I have no idea from whom, but it is there. Old men in green hats go from door to door checking to see if everyone is OK. People talk to complete strangers asking if they need help. I see no signs of fear. Resignation, yes, but fear or panic, no. They tell us we can expect aftershocks, and even other major quakes, for another month or more. And we are getting constant tremors, rolls, shaking, rumbling.

I am blessed in that I live in a part of Sendai that is a bit elevated, a bit more solid than other parts. So, so far this area is better off than others. Last night my friend's husband came in from the country, bringing food and water. Blessed again. Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide.

My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don't. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent.

Thank you again for your care and Love of me,
With Love in return, to you all.

The Real Shame about Rape

2011-02-25T16:24:00.001-07:00

Recently, a Canadian judge found an individual guilty of assault in the beating and robbery of an elderly man. The facts introduced to the court revealed that the victim had been approached by a person who admired his diamond-studded watch, and even offered it for closer examination. When the other person seized the watch, the old man resisted and was beaten, suffering serious injury.

In his sentencing report, the judge noted that ‘the victim, visibly frail and alone, must surely have known that his presence in a dark alley after midnight would signal his vulnerability and could prove tempting to a potential malfaiteur who, had he crossed paths with the victim on a busy street in daytime, would never have considered such an assault. The assailant, by virtue of the victim’s poor judgement at placing himself in such a vulnerable position, cannot be entirely blamed for his actions, reprehensible as they were. He can even be forgiven for thinking that the victim deserved to be robbed, especially since he was foolish enough to show off his expensive time-piece.’ In the judge’s view, the victim’s own behaviour warranted leniency for the accused, who was handed only a conditional sentence, without jail time, to be served in the community.

What is your reaction to this judgement, and the rationalization of the judge for his leniency?

Would your reaction be different if the charge had been rape, and if the individual accused of the assault was excused for his act because the female victim had been wearing a tube top without a bra, heavy make-up, and had generally acted in a way that led her aggressor to believe that she wanted sex? And what if the judge was of the opinion that her dress, manner, and willingness to kiss her ‘admittedly clumsy Don Juan’ signalled her assent to sexual intercourse, even though she had repeatedly told her assailant that she did not want to have sex with him?

The scenario at the beginning of this article is a figment of my imagination. The second – the rape trial – is an actual case, and the conditional sentence was handed down this past week by a Manitoba judge. His judgement has met with considerable controversy, even thought conditional sentencing for such crimes is no longer possible in Canada. Changes made to the law now limit judges’ discretionary sentencing power in cases of violent crime, including rape, but only apply to crimes committed after the law was amended in 2007. The rape in this case occurred in 2006.

There has been much discussion over the last few years about the wearing of the burqa, and in general our Western view holds that requiring women to conceal themselves under an all-enveloping garment is not just denial of personal liberty, but is even the evidence of,in the words of the scholar Feisal Mohamed, ‘a deep spirit of misogyny’.

But our hypocrisy – and when I say ‘our’ I mean to include both men and women – lies in our accommodation of a simultaneous condemnation of the Islamist view of female provocation, and an attitude towards sexual assault victims of ‘she-should-have-known-better’ if the woman wore provocative dress and particularly if she had previously engaged in openly sexual behaviour with her rapist.

I’ve been guilty of it myself. Having a bit of an idea of how feminine comportment has changed since I came of age, I shake my head at the practice of ‘grinding’ with a complete stranger on a dance floor and cringe at the flaunting of cleavage of both sorts. Age has wised me up to the realization that sexual attractiveness isn’t wholly dependent on physical attributes, but maybe I’m just an old-school prude and that’s why I have sometimes judged other women’s behaviour as inappropriately or even dangerously provocative. It’s a sort of ‘what was she thinking??’ mindset.

It isn’t unreasonable to think that an elderly person might have done better to think twice about frequenting an alleyway in the middle of the night, but while common sense is one thing, being held responsible for the actions of someone else is quite another. There is an element of risk in most things humans do, and there are times when we underestimate or choose to ignore the risk, whether it involves walking through a sketchy part of town waving a fist-full of bills or getting into a car with a guy you’ve only just met at the bar. Smarts are lacking in both situations, but that does not excuse the also-human reaction on the other end of the spectrum, which is to manipulate another’s vulnerability.

The Manitoba rapist’s interpretation of events, up to the moment his victim said ‘no’ was, in my view, understandable. I can see how a guy who’s had a few drinks, whose libido is aroused and whose companion is happy enough to kiss him, might be inclined to think that sexual intercourse will be the outcome. I don’t have to be an anthropologist to understand that a woman who makes a point of displaying her sexual attractiveness is sending a message as ancient as humanity. But precisely for this reason, and because all humans are subject to imperfectly human responses - which include misinterpretation of the message - risk-assessment should be part of the picture for all women. This is not to lay blame at the wrong doorstep, nor provide any justification for sexual assault. It is to acknowledge the reality that, although ‘no’ should trump dress and behaviour every time, it sometimes does not.

The law exists in order to protect the vulnerable – who include the foolish, the inebriated, the naive and the merely unlucky – from the predatory. Earlier this week, four Americans sailing in the Gulf of Aden were killed after pirates hijacked their yacht. A significant number of online comments to this news story referred to the victims’ lack of good judgement, how they should have anticipated such an outcome. Analysing the risk of a possibility is not the same as expecting it to happen, and I would suggest that the Americans knew perfectly well a hijacking was possible, but did not consider it inevitable. But imagine for a moment that the pirates are put on trial in the United States, found guilty of kidnapping and murder, but given minimal sentences because their victims had deliberately put themselves in a situation where they were at risk of being preyed upon?

It’s absurd to think this would happen, of course. But when the crime involves sexual assault too many of us – including judges who should know better – mistake a victim’s faulty risk assessment skills and her naiveté, for culpability.

Love, negotiation and hanging light fixtures

2011-01-26T16:03:00.001-07:00

MFB and I have had a long-standing difference of opinion about the chandelier, inherited from his parents, suspended over our dining room table. It was probably expensive when they bought it, and was, no doubt, in sync with the rest of their decor. But mauve-coloured pendants and glittery crystal beads are not what I want hanging over my head and the light was definitely not designed for the placement it had. Five flame-shaped bulbs throwing their weak light upward made me feel like a fish in an aquarium and I took to wearing reading glasses to see what was on my plate. For at least four years I have grumbled periodically about the thing.

There’s a lot in this house that reflects the taste of people other than my FB and almost nothing that gives a clue to mine. The balancing act that is his, mine and ours is delicate. We live in his house much of the time, in mine less often, and there is virtually nothing that belongs to the two of us. This isn’t the most important issue for either of us, but if our bank accounts were bottomless we might have been inclined to start fresh. There’s something to be said for accumulating evidence of a life shared. But putting the boot to the old stuff is not easy, and for sentimental reasons my FB has resisted replacing the light with something more contemporary and, well, illuminating.

But last Thursday, inexplicably and without discussion, he moved to a point of concession I had nearly despaired of him reaching. It might have had something to do with my industry of the previous few days, as a hutch was emptied pre-sale in order to make way for a new couch. Items that hadn’t surfaced in a decade were cleaned, polished, sorted according to their saleability, and strategically displayed so he had to pass them every time he went to the bathroom. This was intended to give the impression he could pluck the three pairs of brass candlesticks or any of the thirteen vases from the ‘outgoing’ pile, but it was actually an opportunity to come to terms with his loss and say his goodbyes. Like paying one’s respects to a defunct head of state.

Forty-eight hours later we went shopping. Wandering through the store, we were dazzled by the selection, but of the hundreds of light fixtures on display, no more than two or three were remotely appropriate.

Too wedding-cake

Risky. My wrists could be ribbons too.

Like the only tree in my city backyard.

What I wanted my hair to do once upon a time

My brain. Some bright ideas and a lot of distracting stuff.

A fake-melted-wax classic

All I could think of was the time I filled up a condom with bath water.

Chinese circus act or Swedish kitchen accessory?

But I quite enjoyed this juxtaposition

Down to the last aisle and getting discouraged, I noticed my lover circling around a three-part dangling thing, examining it from all angles. It looked promising. In fact, it looked pretty much perfect but MFB was proceeding cautiously. My tendency to make enthusiastic and spontaneous decisions puts his brakes on, so I tried not to seem too eager. But after some Interrogative brow-raising, approving murmurs and a final comparison with a similar contender, the deal was clinched.

In the end, what delighted me most was not finding just the right light, but that despite our differences - the conflict between his need-to-keep and my aversion to clutter, not to mention our diametrically-opposed decision-making styles - we have pretty much the same taste. We argue about what to toss out, but there’s no disagreement about what comes in. As far as I’m concerned, that’s proof we were meant for each other.

It was up and switched on in a couple of hours, after the most energetic swearing I’ve ever heard from my mate. We sat down to dinner and for the first time in ages, I didn’t have to squint to see what I was eating. We clinked glasses in a toast to our new purchase and our mutual agreeableness. His eyes narrowed.

‘But it’s awfully bright in here, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have to put in a dimmer switch.’

Do You Freewrite?

2011-01-21T02:39:00.001-07:00

Free-writing this morning will be done on the computer. My right elbow does not appreciate being used to make my hand work. Saw an interview with John Irving on French television last night – most interesting. He starts with the end first, then works backwards. Writes his first draft in longhand in a notebook with the left side of the pages always left blank, for insertions, correction, drawing, ideas. Big scrawling letters, no more than fifty-sixty words to a page. A very articulate man, thoughtful, straightforward. I must get one of his more recent novels next time I’m in Calgary. For him, style, or the use of language is paramount. More so than plot or theme. He dismissed Hemingway as boring. Admires Flaubert, Dickens and others who used language beautifully. Shakespeare.

Writing longhand makes him slow down. He writes too quickly on a computer and makes too many mistakes, but I don’t know if he was referring to typos or mistake of a more significant. But the process of writing by hand makes his writing equivalent to the speed of his thoughts, I understood. Perhaps I could try this? But I hardly need anything to slow down my thought processes, which are already at a glacial pace. Although, in this age of climate change, glaciers might be moving faster than my brain.

The second I think about this being seen by others, my mind interrupts and censors. What will they think? How will this be received? If I could get rid of the worry of how I am perceived, things would be smoother, better, faster. So laborious to write, normally, but here I am whizzing along at 100 words a minutes, maybe less, when I don’t think about what I’m saying. But it’s such drivel really. Talked to my daughter a few minutes ago and welcomes the interruption from writing. Always ready to hare off after a distraction. Like a moth around a bright light, I am. Unable to settle for more than a few minutes, so easily bored. The writer’s life is probably the polar opposite of what really suits me but still I persist in thinking I can do it. Free-writing is essential, according to some, but I don’t do it. I forget about it, or perhaps subconsciously I think nothing will help. Either I ram my head directly into the wall that is the act of writing well, or I avoid it altogether.

Read a few old comments just now and they are encouraging. People like to read what’s written in the blog, and so that tells me I can do it. Always relying on the opinion of others. Time to just look inward and satisfy myself first. Well, that is what I do, of course, but I feed off the praise of others. Just read about the woman in the US, Amy something, who has just had her book ‘Tiger Mothers’ or something, published. How to raise children to be successful by not giving in to the current (and longstanding) trend of praising children, building self-esteem through words, letting them choose their own direction, not imposing the discipline of effort on them. She’s been roundly criticized for the perceived cruelty of her parenting style, but her daughters (still teenagers) pronounce themselves happy. One has played at Carnegie Hall already, the results, her mother says, of having been expected to apply herself vigorously to piano. The first hour of practice is the easy part, but parents need to insist on the following two or three!! I could never be a parent like that. And many of her critics couldn’t either. Depends what your aim is: success for your child in what terms? And on what terms? I do agree that there is nothing equivalent to the satisfaction of having really worked for something (and obtaining it, one hopes) and somebody somewhere coined the term ‘authentic happiness’ for the gratification achieved from that.

Ms. Amy Tiger Mom knows all about that, and she’s not wrong, but she is a little too zealous for my taste, and one wonders how her daughters will view their upbringing as they become adults. She’s not concerned with being friends with her children, but how many of us (my generation) can say that? Do I care if my children like me? Damn right. Some of my parenting decisions were driven by a need to be thought of in a positive light, or perhaps more because I just couldn’t say no to them. Do they mean the same thing?

Enough of this exercise for this morning. Maybe now I’ve greased the wheels sufficiently to finish the post that I started a week ago. And the one that I started a week before that. Perfection is impossible, and yet I still chase after it.

Apart from the typos I couldn’t stop myself from correcting, the above is a verbatim free-writing exercise I did a few minutes ago. For some reason, I resist doing this sort of thing, which many writers recommend as a way to free up creativity and get things rolling. I thought it would be fun to see what kind of a discussion it generates. I also think it’s a coward’s way out of writing a new post.

Do you freewrite? What’s your ‘process’ when you write for your blog? Does it differ when you write other things? Do you have an established pattern at all? Why do so many writers just think about writing instead of getting down to the real thing?

Of (Potential) Death, Taxes and Human Bondage. Er, bonding.

2010-12-28T16:14:00.001-07:00

When the telephone rings, it’s just before seven o’clock and I feel like I only just fell asleep. The too-bright voice on the other end says he’ll be there to pick me up in half an hour. For god’s sake, I complain, I’m…Still in bed? he asks. No problem, I’ll give you five minutes more.

I creep downstairs to unlock the front door and turn on the porch light. The sky is dark – not a glimmer of natural light – and I marvel at the newfound habits of the Youngest Son, who has become such an early riser that he can sound cheerful before dawn. I shower and dress quietly, but the sound of the hair dryer is harder to muffle. MFB slumbers on, and only mutters indistinctly as I whisper goodbye.

He’s there, bang on time, waiting outside in a borrowed car he wishes was his. We accelerate away from the house, down the darkened streets empty of traffic toward the city centre and the bowels of an underground garage. Walking along the deserted sidewalks – his wounded knee slowing our usual pace – I look up to the brightening sky and exclaim for having left my camera behind. The cell phone will have to do.

The Marriot Hotel serves a breakfast buffet every morning from seven ‘til nine-thirty, and he’s been wanting to go for weeks. There are only a few occupied tables, but enough food to feed a full sitting. Conspicuous waste, but we’ll do our best to reduce what’s thrown out. Three eggs Benedict for him, and one less for me. Pancakes. Croissants. Peeled orange slices with the pith removed. Whose job is that? Strong coffee. Fresh orange juice. Conversation - about cars, about the havoc illicit drugs wreak on a brain, about plans for the future. Then dogs, brothers, travel and the stupid things people do with laser pointers. It’s definitely worth getting up this early.

Replete, we head for the big stores to look for his new pants, a belated Christmas present. But there’s nothing his size, or rather nothing that both fits him and satisfies his need for minimal care. Won’t buy anything that has to be dry-cleaned. Back to the car, but at the garage exit the barrier won’t go up. Next time I won’t fold the ticket, he says, and tries again. Nothing doing. Aw, let’s just steal parking, he says. We’ll just wait for another car to leave and follow close behind. Not a chance, I say, and go off in search of help.

Can’t find anyone on this unnaturally quiet weekday morning, four days after Christmas. Then a horn blares behind me, and he’s gone and done it anyway. Ridden on somebody else’s tail and scooted under the raised gate after they paid to exit. Principles are flexible, I find. Nobody’s there to help me be honest, so if the only way to get out is to steal, I guess I’m OK with that.

Another mall, another store. Two pair of pants that are both long enough and washable enough to suit. He feels bad about not buying the shoes that are a tad too small: he feels sorry for the salesman. My eyes roll slightly. You should know better – you’re a salesman yourself, I tell him. Yeah, well, that’s why I feel sorry for him.

Another mall, another score. On-sale shoes in size 14. Half-price jeans in a 36-inch leg – for me, too. He throws his arm around my shoulder and gives me a big, lingering squeeze. Two things I wished for my kids to be were readers and huggers. Not all of them are both of those things, but they’re all affectionate. Lucky me. He drops me off at home and in return I drop a bag full of clean clothes through the sunroof. Laundry in exchange for a morning’s worth of hanging out sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Unannounced, a big backhoe arrives a few minutes later and stops in front of my house. As MFB and I watch from our front-row seats, it is unloaded and driven across the sidewalk and up the front lawn of the house directly opposite. After a few minutes of suspense, the bucket is raised and with a delicate tap, demolishes the west wall of the house.

The driver who delivered the thing stands on the sidewalk watching, and when I jokingly ask if the gas line was turned off first, says: we never check. I laugh. You’re kidding. Nope, we never do, he says. Thirty seconds later I get a big whiff of natural gas. Smell that? I ask. A mild look of consternation crosses his face and he starts off in the direction of the backhoe. I beat a retreat into my house to call 911, wondering if this is an overreaction but preferring that to being blown to smithereens.

In less than three minutes a big red fire truck pulls up at the end of the street. (Living in a city has its advantages.) When I identify myself to the responders they invite me into the truck and you don’t have to be a kid to get a thrill out of that. What did you smell? For how long? How strong was it ? No, don’t apologize for calling us – we’d rather be safe than sorry – and no, we don’t think your fertile imagination had anything to do with it

I want a picture of the inside of the truck but don’t want to look like I’m one of those fire-setters who get their kicks from crying wolf. A few minutes later the advance men radio back to the truck that they have no indication of errant gas, that all demolition permits are in order, and that they believe it’s safe to leave the area. The explanation I had already thought of is offered by one of them : residual gas escaping a pipe ruptured by the backhoe almost certainly accounted for the smell. They’re satisfied that the supply had already been turned off before the first strike.

Sheepishly, I ask for a photo. Because my admiration for people who put themselves at risk for others is boundless, and because I want to put you up on my blog. Tell your city counsellor instead, they laugh, but happily line up for me. They want to know what kind of a blog it is and can they look at it? What do I write about? Oh, everything, I say. Travel. Adventure. Human beings. They seem impressed. For heaven’s sake, they’re the ones who put themselves in the line of…fire. Somebody fishes out a pen and tells me to write the blog name on his partner’s forehead.

On the way back to No. 15 Fire Station, the guy riding shotgun gives me The Royal Wave. For you, Mr. Fireman, and all your buddies everywhere, I’ll pay my taxes without a peep. And just let me know where I can get your New Year’s calendar, would you?

The Twelve Teaspoons of Christmas

2010-12-23T23:10:00.001-07:00

Dear Mom,

Just finished baking a whole lot of your gingersnap cookies this afternoon, only about the fourth time in ten years that I’ve managed to do any kind of Christmas baking. In the lean years – and by that I mean the years when I haven’t been able to get my act together enough to do more than presents, turkey and tree – I missed the gingersnaps the most. And it felt a bit like I was letting everybody down, although Eldest Son certainly didn’t mind. He might have loved them as much as his siblings had I not eaten my way through an entire bowl of uncooked dough back when I was breast-feeding him. I kept getting interrupted just when I was about to roll and bake them, and the bowl sat in the fridge for a couple of days. Gradually emptying, spoonful by raw spoonful. Poor kid – no wonder he has an aversion to ginger.

But the rest of us love your recipe, which was your mother’s before that. Ginger chews they are really, so long as they’re not left in the oven long enough to crisp. Now the oversized cookie jar is full to the brim, and what wouldn’t fit in there has gone into a Christmas box for the neighbours. I pray that I’ll be able to leave them alone, but the jar is see-through glass and I might have to put it in the basement until Christmas Day, just to get it out of my peripheral vision.

Mom, you’d probably look askance at the tree we’ve got this year. It’s a nice enough little thing, reasonably full and not dropping any needles yet, but the decorations went up in record time and frankly, it shows. Your trees were always beautiful, so artfully arranged, with reflective orbs suspended just so over the lights for maximum effect. I remember the year that Dad got fed up with your tree-trimming instructions (interference, he called it) and, in a fit of uncharacteristic exasperation, took handfuls of tinsel and just threw them at the tree. I was the only person who thought that was funny.

Our tree is a happy medium between perfectionism and random tinsel-tossing although maybe just once, some year when I don’t also have to produce dinner or wrap presents. I’ll decorate a tree all in blue and silver, or red and gold. My kids would be disappointed by such loveliness, though. Many of our best decorations were hand-made by the craftiest woman in the family and even if they don’t shine, they mean a lot to us.

But back to those cookies, Mom. The recipe says that 12 teaspoons of ginger, 8 cups of flour and 1/2 cup each of molasses and golden syrup will make, along with the other essential ingredients, 20 dozen cookies. I only got about 14 out of it, and I didn’t roll them in sugar either. It’s a new world, Mom. People watch their weight now, although the stats say that we’re more overweight than ever. As it is, I’m damn lucky I got Dad’s metabolism, otherwise I’d weigh about three thousand pounds.

Unlike a penchant for sewing, the gift for turning out delicious cakes and cookies didn’t skip a generation. While you were precision itself in the making of blazers and other complex garments, I was of the ‘Make-It-Tonight’ school of tailoring and your granddaughter would be hard pressed to even hem a pair of jeans. She is, however, a baker extraordinaire. Dessert on Christmas Eve will her offering, and if you were here to sup with us, you’d be asking for seconds. Not to be confused with the Eating Contest that seems to have become a tradition among the younger set at Christmas, the appeal of which is utterly lost on me. All I can think of is that Japanese kid who makes a living, revoltingly, out of stuffing himself.

We’ll be about ten around the table tomorrow night, a nearly two-fold increase from the years when you were still with us. Christmas was always too quiet, despite the eight cousins and their progeny who lived within shouting distance. The great divide between you and their mother had a spill-over effect on the rest of us, although the real reason might be the merciless teasing visited on my eight-year-old self by the eldest one. And I always suspected that they liked their other cousins - the ones that weren’t related to me - better. If Dad’s brother hadn’t gone and married your lovely younger sister, I would have had some cousins all to myself too.

The recipe box is a treasure trove of memories, and I have fun looking through it. There’s your ‘Never Fail Pastry’, written in a younger hand, the 60s ‘Festive Mulled Wine’, and the perennial favourite: ‘Rhoda’s Cheese Balls’. Those got made last night and slung in the freezer right away. The only way I can control my appetite for salty, savoury things like that is to put them out of sight and hope they stay out of mind.

You know, Mom, I’m basically an atheist. All that stuff about life-ever-after is just nonsense, if you ask me. When you’re done, you’re done, and whoever is left behind better just get on with it. But still, I find myself talking to you in my head, and wondering if I’m getting through to you. That’s what happened this afternoon, while I was rolling those fourteen dozen cookies. Telling you that, despite the down-market Christmas tree, you’d be pretty pleased to know that I still make your ginger cookies and that I love the fact that the recipe is in your handwriting. I never understood why you thought your writing was messy and childish. It’s perfectly legible and absolutely you. It’s also the last tangible connection I have with you and helped me make-believe that you really were in my kitchen this afternoon, with the sun pouring through the window and carols playing on the radio.

Merry Christmas, Mom. Miss you. Love you.

Your daughter

24 Ways to Christmas – A Quiz Just For You

2010-12-22T11:35:00.001-07:00

Oh, it’s been a while. According to (some) blogger etiquette, I’m not supposed to remind you of that, but I wanted to say that I’ve missed being here. Having been well-occupied with children and domestic Canadian life, writing has dropped to the bottom of the priority list. This is unfortunate but due to be addressed as soon as December 25th is just a memory. In the meanwhile, here’s a little something to stir up your brain cells.

If I were diabolical, I would post this on Christmas Night, when everybody’s brain is in a fog from too much food and drink. However, since I will be in the same state and wouldn’t remember to do that, they’re going up now.

Each phrase is a clue to a well-known Christmas carol. Good luck! (Answers will be posted….later. When depends on how desperate you get!)

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

1. Move hitherward the entire assembly of all who are loyal in their belief.

2. Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious sounds.

3. Nocturnal time-span of unbroken quietness

4. An emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good, given to the celestial sphere

5. The Christmas preceding all others

6. Small municipality in Judea, south of Jerusalem.

7. Diminutive masculine master of skin covered percussionistic cylinders.

8. Omnipotent, Supreme Being who elicits respite to ecstatic distinguished males.

9. The first person normative plural of a triumvirate of Far Easter n heads of state.

10. Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of crystallized vapour.

11. Geographic state of fantasy during the season of mother nature’s dormancy

12. 12 Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted, metallic, resonant cups

13. In a distant location, the existence of an improvised unit of a newborn’s slumber furniture.

14. Proceed forth declaring upon a specific geological formation

15. Quadruped with a crimson probiscus

16. Adorn the vestibule

17. Cherubim audited from aloft

18. Hallowed Post-Meridian

19. Fantasia of a colourless December 25

20. A dozen 24 hour Yule periods

21. Befell during a transparent witching hour

22. Desire a pair of incisors on the day of Natal celebration

23. I spied my maternal parent osculating Father Christmas

24. Joyful Yuletide desired for the second person singular, by us!

To all my blogger friends, I wish a joyful Christmas and all best wishes for the New Year.

Keep Seat Belts Fastened Whilst Seated

2010-11-16T23:36:00.001-07:00

We are on the final approach to Brussels airport, and my seat belt has been securely fastened the whole way. If my only clue to the nationality of this airline was the ‘st’, I’d say it was British. And it is. If ever you want to zoom around Europe for next-to-nothing, Easyjet is the way to go. (Shameless promotion of an airline in which I do not have shares.)

From the air, Belgium is a harvest vegetable stew of oranges, reds and yellows on a green backdrop. With few exceptions, vivid fall colours are missing from the autumn landscape in the south-east of France, which stays pretty much green all year round. I miss the definition of the seasons by colour and temperature, although this is only a mild complaint! - anyone lucky enough to live in Provence has no business moaning about anything. From a few thousand feet up, the villages look like they belong to that toy train set my older brothers never let me play with; their matchbox houses built of brick, with steep-pitched roofs. Why is that? There’s no snow to slide off them in winter, so perhaps it’s because of the extra room gained under the eaves. It all reminds me a bit of England, but prettier and less dense.

We are picked up at the airport by a welcoming party of two of my Favourite Belgian's children, some grandsons, and a son-in-law who whisk us away to the coastal town of Oostduinkerke to spend the weekend. All of Brussels is on the highway heading west, it seems. High-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic is not something I'll ever get used to, although it's the norm in the densely-populated countries of Europe, whose citizenry heads en masse for the sea, the mountains or the countryside on their days off.

Belgium is the Canada of Europe, according to me. To the south is a much bigger, more powerful neighbour with a voice that carries, if not around the world, then at least around Europe. Like Canada, it is a country of two cultures and languages - French and Flemish - that struggle for supremacy against a backdrop of sometimes-bitter history. The level of concession is astonishingly low – if you live in a Flemish-speaking commune but are a Francophone, you’re sunk. All administrative business is conducted in Flemish and you have no right to put so much as a For Sale sign on your lawn in anything other than the official language. Shopkeepers, even those who speak French, are known to refuse to serve French-speakers. The Flamands, chafing from old injustices and an inferiority complex, are known for their refusal to accommodate the Walloons - French-speaking southerners - who are viewed through a historical lens as aristocrats unwilling to acknowledge the linguistic and economic clout of their northern neighbours.

Brussels is caught in the middle. As the capital of Belgium and the capital of Flanders, it is a distinct region in its own right and recognizes both French and Flemish as official languages, although only a small minority speak Flemish. French-speakers account for well over half of the population, with the rest taken up by the multitudinous languages of Brussels’ international community, the result of both the European Union and NATO being headquartered here. The city is wonderfully cosmopolitan as well as being very attractive, and is at the top of my favourite-cities list.

Despite their deep political divisions, Belgians are viewed as friendly, welcoming people with a reputation for unpretentiousness. Like my Quebecois compatriots, they move to the familiar tu more readily than the French. They have a reputation as peace-brokers and negotiators, take no major stands on the international scene, do no sabre-rattling and generally go about their business with a minimum of fuss. Ignoring, for the moment, that they have been unable for months to achieve the necessary compromise to install a functional government acceptable to both sides, Belgium is nevertheless a place that exudes calm, prosperity and efficiency.

It's a fascinating place from an architectural point of view. An architect or urban planner would able to explain to me how the Belgians manage to create a sense of uniformity while remaining highly individualistic in their building and house construction, but what comes across to this visitor is a very pleasing originality in which the unexpected is entirely expected.

Stone, bricStone, brick and wood are common materials, but what the Belgians do with them is limited only by their considerable imagination. To be expected, of course, of the birthplace of the surrealist René Magritte.

On this mild November long weekend, the tidy town is filled with couples, dogs and children strolling the esplanade and the vast, hard-packed beaches.

Even at thisEven at this time of year, the outdoor seating areas of the restaurants lining the esplanade are full, their patrons swathed in woollen scarves.

Most places offer the Belgian specialties of mussels and fries, or waffles loaded with whipped cream and chocolate. My preference is for le gaufre Bruxellois, a lighter-than-air waffle made with yeast. Its Liège counterpart is heavier, sweeter and irregularly-shaped – both are scrumptious and the variety of toppings nearly limitless. Apart from waffles (and chocolate!), the Belgians are known for their hundreds of varieties of beer and a peculiar habit of eating fries with mayonnaise.

Last year when we were here in September, I was lucky enough to catch an unusual sight. There are fewer than a dozen fishermen left along the North Sea who practice the 500-year-old tradition of shrimp fishing on horseback. A net attached to two planks is pulled through the surf behind the horse, catching shrimp and other fish.

On my

On my bucket list is a horseback ride along a beach like this one, but the older I get the less likely it is to happen. Remember that scene in The Black Stallion, when the boy finally gains the trust of the horse and clambers aboard to canter through the surf? It chokes me up just thinking about it.

This weekend holiday at the coast is a lapsed family tradition, renewed in recent years. My FB – the patriarch – has three children from two marriages, and his lovely daughter’s two sons each have their own dad. The French word for a family like this is recomposée, which seems a bit more realistic than 'blended'. I am the only non-Francophone in the mix and the conversation between the younger ones often goes too fast for me to take in everything, but I never feel excluded. They have been warm and welcoming of me from the start. We spend Saturday evening playing cards, making origami figures and watching movies projected onto a lovely old damask tablecloth stuck to the wall, but mid-viewing the duct tape gives way and the screen puddles gracefully to the floor. No matter - we don't mind Nicholas Cage on a cinder-block background.

The second day dawns overcast but blooms into sunshine by late morning, perfect for another long beach walk. When I first spotted this little fellow, he had his underwear on, but eventually ended up with nothing at all, much to everyone's amusement. eventually ended up with nothing on at all, to his well-wrapped mother's amusement. Other than us, he and his well-wrapped mother were the only French-speakers we heard in two days in Oostduinkerke.

Had to take a spin on a cuistax (from cuisse meaning ‘thigh’ and tax for ‘taxi’) along the esplanade. Every imaginable kind of these wheeled vehicles is available for rent, and I try out a low-slung recumbent tricycle that steers by body lean. After about thirty yards my legs are in agony, but it's more fun than a step machine.

I’m dying to try out the bungy swing/jump with my FB’s daughter, but we’re turned down for being too grown-up! Very disappointing – just when I had worked up enough nerve to make a fool of myself. We finish off the day with a fine meal – huge bowls full of steaming, garlicky mussels for the initiated and an excellent steak for me.

Next morning we head back to Brussels, with a stop along the way in Ghent, where the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States was put to an official end. The first mechanical weaving machine was also built here, and as a result Ghent became an important centre for the wool industry.

A turbulent history saw the city traded back and forth between the Romans and the Franks as well as the Spanish, French and Austrians but these days it is resolutely Flemish. Were it not for the electric tram and the street signs, one could well imagine being transported back into the Middle Ages.

I also noticed, not for the first time, how well put-together people generally are. Women do not wear running shoes with ill-fitting jeans. Or ski jackets. Or, god forbid, sweats.

Dinner on our last night is put on by my FB's son-in-law, whose skills in the kitchen are second to none. Here is Mario's ‘Roulade Paupiettes de Volaille’ - too good not to share.

Ingredients:

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

Cream cheese, about 1 ½ Tbsp per chicken breast. (If you can get French cheese, so much the better, otherwise Philadelphia will do.)

Sun-dried tomatoes, finely chopped (1 per chicken breast)

Shichimi Togarashi (Japanese seasoning)

Orange zest (optional but adds that little je ne sais quoi that distinguishes a chef from a mere cook)

Directions:

Place wax paper over opened chicken breasts and flatten with a meat mallet.

Mix cream cheese with tomatoes and a feeling of Shichimi Togarashi. (A feeling – pronounced with a French accent – is Mario’s equivalent of ‘a bit more than a pinch’)

Spread cream cheese mixture on one half of chicken breast.

Roll breast, securing with toothpick.

Brush lightly with cooking oil.

Finish with a sprinkle of orange zest over breasts.

Bake at 400F (200C) for about 20 minutes or until cooked through.

Serve with oven-roasted potato slices or risotto. Or whatever you like – it’s absolutely delicious no matter what you eat with it. I have no pictures of it, but your imagination can manage something, I’m sure.

I'll leave you with a few more Belgian specialities, although my tastes run simpler than these extravagant confections. They're a bit like baked-good version of George Clooney - awfully nice to look at, but out of my league.

Greece Part III. In which I give up swimming upstream.

2010-09-24T15:55:00.001-06:00

I suspect I’m not the only one here who resists going along with the herd. Telling me ‘but that’s the way we do things here’ sets off an instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction that probably has its roots somewhere in a childhood where my only siblings were (considerably) older brothers. There’s only so much direction you’ll put up with before the Nope reflex becomes part of your social behaviour.

But I’m Canadian, and that makes me, paradoxically, a follower of official rules. I believe that most laws have a basis in reason, and that they should be obeyed. Plus I’m afraid of being found out, which is why I’ll wait for the red light to change even if it’s 3AM and every other driver is in bed asleep.

So we’re on dry land, having finished the sailing part of our holiday and on the road headed for the Peloponnese and the first of three destinations. Having previously agreed to a policy of shared responsibility in most areas, MFB and I take turns behind the wheel, and it’s my turn first. Right off the bat, we have a problem.

The vast majority of Greek highways consist of two lanes, with a paved shoulder on each side. The speed limits vary depending on how curvy the curves are, and I adhere to them religiously. I’m not always so respectful on home ground, I admit, but in unfamiliar territory I’m prepared to believe they’re there for good reason. And I have been taught, and agree, that the road shoulders are off-limits, unless for emergencies such as blown tires, vomiting children, or an urgent need to pee.

But the Greeks view things differently. They’re not the only ones to consider the shoulder as an extra driving lane, but they are my introduction to this unnerving practice. So there’s a car on the shoulder, doing slightly under the speed limit. Do I pass? If I do, do I just stay in my own lane or do I pretend that this is a regulation pass, and move into the oncoming lane? What if there’s somebody coming the other way, and I start to overtake Slowpoke in my own lane only to see an obstacle on the shoulder ahead?

So I stick to my Canadian rules of the road. I might be in Greece, but I don’t think it’s safe to pass somebody on the shoulder, nor am I going to move over for the Mercedes SUV riding my tail. (Digression: According to reliable sources, Greece is having an economic meltdown. In that case, why are there more luxury cars per linear kilometre than in France?)

So, pass me already! It’s not like I’m just poking along, but after a few kilometres of determined passive-aggression, I have gained a following. It’s not pretty. I can only withstand so much of horn-blaring-arm-waving pressure until my defiance deflates. I move marginally to the right and straddle the yellow line for a bit, but as concessions go, it is ineffective. Finally I cave totally and move right onto the shoulder, only to find that it runs out 100 feet later, replaced by a bridge abutment.

After a while I get used to it, and decide that maybe the Greeks are resourceful, not irresponsible. Just because there isn’t a passing lane doesn’t mean you can’t make one up, right? There are a couple of breathless moments when somebody coming the other way doesn’t play the game and forces the overtaking car over the centre line. We now understand why there’s a roadside shrine every couple of miles.

We have a map of Greece printed in France, which gives French versions of Greek place names. They do not correspond to the English names that are occasionally shown on the road signs, so this mean we have to decipher the Cyrillic-Greek names and match them up with what’s on the signs—at 80 miles an hour. I am probably better at calculus.

This gorgeous bridge crosses the Ionian Sea from the mainland to the Peloponnese peninsula at the port city of Patra. The one-way toll is about 11USD, cash only. I have fully embraced the concept of the cashless society, but that won’t take you far in Greece. Credit cards are unwelcome, not because the Greeks shun indebtedness, but because cash is easier to hide from the taxman. In response to the economic crisis, an army of tax inspectors has fanned out across the country in an attempt to curtail the black market economy, and anyone caught trading services or goods for cash without a receipt is slapped with a 1700 Euro fine (about $2500US). But suspicion of corruption runs high, and many Greeks remain convinced that tax revenue goes straight into the pockets of government officials.

A compromise is struck between MFB and me about the route to take across the Peloponnese mountains from Patra to Nafplion, just south of the ancient ruins of Mycenae. He wanted 100% scenic (read ‘non-stop hairpin turns), but settles for half-highway, half-scenic. Even then it takes about nine hours to do 250 miles, but the reward looks like this:

Me:‘Why can’t you smile??’ Her: ‘Why do you have to have a picture of EVERYthing?’

Nafplion (Napflion? P before f or the other way around? Damned if I can remember.) is a pretty coastal town about 55 miles south-east of Athens. Our room at the pension opens directly onto a narrow street in the old town, and the place felt like a movie set.

I’m thinking I should swap my house for this one, which overlooks the port and its ancient fortress.

We all wish we could stay longer here, but next morning we’re off to …

…the dry, rocky landscape of Mycanae, from where—despite its geographical isolation—a great civilization ruled and dominated ancient Greece. Agamemnon returned here, fresh from his victory over Troy, only to be murdered by his wife and her lover. Mycanae dates from the second millennium BC and was destroyed by the Argos in 463 BC – it is a site so ancient that it was already a tourist attraction during the Roman age!

The ‘Lion’s Gate’ (middle photo) is the oldest known monument in existence, and at right is a Bronze Age example of a secant ogive, the single keystone at the apex of an arch, an architectural construct commonly seen in Gothic churches. I marvel at the brilliance of ancient engineering, but the Corinth Canal fair took my breath away.

A joint project of the Hungarian and Greek governments, it cut through the isthmus between the Peloponnese and central Greece, taking 13 years to build. If your ship is narrow enough, it shortens the journey from the Ionian Sea to the Aegean by 125 nautical miles.

Up next is Delphi, of Oracle fame, and a major site of worship to the god Apollo. In 586 BC the first Pythian games, precursors to the modern Olympics, were held here.

And if ever you thought you were the centre of the universe, you were wrong. It’s always been Delphi, where the beauteous omphalos,(navel) of the earth still remains to prove it.

The paving stones on the pathways around the ruins are shiny-slippery from thousands of years of being walked on. I’ve decided that my travel wish list should include all UNESCO World Heritage sites. Delphi is the fourth I can cross off my list.

Apollo’s temple.

Driving from Delphi to Itea, where we spend the second night, we are agog at the immensity of this olive tree orchard. Nothing else grows in the valley, save the occasional errant cedar.

They taste the same no matter what the alphabet

Another UNESCO world heritage site, Meteora, with its sandstone formations rising spectacularly from the Plain of Thessaly….

…on top of which are Eastern Orthodox monasteries, the first of which was built by hermit monks in the 14th century, seeking refuge from an expanding Turkish invasion.

And cats! They are everywhere—on the streets, in restaurants, shops, parks. The country is overrun with felines. Some are abandoned, most are feral, and all are thin. And fecund. I wanted to adopt them all.

We leave the next day for Egouminitsa to catch the ferry across to Italy. We get there by mid-afternoon and after check-in, there are still 8 hours to kill. Our friend Jos told us about a hotel-spa at Sivota, 20 kilometres away, where we can lounge around the pool for a minimal fee, so we head in that direction. I’ve had my fill of winding Greek roads but the resort is worth the detour. It’s very upscale, and there I am in the same shorts I’ve worn for the past three days and my hair is clamped to my skull with sweat. It’s hard, but I make myself not care.

We swim and read, and drink iced coffee. There is supposed to be a 10 Euro fee for pool privileges but nobody asks us for it. After a light dinner in the poolside restaurant and a spectacular sunset, we’re on our way back to the port.

We leave Anne to sit in the car and wander along the quayside, waiting for the ferry. There’s no security, no uniforms. People and kids pass the time watching ships disgorge their cargo, and small groups of young men—boys, really—emerge from the shadows at the edge of the quay, moving furtively, their faces wary. I’ve seen the reports on the evening news about Afghan boys, some as young as twelve, who make their way through Iraq and Iraq and across Europe to Calais, where they spend months in miserable conditions waiting for a chance to get to England. It hits home that this is real life in front of us, not just an item on the news. What wouldn’t they give for my ease of movement, my right to live in Europe, my security? The ticket in my pocket feels very heavy with symbolism.

A thin, handsome dog pads purposefully between the waiting cars, ignoring calls from sympathetic dog-lovers. He’s looking for food, and isn’t interested in anybody’s transient affection. Out of the blackness a behemoth looms, blazing with light. It’s our ferry, just arrived from Brindisi. Loading is faster than on the journey over; and in under an hour we’re on board.

As I leave the car deck, I turn back to make sure the car is locked, and see the dog. He must have come up the ramp unnoticed, and now he’s on his way to Italy. He flops down underneath a camper van and rests his nose on his paws. I want to think that he’s headed back home, that he hops the ferry the way some dogs prowl the streets. I hope so.

Kalinikta, puppy.

Efharisto, Greece.

The Southern Ionian Islands

2010-09-04T04:43:00.001-06:00

Greece was not quite what I had imagined. Glossy tourist brochures had seduced me into thinking that clusters of white-washed houses with cerulean rooftops would be typical of the island villages, and although this is the case on some of the islands in the Aegean (Santorini, at right) the architecture is quite different elsewhere.

Although I like to think I don’t have preconceived notions about the places I travel to for the first time, this is mostly due to not having done any homework. Unlike the serious travelers who do their research in advance (and probably get a lot more out of their experience), I am happy to make my discoveries as I go.

But although I had to slightly readjust my vision of Greece, or at least this southern Ionian part of the country. there was much to be appreciated.

Leaving the port of Lefkas, we passed through a channel that had originally been dug under the reign and direction of Cleopatra. The story goes that a major skirmish was fought over Lefkas and that when Cleopatra’s troops went down in defeat, their commander abandoned them to run off with his lover, the Queen herself. The worse we had to cope with was wondering whether we would beat this big motor yacht through the narrow channel opening (marked by red and green buoys).

First night on board the Maya was spent anchored in a quiet bay, sleeping on a narrow, sloping platform to the left of the hatch absolutely not designed for the purpose. Impossible to roll over without involving MFB. By early morning the sheets were clammy with humidity but waking up to the exquisite sound of Greek Orthodox plainsong drifting across the water was worth all the discomfort.

Depending on which side of an island you’re looking at , the landscape is either dry and rocky, or green, but always mountainous. The last major earthquake to strike the area, in 1953, caused extensive damage, completely levelling many villages.

The Dutch are well represented here – most of the sailboats we encountered were flying the colours of Holland, including us. Jos, our friend and skipper, is a big Dutch guy with a bigger personality, with a talent for getting himself into – and out of – sticky situations that would fell most ordinary mortals.

See that little dinghy near the bow of the boat? Well, the outboard motor quit with 4 of us sitting in it the night before and just my luck to be sitting too close to Jos’ right elbow as he yanked the starter cord. I have always promised myself that I would get myself a straighter, smaller nose if ever it needed to be repaired, and thought for a few star-crossed moments that my opportunity had arrived.

Next morning we sailed to the port of Sami and Jos, never one to wait around for anyone else, decided he’ll haul the motor onto the quay to do a little fixing. What he neglected to consider is that when you’re in a moveable object and you lean one way, your moveable object goes the other way. By the time anyone realized what was happening, Jos was in 25 feet of water and going down, stubbornly clinging to his motor. MFB mounted a rescue, nearly landing in the drink himself, but Jos and motor were both saved, dried out, and made functional again. Mythos beer is the celebration drink of choice.

Sailors get snarky about their parking spots. We had been told off at an earlier port for having inserted the Maya into a space considered much too tight by the boaters on either side, who launched an energetic volley of Italian at us amid much throwing about of arms. Our skipper tried to placate them but they were having none of it, and a few minutes later, a man on a scooter pulled up on the quay. He was clearly an official of some sort, with a serious-looking badge on his nicely-pressed blue shirt, so naturally we invited him on board. Under the glare of the neighbouring Italians, we adopted our most ingratiating behaviour until a closer examination of the badge revealed that it said not ‘Greek Port Authority’ but ‘Family Restaurant Tomorrow’. Not a word was said about our moorage, and our expansive relief resulted in a reservation for four at 8.

Next day it was our turn to be shamelessly hypocritical, raising objections as the sailboat (above left) manoeuvred between us and the sleek yacht in the background. To no avail.

There were, nevertheless, advantages to having Italians as neighbours: the language is a delight to hear, and the men….well, there’s a lot to be said for their sense of style. Sometimes a girl just has to sit back and enjoy the view. Greek men, I’m sorry to say, are not as pleasing to look at.

On the way to Nydri, a piece of hardware at the top of the mast gave way, and once we were in port, a repair operation was mounted. MFB, volunteering his lesser size and greater knowledge, was hoisted up the mast, secured by two ropes and three nervous crew. After it was all over, he admitted that his only previous experience – as a thirteen-year-old – had resulted in his being dropped on his head during the descent.

The food was always good. I love tzatsiski, saganaki (fried cheese), stuffed vine leaves, and feta. Eating out is cheap and portions are very generous. The four of us shared appetizers and two main courses, and with wine and coffee, our total bill was usually under 50 Euros. All the ports we visited had restaurants lining the waterfront, and while the views weren’t always as good as the one below, the ambiance was always lively.

Although there has been much in the news recently about the sagging Greek economy, it’s evident that Greece has always been a poor relative to the more prosperous EU members like France. Abandoned construction projects are a common sight, as is the neglect of lamppost alignment. The government has sent forth an army of tax inspectors to ensure that shopkeepers and restaurateurs issue receipts to their clientele. The income tax coffers are now filling up nicely, thanks to a 1700 Euro fine that discourages businesses from operating ‘under the table’.

Daughter Anne arrived midway through the week, fresh from the other side of Greece (the part with the white villages and blue roofs) and quickly dubbed the Maya the ‘ESL Boat’. With English native to only two of the five crew, there was a lot of ‘what did you say?’s”

Miscommunication is never a good thing, and especially in winds like this one (below). The sails of the Maya were so taut that we couldn’t reef them in to reduce our tilt. Two of us loved it, two were slightly apprehensive, and one went below deck to stick her head under a pillow.

This beauty easily won the prize for Most Elegant Boat.

A few random Greek scenes. An early-morning fisherman. An old lady filling up a wine barrel with sea water. I managed to understand that she wanted to use it for drinking water, but I couldn’t figure out what she was going to use for a desalination system. MFB explained later that she was simply using sea-water to expand the dried-out wood, thereby tightening the metal rings around the cask, at which point it would be refilled with fresh water. Ah. I wish my brain worked like his.

On the last day together we climbed a big hill to a resort hotel and spent the afternoon recuperating in front of this view. There are worse ways to kill time.

A last tranquil evening in the port of Spartochori. But wait, how did we miss the news about the end-of-summer party on Zulu Beach?

I can’t remember why sound carries better over water than land, but I can confirm that it does. At 3AM, I lowered the gangplank and took myself over to Zulu Beach to ask the party-goers to turn down the volume. Let me put it this way: that music could have kicked waterboarding out of its spot as the CIA torture of choice. I’m open to a lot of different kinds of stuff – Turkish pop, marching bands, Russian male choirs, bagpipes, Gavin Bryars and the occasional heavy metal – but never have I heard anything that so strongly suggested the pain of having nails drilled into one’s head. The supremely unco-operative Greek fella in charge of the sound system grudgingly promised to tone it down, but it took him an hour to find the right button.

Early next morning we walked up to the village to have breakfast in a Greek pizza joint specializing in omelettes. With an distant island that might have been Ithaca in the background, we watched an early-bird sailor head out to sea. This part of the world isn’t known for its strong winds, and it’s more common to see sailboats under power than sail.

A little bit later, it was our turn to lift anchor and head back to Lefkas and the dry-land part of our Greek holiday. Even though I wasn’t looking where I was going, we got there in one piece.

More later!

Knitting My Way to Greece

2010-08-18T10:18:00.001-06:00

5:18 AM

Eighteen minutes late . The car was packed the night before and the house is shuttered closed. Is summer already so far gone that there’s no sign of sunrise yet??

Across the border into Italy it starts to rain, a few drops here and there, then a sudden deluge. I don’t like this part of the autostrada, with its endless alternation of tunnels and bridges. Fortunately the speed limit is only 110, sometimes 90, although you’d never know it by the clip at which we are being passed. Glimpses of red-tiled roofs below filling the crevices between steep slopes. Sea and sky are the same blue-grey; it’s hard to tell exactly where the horizon is. We say little; our night was short and all focus is on the road. At the two-hour mark we change seats. From here the road is straighter, the speed limit now 130 – which means about 160 in Italian. I never hog the passing lane and object to being flashed with high beams from half a mile back warning me to get out of the way. I take my sweet time time moving into the right lane and resist the urge to flip the bird as a Porsche flies by, with a Ferrari hard on its tail in hot pursuit.

At the next two-hour mark, we switch again. The road is tediously straight, the countryside unremarkable. I retrieve my knitting from the back seat and toss the ball of wool onto the dashboard. It’s the perfect road trip project – staving off boredom and getting a head start on a Christmas present at the same time.

At Bologna we miss the exit that would have taken us south of the snarl that is the ring-road around the city. An electronic signboard warns of an incidente ahead and traffic slows to a crawl. I am pleased that the smattering of Italian I learned as a piano student is quite useful on the road.

The ferry we are headed for leaves Ancona, on the east coast, in 4 hours, and it’s beginning to seem a little tight. MFB must be wishing he had overruled my decision not to leave the night before. An hour later, after we’re covered only a mile or so, another sign flashes the all-OK and in concert, hundreds of gas pedals are pushed to the floor.

We are half an hour early at the port of Ancona – the sprawling ferry terminal is crowded and noisy with the din of many languages. I hear bits and pieces of Greek, Italian and Slavic tongues – there is ferry service from here to Albania, of all places. The girl who checks our reservations sticks up four fingers when I ask how many languages she speaks.

The rain pelts down as we manoeuvre into place for the ferry. We eat our picnic lunch sitting in the back seat, because of the fold-out tables. After lunch I knit some more. I’m on the second ball of wool now and going like gang-busters.

The ferry arrives on time but disgorging its cargo of transport trucks and cars takes forever. Departure time comes and goes, and an hour after that the lines of cars begin to move toward the boat, in seemingly random order.

Inside the bowels of the ship, we understand why everything is so slow. The lower deck fills in a classic U-turn configuration, so that cars are facing the right way to drive off the stern, but the upper level has only one access ramp. Transport trucks are the first to drive up the steep incline, reversing into their spots. Cars follow, parking front-first against the noses of the lorries. The deckhands shout directions in Italian, impatiently gesturing for passengers to get out of their cars so that the driver can squeeze against the row to the right. The cars are so close together that the only way for the exiting drivers to get to the stairwell is to climb across the bumpers of other cars.

Despite the apparent disorganization below deck, all is smooth and charming service above. To our pleasant surprise we’ve been given an outside cabin instead of the porthole-less cubicle we have paid for. I stretch out in anticipation of a little nap while MFB goes off to explore the ship.

Nearly asleep, I hear my cell phone ringing from the recesses of my damnit-where-the-hell-did-I-put-it backpack. It’s my lover, in the bar with a table for two and a panoramic view of the Adriatic Sea. How will I recognize you? I murmur throatily, and brush my teeth extra well before I leave the cabin.

Exceptional situations call for exceptions to the rule, and a chilled white wine is the only appropriate drink for this one, accompanied by a Greek cheese pastry. This is no British Columbia ferry – more like a down-market cruise ship. We sip our drinks languidly, until, reaching for my pastry, MFB knocks over his beer onto his only pair of pants. Never one to let a exceptional situation get the best of him either, he uses my hair-straightening iron to dry them out before dinner.

We turn up our noses at the self-serve cafeteria, nice as it is, and dine in the elegant restaurant, he in his perfectly pressed shorts smelling faintly of hops and me in jean capris and a fuchsia golf shirt. We are the best-dressed people in there with the exception of a woman who looks terrifyingly like Joan Rivers.

Over Greek salad my lover admits to a slight concern about finding our way through Greece in ignorance of Cyrillic script. I scoff, in a high-handed Anglo-Saxon sort of way, because no country so dependent on tourism will neglect to its English-speaking visitors.

Our kind-faced waiter takes the time to teach us a few words in Greek and I am ashamed of my ignorance at having spent my down time across Italy knitting instead of learning how to say please and thank you in Greek.

Watching the disentanglement of the cars on the top deck once we arrive at Egominitsa is the best entertainment I have had since watching ‘Most Extreme Elimination Challenge’. One by painstaking one, each car is directed to reverse out of the huddle, then do a U-turn in order to head down the ramp and out the stern. Miraculously, everyone’s paint job seems intact. The shouting reaches a crescendo when it is discovered that the little blue car behind us is destined for a different port, obviously herded into the wrong bunch on the Italian side. I am ordered to stop taking pictures of the chaos, but I don’t understand Greek, do I??

Sweating, swarthy men with three-day-old beards try to manoeuvre the errant car out of the way, but such an excellent job has been done of sandwiching everyone in that extraction is impossible. I am in rapture; knitting will never have the potential for this kind of amusement.

It’s always a good idea to have enough gas in the tank to allow for disembarkation.

Finally a flustered and dishevelled young woman appears with the keys to the little blue car, and we are freed to disembark.

The directional signs are, after all, offered in Greek and English. It’s stinking hot and disconcertingly, people are driving on the shoulders. We have our usual argument about map-reading while at the wheel, but a couple of hours later we arrive safely at the town of Lefkas, where our extremely generous Dutch-Norwegian friends are waiting to welcome us on board their 15-metre ketch, Maya. We haul our bags out of the car and up the gangplank, leaving my knitting in the back seat of the car. I just hope nobody steals it.

Our ride for the week. Not.

The ‘Maya’, built in Finland and sturdy enough to sail through the Northwest Passage.

MFB at the helm, doing what he loves best. Well, almost.

Posted, unedited, from Sami, on the island of Keffalunia, Greece. Next instalment when internet connection permits.

Move over, Jamie Oliver

2010-08-10T07:20:00.001-06:00

Summer in the south-east of France has the same effect on me that a few drinks would (and I say ‘would’ because it’s an entirely theoretical supposition) – I succumb to an indolence that approaches unconsciousness. A lot of reading, a little housework, a few pages of incomplete prose, some idle conversation and the occasional bike ride or tennis game are about all I can manage. Used to be that I’d have to save up all year to spend two weeks doing next-to-nothing at some Hawaiian resort, where I’d feel like I’d earned my leisure time, but now it’s just part of living in a place that half the European continent considers the ultimate vacation destination. I get a bit uneasy being so slightly occupied. It feels sinful and wasteful, and if life were already passing at the speed of light, it is now disappearing at twice that rate into a black hole of non-achievement.

But my friend Jocelyn of O Mighty Crisis is much too disciplined for that sort of thing. She has just parked herself and her family at the other end of the Med - in Turkey - for a sabbatical year during which she is going to produce works of a scholarly nature, while also blogging (hilariously) about her new life in a (former) land of troglodytes. Yesterday, after a morning run (!!!) through the hot streets of Goreme, she nudged me awake to ask if I was ever going to post again. Soon, I promised.

While I’m working up a little motivation for that I thought I’d share a couple of scrumptious summer salad recipes with you, just so you know I can chop and toss as well as write essays. The melon salad is easy, elegant and delicious, even for non-lovers of melon. Personally I think that cantaloupe tastes an awful lot like dish detergent, especially when it’s just beyond ripe, but I fell completely in love with this combination of flavours. Never met a guest who didn’t like it, and they unfailingly ask for the recipe. The second one is equally delicious although savoury rather than sweet-ish, and is dedicated to Jocelyn, for whom chick peas are about to become a staple food – once she gets over her Turkish tummy.

Bon appetit!!

Melon and Feta Salad

I honeydew melon/cantaloupe

4 medium tomatoes

200 g. (8-10 oz) feta cheese

1 lemon

3 Tablespoons olive oil

1 bouquet fresh basil

salt, pepper

Cut melon in half and remove seeds. Cut each half in half and remove rind.

Cut quarters into small cubes.

Dice tomatoes. (If you’re really a purist, skin and seed them first. I’m not, and it works out just fine if you leave them as is.)

Cut feta into small cubes.

Finely grate lemon rind. Extract juice from lemon.

Add a bit of salt and pepper, the olive oil, and most of the basil leaves (torn into pieces) to juice and rind. (let sit for a few minutes if you can)

Gently toss melon, tomato and feta cubes in juice/oil dressing.

Sprinkle with remaining basil leaves for decoration.

Serves 4 blissfully

********************************************************************************************************************

Mediterranean Salad

1 large can chick peas (19 oz or 800 gms/850 ml)

2 Tablespoons lemon juice

4 Tbsp olive oil

1 Tbsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional, but it’s great)

1 pint cherry tomatoes, sliced in half, or 3-4 medium tomatoes, diced

2 roasted red peppers, coarsely chopped (optional too. Canned is fine)

1/4 Cup fresh coriander leaves, chopped (indispensable)

1/4 Cup chopped red onion

1/2 Cup feta cheese, crumbled

Stir juice, oil and spices together.

In large bowl, toss onions, peppers, coriander and chick peas with juice/oil dressing.

Add crumbled feta. Toss again lightly.

Serves 4 hearty appetites.

Best to make this an hour or so in advance, so as to marry the flavours. Refreshingly tasty, filling and highly nutritious. We make a meal of this along with some whole-wheat bread to mop up the dressing.

The Perfection of Being

2010-07-22T04:19:00.002-06:00

Note: This essay, about an unexpectedly wonderful day with my mother, was the catalyst for my blog and first posted a year ago. My mom – who should have been a writer – would have loved the idea. She died six months after it was written.

The colour of my mother's eyes has changed in the last few years.

They used to be hazel, as well as I can remember. It struck me when I looked into them today that now they're a deeper green, the colour of late-summer pond water. And her irises are no longer transparent, but nearly opaque, as if someone took a green crayon and filled in all the bits where the light used to pass through. She can still see well enough, as far as I know, even without her glasses. They disappeared a while ago, probably tucked away in some unlikely hiding place that she can’t recall anymore. But I don’t think it’s cataracts that make her eyes look that way and imagine instead that some mechanism of self-defence allows her to hide the vacancy of her mind behind a coloured veil.

I have a plan for our day. I want to take her to the petting zoo at the park, where we can sit in the car and watch little human kids chasing little goat kids. She loves children, to the point that it would be fair to say she is fascinated by them. It never mattered if they weren’t her own, and the older she got, the more appealing they became. Watching children play will be a safe bet: a guarantee of a good time.
The weather is more than fine, and there is a bench right in front of the goat enclosure, vacant just for us. She’s willing to be eased from the car and helped to the bench, in painful shuffle-steps. I put a fat red cushion behind her back and wrap a thick dressing gown around her legs. It looks a bit odd, but there was no blanket in her room that I could find. Maybe she had hidden it. She says she is comfy and warm enough, but is worried about me. I’ve got more flesh on my bones than you do, Mom, I say. I wonder if she thinks it’s strange that I call her Mom, or if she even notices.

She is entranced by the scene in front of her. Children play and scramble on the rocks, chase the goats and run away in thrilled mock-terror when the animals turn on them. Some struggle to pick up the little ones and others squat down to peer into their eyes and pat them tenderly. Mom loves it. She points at a boy who can’t be more than two, shaking her head in admiration. Look at him, she marvels. He knows exactly who he is and who he’s going to be. She nods sagely and says it twice more.
This is a recurring theme for her - people knowing who they are. In almost every conversation she will say something along those lines. Sometimes she’ll refer to herself and state, emphatically and a little defiantly, I am me. It saddens me because she doesn’t really know who she is anymore, having lost track of that knowledge over the last couple of years. She does know, however, that she is missing something essential about herself, and it’s very hard to watch her trying to figure out what it is.

That’s another part of my plan; I thought she might like to hear about the person she had been. Mom has always been interested in people and their doings, and it seemed reasonable to think she would be as intrigued by herself. We sit side by side on the bench and I share random memories with her. I tell her that she used to make really good pastry, and lots of it. Not just a few shells at a time, but a veritable assembly line of crimpy-edged circles of melt-in-your-mouth dough. She’s surprised and pleased by this bit of news. How interesting. I didn’t know that. I tell her that I can still hear the sound of her wedding ring clicking against the metal sifter as she shook out the last bits of flour.

You used to love to go bike-riding three or four times a week along the river path, I say. It was your favourite kind of exercise - you used to ride for miles and miles. This astonishes her. It’s hard to say if she can even visualize what a bicycle is. And the way you drove! I exclaim With verve! She only smiles at that, a little uncertainly. Do you have children, she asks me suddenly. I tell her about my three, her grandchildren. She seems quite interested but gives no sign that she knows who they are. Her comments are completely irrelevant to the subject; the endings of her sentences unrelated to their beginnings, but it doesn’t matter. The sun is warm on her face and she’s got someone to talk to. I get the feeling that she’s pretty content with that.
I tell her about Dad, that he was tall and handsome, and that a few years ago I found a picture of the two of them in a box of keepsakes. They must have been in their late twenties then, and my father has his arms wrapped around my mother from behind. He used to call you Lover, I say. Her reaction is a curious mix of discomfort and puzzlement. She doesn’t remember Dad when I mention him, but in her random, directionless conversations, she talks about him frequently and exclusively, seemingly unaware that she later loved and married another.

A peacock struts by, picking his elegant way across the grass. She wants to know what it is, but the word doesn’t appear to mean anything to her, although she thinks he’s beautiful. Seeing the bird reminds me that I intended to take pictures of us. It’s not likely that anything will help her to remember this day but just in case, I want her to have a souvenir. I turn the camera towards us and take a few snaps and show them to her. Mom peers intently at the little screen but I don’t think she knows what she’s looking at.
I go to the car to get us some cheese buns and as I come back to the bench she stares at me, incredulous. You’re there! she says. It’s you, it’s you, it’s you! I put my arms around her, pulling her close. Her recognition of me has come and gone in brief instants, but at this moment there is no doubt that she knows who I am. She starts to say something that makes sense, talking about the time when we didn’t do very well together.
I’m so sorry, I whisper.
For what?
For all the years when we misunderstood each other, I say. I can hardly speak for crying. If she responds to this, I don’t hear it. Perhaps she says it doesn’t matter now. I tell her I love her, and take more pictures. We scrutinize them together, and I realize that it’s there – the best picture I could ever have hoped for.

She chatters on. Nothing makes sense, but certain names rise again and again to the surface of her confusion. Although she would not recognize the faces attached to them, they belong to her so deeply and irrevocably that her knowledge of them has survived the dreadful ravages of her disease.
Did David stay in the car? Where is Mike? Garry said...
The names of her sisters and a long-dead brother come, inserted randomly in repetitive, incomprehensible sentences. Are you warm enough? At this particular moment, she doesn’t know I’m her daughter, but she hasn’t forgotten how to mother.

We stay for an hour, then two. I had thought she might last for half an hour, too uncomfortable or tired to be able to sit longer, but she’s happy to stay put. She rarely takes her eyes off the children, and when they leave, she comments about the goats and the arrival of the pea-hen. I am content to listen to her talk. She doesn’t need my response, enthralled as she is by her surroundings, the warmth of the sun and people passing by with their dogs.
Mom tilts her head back to look up at the sky and sighs happily. This is wonderful. It’s a perfect day. Perfect. She turns to look straight at me, and it seems as if she’s searching for something. Perhaps she’s just trying to make sense of what she sees; her green eyes are unreadable.

She smiles. Aren’t we lucky!

Oh, yes! Oh yes, we are.

My Wake-up Call

2010-07-14T15:37:00.001-06:00

During a particularly severe winter in the early 1960s, everybody in my elementary school got a lesson about the dangers of hypothermia. We were warned, should we find ourselves in a blizzard or too long on the toboggan hill, that a too-low body temperature could result in drowsiness that could prove fatal. The idea of giving in to a sleep to the death fascinated and horrified me, but I knew – even at that age – that if saving my own life meant resisting a nap, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I have fallen asleep reading in bed, watching TV, riding as a passenger in a car, on a train, on a plane – all those relaxing situations where, if I’m already tired, passivity or quiet pleasure will be enough tip me into the land of Nod. But lots of people do that, and especially in my family, whose members have a dominant doze gene.

My dad was a confirmed nap-taker, as are my brothers, and some of their adult children. So far, my kids seem to have escaped this. On my wedding day, in the afternoon interval between the ceremony and the dinner, all the members of my family - except for me, and only because I had a 9-month old baby to look after – fell asleep on my mother’s lawn, at roughly the same time. Sleep contagion had a human domino effect, and while we all thought it was funny, no one thought it was odd. Just as we’re all tall, we’re also what I would term ‘low energy’. (One of my brothers married a woman with an energy surplus, who has injected some welcome dynamism into the bloodline.)

But I also fall asleep at less appropriate times. Reading aloud, for instance, which made for abbreviated and bizarre story times with my kids when they were small. I would sometimes carry on talking in a kind of somnambular automatism, coming to a few minutes later to my children’s incredulous ‘Mom, do you have any idea what you just said?’ I have drifted off in dentists’ waiting rooms and passport offices, at the movies, concerts and the ballet, and most embarrassingly, during piano lessons. (But only sometimes, if the piece was long and boring!). I don’t think I was ever caught at it, but it could be that my students were just too diplomatic to say anything.

There is almost nowhere that I can’t cat-nap. Only once did I ever nod off at the wheel, but that scared me so much, I never let it happen again. While briefly and tediously employed by a major oil company, I once arrived a few minutes late to a sales meeting to find all seats taken. When my boss offered to get another chair, I said I’d rather stand because ‘it’s harder to fall asleep on your feet’. I thought it was funny. He didn’t.

It’s always bothered me that I didn’t have more get-up-and-go. I avoid thinking of all the things I might have accomplished had mid-day inertia not ‘cut the legs off’ my intentions. (That’s how the French refer to a sudden loss of energy) Mornings usually start out fine, although my head can be drooping before noon if I’m at the computer doing something passive like reading the news. Writing falls into a similar category – it lacks external stimulation and is often laborious – and it’s frequently more than I can manage to stay awake, let alone alert and creative. It’s part of the reason why I despair of ever finishing my novel. It never occurred to me that there was anything I could do about this, since even getting more sleep didn’t help. Then a facetious remark made last summer to an in-law about her husband’s sleepiness – just another family narcoleptic – made me curious enough to do a little research.

Narcolepsy is characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and usually, but not always, accompanied by one of more of the following symptoms: cataplexy (sudden muscular weakness, usually with an emotional trigger such as laughter) sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations and automatic behaviour. None of these really applied to me, but bells started clanging wildly when I read that REM sleep episodes are abnormally frequent in people with narcolepsy. Long ago, my favourite Belgian stopped asking me about my dreams. There’s no end to my tales of night-time adventure and it is no exaggeration to say that I am busy all night long. Every night.

For the narcoleptic person, REM sleep kicks in soon after falling asleep (usually in less than 15 minutes instead of the usual 90) and occurs far more frequently than it does during normal sleep. Restful non-REM periods are sharply reduced, and the result is an inadequate amount of restorative sleep, leading to daytime fatigue. In addition, the ‘sleep/wake’ switch in the brain is thought to malfunction, as perhaps it does for insomniacs, but in the opposite way.

All of this made sense to me, and I was pretty convinced that I had found a valid reason for my dopiness. My family doctor, who probably has her share of patients who self-diagnose via the internet, took it all seriously and referred me to a sleep clinic. My answers to their initial questionnaire, which included the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, determined that depression was not at fault. The next step was to determine if I slept poorly due to sleep apnea and I was sent home with a machine to record my sleep behaviours, breathing patterns and snores. Once that was ruled out, the last step was to make arrangements for an overnight stay at the clinic, where electrodes will be stuck to my head to analyze nocturnal brain waves. (I’ll have to wait until my next trip to Calgary for that.)

The neurologist says she won’t be surprised if the results show abnormal REM activity, which will make a diagnosis of narcolepsy straightforward. If they don’t, then I have what is simply referred to as idiopathic hyper-somnolence – excessive sleepiness of unknown origin. In either case, there is no cure, although there are treatments. Scheduled napping is one. Taking a medically-justifiable afternoon snooze is, to me, an unproductive option that offers no real improvement, but the other is a medication to regulate that on-off switch in the brain. It is not understood exactly how the drug Modafinil works, but it is considered a much safer, gentler alternative to Ritalin, a stimulant with a molecular resemblance to cocaine. I don’t like the idea of Ritalin, and while I have taken it occasionally for a diagnosed condition and found that it does help me to focus, it’s an ineffective defence against an overwhelming desire to sleep. It helps to stay physically active or visually stimulated but neither of these things is compatible with writing.

Narcolepsy is considered by the medical profession to be seriously under-diagnosed, and many people never investigate the cause of their sleepiness, often classifying themselves as simply lazy or low in energy. It’s a negative self-image, and one that I had for a long time. I also blamed my owlish tendencies, but even after 8 hours of non-stop sleep, I am still tired. My days were like a paraphrase of that famous description of an airline pilot’s job: Hours and hours of lethargy punctuated by moments of intense activity.

For years I’ve joked that I could fall asleep at a red light. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that when you’re tired, you feel sleepy, but the neurologist drily assured me that getting a few winks in while waiting for the light to change is not a normal thing to do. The oddest thing about this whole experience is that when I take the medication, although I still feel tired, I don’t have to fight the urge to put my head down. Tiredness and sleepiness have always been inseparable to me, and it has been a revelation to discover that one can exist without the other. To understand how that feels, just imagine being ravenously hungry, but without any desire to eat.

Sleep has been a drug I was involuntarily addicted to, and without that need, my afternoons – and this is one of them – now have the potential for copious amounts of fresh prose, instead of being spent in an often-vain struggle to stay awake. Sometimes this new alertness feels slightly unnatural and I’m tempted to skip the pill, but the satisfaction I want and get from actually achieving something has won out, so far.

And it’s great, finally, to be able to live up to my name.

All I needed to know about being a mother, I learned from a dog. Too late.

2010-07-10T14:47:00.001-06:00

My parental decisions, I am embarrassed to admit, have too often been influenced by the potential for my permanent unpopularity. The occasions when I have parked my common sense in favour of making a child happy – or side-stepping their negative opinion – have not always done them any favours. Like many parents of my generation and culture, I tend to place more importance on the relationship I have with my kids than whether the best answer is ‘no’. To those brave and confident parents who have managed both firmness and friendliness with their children, (Midlife Jobhunter appears to be one) I offer my congratulations and a not a little envy.

Over the 28 years that I have been a parent, I’ve spent some time examining my errors, and this one is at the top of the list. Number two is my inconsistent application of discipline – not the corporal kind – and after spending a couple of recent months in the company of my adult offspring, it is apparent that I have influenced them towards a certain insouciance, insofar as deadlines, order and the judicious application of their attention to the road are concerned.

(Note to my children: Don’t think for a second that I believe you to be seriously flawed. Rather, it’s sometimes evident to me that, had I been a little more with it as a parent, you might have had some more helpful habits in place. The nature vs. nurture debate has never satisfactorily determined what aspects of personality and character are inborn but it’s safe to suggest that I am responsible for not instilling in any of you a better defence against procrastination, for instance.)

So I could have put my foot down and just said No when Youngest Son said last fall that he wanted to bring a dog to live in my house, but being firmly opposed to anything is not a natural position for me. I preferred to appeal to his practicality. After a protracted, long-distance MSN discussion during which I cited at least 30 reasons why getting a dog was a bad idea (I saved the conversation in case a reprise was necessary), he proved once again that I am someone to be ignored. When I arrived home a month later, a Giant Alaskan Malamute was in residence. (Like their Canadian cousins, the Huskies, Malamutes are Northern sled dogs who are noted, among other things, for their physical strength and mental stubbornness. These two attributes do not a good combination make, in either dogs or children.)

I am a realist. There was no point in objecting – the dog was there to stay. And besides, I fell in love with him. There was no other option for an animal with snowshoes for paws who could easily whup a lion cub in a cutest-ever contest. But the black-and-white bundle of fur who had to be plucked out of December snowdrifts had become, four months later, a 115-lb adolescent whose height was the canine equivalent of Eldest Son’s 7’0” and whose personality could be best described as Totally Chill alternating with Cannon-on-the-Loose.

The first time I offered him breakfast, he went vertical and kibble scattered to the four winds. My eardrums hurt from the sonic thunder of his bark. Going for a walk meant trying to get out of the house without having my upper body slammed against a barely-open door, and my left bicep began to develop at an unnatural rate.

In short, he was trouble: undisciplined, oversized, and too big to control by force. Despite his affectionate temperament and complete lack of aggression, he was an intimidating sight bearing down on small dogs and children, his favourite beings in the world next to his human dad. Something had to be done.

My only experience with dogs had consisted of a decade-long relationship with two pre-owned Belgian Sheepdogs, one of whom came with a perfect report card and natural deference. The other one got me enrolled in some basic training and we both learned a few things about what I should and shouldn’t be doing. She was intelligent – as opposed to obedient – and although I never could trust her around rabbits or other female dogs, she became my favourite.

Having supplemented my patchy recollection of dog commands and desirable behaviours with Youtube videos of Cesar Milan, Dog Whisperer, I felt ready to take on the task of teaching Noa how to be good. Whatever nuances of puppy-training I didn’t know about, one thing was burned into my intent – I would show him who was Da Boss.

Mealtime manners were first. No aggressive food behaviour allowed any more, and he had to sit, lie down and wait to eat until given permission. His master had done a good job of teaching him the first two, but Noa figured he owned the bowl. It took about a four days before he could be relied on to wait in front of a full bowl, ,even when the food-giver left the room. A couple of weeks later he didn’t even need to be told what to do, and without a word from anybody, he lay down quietly and would not eat unless given the OK.

Next step: door decorum. Ladies first – in fact, humans first. This was a bit tougher, as Noa would already be on a leash and in a state of high excitement about getting a walk. It took a couple of weeks before he stopped trying to take my arm out the front door without the rest of me, but after a while he got the message that if he didn’t sit and let me go first, nobody was going anywhere. Ditto stairs.

But the biggest issue was the neighbourhood Iditarod. This world-famous sled race usually takes place about 10 degrees further north and requires snow, but Noa had his own version. The first half-block of the competition was deceptively easy, distracted as he was by getting the leash between his teeth. Looking up with an ‘aren’t-I-cute’ expression, he would trot beside me for only as long as it took him to realize that we were actually Out of the House. Once the full significance of the situation hit, he was off at full-bore sled dog, with me hauling back on the leash with every ounce of strength I had and thinking that gaining an extra hundred pounds had its advantages.

Grind to a halt. Sit. Calm down. Heel. Shoulder dislocation. Halt. Full circle turn. Sit. Heel. Shoulder dislocation. Do it all again. And again. And again. But finally, interrupted step by interrupted step, he learned that he couldn’t get away with anything and that if he wanted to go for a walk , he had to stay beside me. (This is still a lesson-in-progress, and for every time he responds to ‘Heel’, there are at least as half as many when he doesn’t.)

It did not escape me that there was a certain amount of enjoyment involved in my gaining the upper hand. Being an Alpha female is more fun than bungee-jumping. That Noa was learning to behave well was the primary reward, but there was also that ancillary glow about being decisive and unambiguous about my expectations of him. There were times when I was tempted to let him sniff even when he was supposed to be at heel, and others when his joy at seeing another dog made it seem mean to insist that he sit patiently and watch, but damn, it felt good to be totally consistent. I became one of his favourite people despite, well, actually, because of my role, and it was then that the light went on. I didn’t spend a second wondering if my firm decisions affected my standing in his doggy heart, and that left me free to just go ahead and apply the rules for his own good. He held nothing against me and in fact, the more I persisted in expecting him to do the right thing, the more he seemed to like me.

Why couldn’t I have done this with my kids? This should not have been the revelation it was. In theory, I knew this already, but sometimes you actually have to experience the truth to really get it. Had I known way back when what I know now, I could have been as good a raiser of children as a trainer of dogs.

If I could do it all over again, I’d practice parenting on a pooch first. But since that’s not going to happen, I’ll have to wait and see if it works on the next generation. Although, the other thing I’ve learned from Noa is that good grandparents must be equipped with Velcro lips.

I guess it really is too late.

The End of the Road

2010-07-03T15:37:00.001-06:00

After hours of driving the secondary highway (#20) that meanders across northern Washington state, we are in need of a coffee and something to tide us over until supper Around 5 o’clock, we round a bend in the road and fall upon Winthrop.

The town turned back the clock in the early 1950s, when local businessman Otto Wagner, in gratitude to the townsfolk for the prosperity he enjoyed, underwrote the transformation of the town back to the way it had looked at the turn of the century. When he died, his widow took over the realization of his dream, and Winthrop became a living museum of early 20th century Western architecture.

Wooden sidewalks run the length of the main street, and every building and storefront is made of or covered with wood planks. Our hotel was straight out of a cowboy film, and even the pumps at the gas station looked at least half a century old. The only thing missing were a couple of horses tethered to the railings.

It’s a delightful place, and its old-style air brings in the tourists and their custom. In my hometown of Calgary, an Old West village in a beautiful lakeside setting has been constructed from old buildings, machinery and artefacts, but while an admirable job was done to recreate a showpiece of life as it existed over a hundred years ago, it is a display. Winthrop, on the other hand, is a place where people live and work, and the place feels genuine despite its obvious tourist appeal.

Supper was steak and pizza served by a motherly waitress at the Whiskey Bar, sitting side-by-side in a booth by the window. If I were a beer drinker, I would have gone to the former schoolhouse afterwards, but instead we strolled through the town

and then drove up into the hills to take pictures in the golden evening light. From the spectacular mountain ranges of central Washington,

the topography has changed to rolling hills and the vegetation – much of it low brush – reflects a much drier climate.

The next morning, astride saddles outside at the café, we breakfasted on cinnamon rolls, the best yeasty treat on earth provided the baker is generous enough with spice and butter.

In the shade of a courtyard tree, a busker plays lovely music, but his instrument seemed a little out of place in a Wild West town. Once I’d licked my fingers clean I went on a mission to Find Out More.

David Michael’s Celtic harp was made for him 28 years ago, and he has earned his living playing it ever since, For 17 years he had a steady gig on the Whidbey Island ferry north of Seattle but in the post 9/11 paranoia, Homeland Security declared him a threat. His sacking made the national press, but even all that publicity didn’t save his job.

He composes film soundtracks, teaches harp and for three months every summer, he busks in Winthrop. I bought two of David’s CDs and think I might have found just the right kind of background music to write my novel by. (According to the prolific blogger and published author Larry Brooks, music can make a big difference to a writer’s output. Finding the right music will release a lava flow of words and ideas, I am certain, but songs with lyrics are too distracting and classical music only works if it’s not something that demands attention. Pop music is out of the question, being full of clichés, which invariably find their way into my prose.)

After breakfast and a stop at the Frontier Bank, we head east to the hard reality that scenic routes do numb bums make. Narrow Idaho passes in the blink of an eye, although we have a very good lunch at a slightly funky restaurant in a town where pickup trucks idle up and down the main street and the street corners are anchored by churches.

Across from the restaurant is a general store advertising fabric, and I wander in to see if there’s anything interesting. The proprietor is an extroverted, friendly woman who doesn`t mind that I buy nothing, and chats about the weight of good denim and parenting.

There is no border crossing between states, but it’s immediately obvious that we’ve crossed the line into Montana. The speed limits increase and the paved shoulders disappear. The land gets drier and the roads straighter, and there’s hardly any traffic although we frequently spot deer in the long grass or sprinting across the asphalt ahead. At regular intervals white diamond-shaped markers atop long poles indicate the limit of the pavement, for the winter months when snow covers the road. After a time, I realize that sometimes the markers are in the shape of a cross, planted singly for the most part, sometimes in pairs. They represent deaths from car accidents, obviously, but oddly enough they appear most frequently on long, straight stretches of road where the view ahead is unobstructed. The road has only one lane in each direction, with a dotted line down the middle, and it’s not hard to imagine a fatal scenario. At one point we pass a cluster of five crosses, and I wonder how many of them were members of the same family.

We stay the night in Missoula, arriving too late for a proper meal and hungry to the point of snappishness. My personal boycott of McDonald’s crumbles in the face of an empty stomach, but I’m not sure if I feel any better after a Big Mac – hold the onions – or not.

Heading to the Logan Pass the next morning, we have a brief disagreement about the necessity of checking the status of the spare tire, something we’ve forgotten to do from the start of our trip. I win the round, and we unpack the rear of the car to reveal a seriously flat tire. It’s hard to hide my ‘I-told-you-so’ smirk, but my favourite Belgian offers some statistics about the unlikelihood of impaling a tire, bolstering his case later when the trip is finished without a single blip with the car. .

Disappointingly, the Going-To-The-Sun road is not open all the way through the pass – wet weather and a late spring are to blame – so we turn around at the 26-mile point and make our way back down a vertigo-inducing striplet of road along with thousands of others who have come for the thrilling scenery.

Almost out of Montana, we see an artist by the roadside, with a bumper sticker that makes me smile. She agrees to a photo shoot when I explain that I like the juxtaposition of the pickup truck and the easel, but the more I explain, the more I have trouble talking around the foot in my mouth.

On our way north to Alberta now, across the border without incident although I see no point in telling the unsmiling Customs guy about the wine or the heirlooms, since their provenance is Canadian anyway. It’s another two and a half hours up to Calgary on a dead-straight road, with hardly a tree in sight. The fields are green, green, though, and the Rockies rear up from the western horizon. The vast breadth of the land is astonishing and whoever named this part of the world ‘Big Sky Country’ was bang on the money. It’s not a sight I have ever seen in Europe.

Then we’re almost there, turning onto the street where I live. Above my house, against the backdrop of a slate-coloured sky and lit by early evening sun, a double rainbow arches prettily. Youngest son’s leaky, un-useable car still sits under its flapping tarpaulin, and he is just finishing mowing the lawn as we pull to the curb.

It’s good to be home for a while, but we’ll be off again soon, headed across the water to France next week A bientôt!!

Not-quite sleepless in Seattle

2010-06-23T00:47:00.001-06:00

My preference would have been to discover Seattle on foot, staying in a cozy B&B in Frasier’s old neighbourhood and soaking up a rare urban experience on this mostly rural and small-town trip. Pragmatism prevailed, and the hour of our arrival in Port Angeles plus the late-night drive to a second ferry which would take us across to the city meant that booking a hotel on Bainbridge Island was the more sensible option.

With sincere apologies to my American friends ,I admit to a certain wariness about being the States, as Canadians call the country that our only charismatic Prime Minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, once likened to ‘sleeping with an elephant’. The slightest move made south of the border has its repercussions for Canada and despite our proclamations of apart-ness, we are inextricably linked to American economics, politics and culture. That is not to say there isn’t a difference, but to the uninformed point of view, North Americans (minus Mexico) could be considered a single unit.

Sure enough, in Port Angeles a sign announces that ‘Guns and Ammo’ are for sale at a pawn shop cum hardware store. The right to bear arms is, rather simplistically, the single biggest criticism we have of American culture. (I don’t make the mistake of assuming that all Americans are comfortable with this, either). But the relative ease of gun ownership puts visions of pistol-packing Starbucks patrons into my head and I intend to be excessively polite here in my dealings with strangers.

Next morning it’s cool and overcast. The Olympic Mountains are sheathed in low cloud and I’m relieved we didn’t pay a fortune to stay in any of the Seattle B&Bs I had initially earmarked for their fabulous views. We hop the ferry from Bainbridge Island over to the big city and by the time we walk two blocks from the docks, it is raining. The Pike Place Market is on our list of places to see, and it doesn’t disappoint. Colourful and filled to the brim with fish, flowers and fruit, it is also jam-packed with browsers. A big cruise ship is in port and it’s also Father’s Day, but maybe every Sunday is this busy. (I find out later in the day that another blogger who regularly comments on my other (collaborative) blog Fridge Soup, is at the market at the same time!!)

I never met a busker I didn’t like. Somebody tell what the name of the third instrument is…?

I love browsing and am always alert for handicrafts with some originality. My FB, on the other hand, does not do shopping. He does not think about Christmas presents in June nor consider it necessary to have souvenirs to remember things by. His philosophy of shopping excludes the possibility of buying anything he hasn’t already decided he needs, whereas I am open to the delights of happenstance. This clash of personal habits is one of our few, map-reading at the wheel being another.

We walk to the Space Needle but decide that a ride up on such a grey day would be a waste of time and money. Instead, we head for the Experience Music Project, a hands-on museum of rock and roll history and paraphenalia that features an interactive area of recording studios, where I briefly contemplate cutting a CD of the Belgian and I jamming on guitar and drums. Only trouble is, neither of us is sufficiently unself-conscious to brave the public display of our ineptitude – a TV screen placed outside the studio gives everybody a chance to watch the session and snicker. I care too much about making a fool of myself and walk away with mild regret that we weren’t just able to be silly and have a permanent record of it.

The Guitar Sculpture at the Experimental Music Project (about 40 feet tall!)

I wish Youngest Son was there to see the extensive display of electric guitars. His basement room holds an expanding collection of them, with accompanying massive amplifiers that do double duty as sled substitutes for his Malamute-in-training.

We walk and walk and walk and I’m grateful that I have broken my Golden Rule of Sneakers, which is to say that they are never my default footwear of choice. Especially in cities, where running shoes should only be worn if training for a marathon on your lunch hour.

Although I generally shun Starbucks coffee for reasons of taste and corporate bigness, in its birthplace of Seattle, I will put my principles aside. The staff are extraordinarily friendly and nobody seems to have any hardware stuffed into their belt. The coffee, a blend exclusive to this location (if the board is to be believed) is very decent and we retire to a window table to decide what to do for dinner. I’m skeptical that Bainbridge Island will have a restaurant with anything other than standard American fare, but neither of us feel like finding a way to occupy ourselves in the city on a Sunday in the rain between 5 and 7:30 PM before we’re ready to eat. We opt for the ferry, and on the other side discover that my dim view of Bainbridge Island gastronomy was completely incorrect. Dinner is very good, without a French fry in sight.

The US is second only to the UK for its profusion of churches,according to me. The Scientologists seem to have NW WA all wrapped up.

The next morning we set off for a mall near the airport, specifically for the Abercrombie & Fitch kids’ store, at the request of my FB’s daughter, whose young sons are taken by the brand. It astonishes me that anyone is willing to pay money to put someone else’s advertising on their back. On principle I will not buy anything that visibly proclaims its corporate origins, with the exception of automobiles, and there I am a snob. Did I mention that I bought an Audi recently? Did I also mention that I’m a cheapskate and made sure somebody else took a serious depreciation hit on it first?

The freeway to the mall is a scene of high anxiety. FB is driving and I am navigating, a reversal of our usual roles when in a strange place that requires intensive map-reading. I nearly come undone when he decides spontaneously to take an earlier exit than planned and crosses five lanes of traffic in an exceedingly short time. He is, I add in all fairness, an excellent driver in whom I am normally very confident, but we’re in my new-to-me Audi and I’m not in control.

Half an hour later. Purchases made, harmony restored. We leave the city behind and head north-east, past the well-kept farms and tidy towns of Washington state, towards the distant mountains, still obscured by clouds. Even the imposing and stunningly beautiful Mt. Baker, normally visible from a hundred miles away, remains discreetly under cover. It’s a disappointment, but there will be, we hope, other compensations along the way.

The Longest Undefended Border in the World

2010-06-21T23:19:00.001-06:00

Leaving Tofino, the sun is out in full force,typical for a day we have to spend in the car. We stop at Combers Beach for a quick snap or two and wish we could stay longer – this is the southern part of Long Beach, 12 km from end to end. Watching the waves roll in, I imagine the Pacific Ocean as a gigantic bowl of water, the earth’s rotation sloshing the sea from one continental coastline to the other.

We visit my aunt and uncle – she my mother’s siter, he my father’s brother, both in their 80s and determined to stay in their neat-as-a-pin house for as long as they can. I catch them up on the latest from the relatives we’ve visited so far – my FB still having me believe that he isn’t yet fed up with the endless re-broadcasting of family news.

Down the Island highway to Victoria and nearly out of gas. My gut tells me I’ve been in this situation before – running on empty in a German car. Oh right, it’s that Boxing Day fiasco on the road to Banff. Read about it here,.

Maggie of Stepping Out With Red Shoes On picked up on the label on the previous post and wanted to know what ‘learning to be a better passenger’ was all about. That’s a whole other post in itself, but it refers to my anxiety when not behind the wheel, especially in my own car and in my own country, More on that later.

These are not boats. These are high-end housing projects that happen to float.

Pulling into the ferry line-up at Victoria Harbour, the US Border Patrol requests the presence of MFB at the customs office. He’s gone for a long time and I imagine him being overly helpful and giving them way more information than they need. As in, how many bottle of wine we/;ve got stashed in the back of the car and the provenance of all that jewellery that used to be my mother’s. Going into the States makes me slightly queasy, and I won’t be completely sorry if MFB is refused entry.

But he’s not. He’s passed the preliminary inspection and will go through a more rigorous one once we make land on Bainbridge Island. I’ve heard lots of stories about cars torn apart by zealous agents, and owners left to deal with the aftermath. Do I have any illegal downloads on my hard drive? And why am I writing about this on the ferry – incriminating words right here for official eyes to find?

Tiny floating houses with tiny floating taxi. Victoria inner harbour.

We board the ferry and get some cafeteria food. MFB, surprisingly, orders nachos, and I, even less characteristically opt for clam chowder with chilli on the side. Here are his nachos a l’orange plastique.

I can’t believe he’s going to eat them, and force him to take some of my chilli/chowder. With as many varieties of cheese in the world as there are, it astounds me that my neighbours to the south had to invent their own to melt over corn chips. American cheese is as much a misnomer as Canadian Cheddar.

Nearing Port Angeles, I finally have a close-up view of the mountains of the Olympic peninsula, after years of peering at them from the Canadian side through the haze of the Juan de Fuca straits. We have an hour-long drive to a little town across the water from Seattle, and if we can get through US Customs without a hitch, we’ll be in a king-sized bed before midnight. After two nights in a bed that was a double by aspiration only, I’m looking forward to some room to stretch out.

On the Road Again

2010-06-18T23:51:00.001-06:00

Left Calgary last Friday, headed for Vancouver Island, land of my childhood dreams and retirement hopes.

In Canada, there is one major road from East to West, officially called the Trans-Canada, and more often simply the No. 1. It might even be the longest highway in the world but it certainly isn’t the smoothest, or widest. On day one of our trip, after stopping for lunch at Field, BC (above) we ran into a traffic jam (below) about 40km east of Golden, BC. Such imaginative names, along with Radium, Kicking Horse and the aptly named Bountiful, infamous home of a polygamous breakaway branch of the LDS.

Obviously an accident of some sort had blocked the two-lane road and we had no idea how long the wait would be. My favourite Belgian, accustomed to the spiderweb network of European roads, wondered if we couldn’t just turn around and take a detour. In theory, this was possible, but since there are only three ways to get from Alberta to BC through the Rocky Mountains, getting to the next pass would add at least 800km to our trip. We elected to wait it out, and it only took an hour for things to get moving again.

It’s been a sentimental journey, and MFB has risen to the occasion. First stop was an overnight stay in Kelowna (above) with a cousin who I first met at a family reunion when I was seven, and to whom I promptly proposed. An aunt was scandalized when she heard of my plan but she obviously had no idea that the Royal Family had already been there, done that.

Next stop was tea and sticky buns with an uncle at his hilltop home overlooking the Okanagan Valley, and more family news and gossip. MFB still able to keep up. Pressing on, we wander through south western BC and MFB comments on the lack of wildlife. Two minutes later a young black bear runs across the road ahead of us. I’m tempted to stop but have grown up with stories of stupid tourists who stop to take picture of beers and elk in Banff National Park and end up with concussions or badly scratched cars.

Two nights with a different cousin, one of my special ones. Our mothers married brothers, and that should make us look almost like twins, but the only physical trait we share is our height. His wife is my good friend Kath, of YOU ARE HERE, and it’s all her fault that I started to blog. Wonderfully generous hospitality, hours of talk, a few games of billiards, and outdoor fish and chips followed by a stroll along the beach at White Rock, just east of Vancouver. MFB mildly confused by the number of family members and friends named Jim.

Two ferries later, we landed on Saturna Island, one of the southern Gulf Islands between the mainland and Vancouver Island. Explored by piloto Jose Maria Narvaez of the Santa Saturnina in 1791, it is home to about 400 winter residents and about three times as many summer visitors. It’s a quiet, wet life much of the time, suitable for seals, slugs and people who really don’t mind being away from everything, including reliable internet service.

Although, if I had a view like the one my uncle and aunt have from their kitchen window (below), I could learn to live almost anything.

More family, now on Vancouver Island. My brother and SIL live in Sidney, just a few minutes from the ferry slip. One night in their huge guest room with its king size bed and stupendous view, and I’m ready to move in. My sister-in-law had thoughtfully laid out what was left of my mother’s things after her death last November, and packed up what I wanted to keep. Her jewellery set off flash floods of memories – the turquoise glass beads that went with a tulle-skirted party dress she had made for herself in the late 50s, the opal ring she bought in Australia, a little silver ring fashioned into a lovers knot that I recognized but couldn’t remember the provenance of…it all made me a bit weepy. MFB still putting on an attentive face at the umpteenth re-telling of family stories.

Then on to Tofino, on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, a Mecca for surfers with dreadlocks. Our hotel is right on the beach, but nobody’s catching any rays here. The temperature might have got up to fifteen degrees Celsius and even though every surfer wears a wetsuit, I still don’t understand how they can stay in that water for hours.

To compensate for our budgetary excesses at dinner last night we buy stuff for a picnic lunch today and go to Long Beach. Sitting on a big driftwood log, we watch crows filch a bag of chips from a picnic basket left on the beach. After they’re done I fold the empty bag neatly and return it to the basket, hoping to drive somebody crazy trying to figure out what happened to their chips.

I take a photo of a couple on the wharf at Tofino and ask them to return the favour. We don’t have a lot of pictures of the two of us, and most of the ones we have are way better of MFB than me. For once, we’re both looking not bad.

Tomorrow we head to Bainbridge Island, WA, (visiting a dear aunt on the way) and hope there’ll be no explaining to do to US Customs about all that stuff of my mom’s. I can’t believe they’d hassle two senior-looking people but every Canadian has a horror story to tell of trans-border car travel.

Seattle is for Sunday, and then a leisurely drive back to Calgary through northern Washington, Idaho and Montana. The high point, in both senses of the word, will be the Logan Pass, also known as Going-To-The-Sun road. See you sometime next week!

My Holy Trinity: Procrastination, Intimidation and occasionally, Exhilaration

2010-06-03T22:46:00.001-06:00

A random picture of the Provencal countryside, with some potential symbolism related to Jumping off Cliffs or Keeping One’s Eye on the Far Horizon.

As you may have noticed, I don’t post very often. In the early, heady days of my blog I kept to a weekly schedule, spending my Sundays in isolation in front of my computer (not much different than any other day, in fact) writing and editing and re-editing until I started to feel like a hamster in a wheel. Round about midnight I’d finally post my latest effort and head to bed in happy anticipation of what I’d find in the morning. I should be embarrassed to admit how thrilling it was to see those comments rolling in, but there are others out there who understand this very well.

I had lots to say in the beginning. The folder of half-finished, semi-started essays that had languished for years on my hard drive began to expand and even took on a new name - Completed Blog Posts. My motivation was high and my commitment consistent. The phrase I am a writer began to seem like it could be true, and I practiced saying it under my breath and without the self-deprecating grimace that used to go along with I’m a full-time mom. Then somebody at a party asked me what I did, and the words came out all by themselves, as smooth as you please. It felt fabulous to say them in public and in front of witnesses and my left eyebrow didn’t even move. Writing was, after all, a substantial part of my daily occupation, and people actually read and liked what I had to say. Thanks to you, I wasn’t even afraid of Have you published anything? After a few months of nice reviews and some more out-loud practice, my new professional status felt pretty natural. I am a writer rolled off my tongue, although deep in the truth-telling part of my brain a few rebel cells muttered in protest.

Every writer gives up energy to doubts about the authenticity of their calling and the measure of their work. Fortunately, every single writer I read has decided to press ahead regardless of their hesitation, and without them, I know not what I’d do. Let me give you an example. Loving the quirks and complexities of the English language as I do, I was happy to discover The Inky Fool, a collaborative blog staffed, in the main, by the highly entertaining, deeply knowledgeable and dangerously habit-forming Dogberry. Fortunately he is also prolific and reliably supplies his readers with a daily fix – occasionally more. The other day he wrote a wonderful piece called ‘Prepositions The End of Sentences At’, the general theme of which was that all kinds of supposed rules of written English usage are not rules at all, but snobberies. The idea that I could start a sentence with And but not feel bad about it filled me with joy, and momentarily held the tantalizing prospect of morphing into motivation to write. And so it did, although with a considerable delay. (See? I used ‘And’ right at the beginning, as I often do, the difference being that now I don’t feel like I’m a lesser writer because of it.)

But as I read Dogberry’s post, I was also conscious that while good writing pleases and often exhilarates me, it also intimidates. A skilled writer (along with a capable editor) leaves the reader with the impression that there was no hard slog behind the prose – that it flowed from imagination to page as effortlessly and continuously as it does in the other direction for the reader. Perhaps this is actually true for some writers, but we know how disingenuous it is to think that an adequately-equipped toolbox of literary devices is sufficient for success as a writer. But then I go and read Jocelyn at O Mighty Crisis and am convinced anew that she and Dogberry both know something I don’t about the secret to writing with effortless, fabulous, and often hilarious ease.

So despite my hard-won smarts about some things, I can still fool myself into thinking that my appreciation for and intense enjoyment of good prose should somehow magically transform the uphill-struggle nature of my writing into something much easier and better. Before you think that I’m fishing for compliments, I should say that I know I’m not a dud. When I spend enough time and have enough patience to edit, I’m reasonably satisfied with what comes out, but the point is not what I produce, but how much and how difficult it is.

It occurs to me that the title of my blog is apt in a different way than I originally intended. Words tempt me, definitely, but often that’s all they do. They beckon, they tease, they make me want to go out and play, but I don’t or won’t push aside the mundane and non-essential things that fill up my time and clog my attention. In more than one analysis of why writers find it so hard to write, it has been suggested that fear of success is to blame. I can hardly believe that. If you knew that success was waiting in the wings at the end of the performance, would you just shut it down and walk offstage? Not me. Fear of not being accomplished enough, organized enough, disciplined enough, connected enough, motivated enough – that’s more likely. How about fear of not having anything worthwhile to say? Years ago, after reading the loveliness that is Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ , I decided that the world didn’t need less-talented writers to dilute the excellence that had been her contribution to English literature. Comparing yourself to others isn’t productive unless you’re learning from the analysis, but in that case I felt that Roy’s novel was so sublime that my time would be better spent worshipping at the altar of her accomplishment than producing any work of my own. Nowhere in my personality is there any hint of perfectionism except when it comes to writing, and the critic in my head stays plenty busy.

Writing is not for the lazy and undisciplined. In my case it demands a marshalling of all my attention and the pushing away of a need to do something more stimulating, more active and less cerebral – something with greater potential for immediate results. I’m a sucker for immediate gratification and writing rarely gives me that. The pleasant anticipation that surrounds the thought of getting down to writing evaporates when the words don’t come fast enough, or when I have to reach for the synonym finder too often. What kind of a writer has to search for words? Is my changing mid-life brain to blame? Is this an early warning sign of the disease that shredded up my mother’s once-sharp mind? I continue to hope that my wordlessness is a temporary situation, and that the fog will lift eventually. Meanwhile, I’m vigilant about proof-reading my comments and disturbingly often find ‘hear’ instead of ‘here’ or letters in wacky order. Sometimes I suspect that I’m working in the wrong department altogether and would do better in appliance repair.

When the kids were small, I read all the articles and listened to the discussions that exhorted women to shuffle the needs and demands of others off to one side to make their own desires and accomplishments a priority. I wasn’t good at it back then, and haven’t improved much over the years. Selflessness isn’t the problem, but more a willingness to be distracted by anything else that moves. Back in a situation where I am in close contact with my children, the need to be needed takes priority, and I get a lot of satisfaction from being useful and maybe even indispensable. It’s a temporary, two-month situation and would probably drive me nuts if it weren’t. In another month they will fend for themselves as they so capably do and I will be back in my undemanding, quiet French environment looking for other excuses not to write. It feels a lot like I’m letting somebody down, and that somebody is me and the people who believe in what I said I would do, which was to write. I want to do it, and I think about it a lot.

The biggest problem is that I want the act of writing to be easier, and it isn’t. Practice, you say! Well yes, that would help, but so would turning off the thinking part that interferes with the doing. The man I love is a sometime tennis player, and was explaining to me yesterday how frustrated he is by the inconsistency of his game. He finds that putting too much thought into his play overrides his instincts, and the outcome isn’t usually good. Playing tennis is not so different from playing the piano or any other kinaesthetic activity, and too much cerebral input gets in the way. Perhaps the same is true of writing. I don’t put a lot of thought into the writing of un-serious things; my email style gets so many compliments that I’ve considered pretending that everything I write has a ‘To’ field. Meanwhile my novel is heading into its fourth year as an incomplete and very rough draft.

It’s been a few days since I started this, and Obsessive-Compulsive Editing Disorder has stopped me from posting it sooner. Tomorrow my favourite Belgian arrives after a month-long separation and I will have yet another wonderful excuse not to write. If I don’t post this now, it will sit for another couple of weeks and I’ve already spent too much energy trying to ignore that familiar, niggling feeling that I’m not doing what I’m meant to do.

The View From Here

2010-05-18T23:44:00.001-06:00

I was very kindly invited by Marcie and Ginnie to write a guest post for their collaborative photo and essay blog, Vision and Verb. You can find my essay, ‘The View From Here’ by clicking here.

While you’re there, I urge you to stay a while to enjoy the fine photography and essays by the talented women from around the world who are regular contributors to this wonderful place.

My Tale of Two Countries

2010-05-15T00:06:00.001-06:00

A Typical French Day

Proof that I live on the French Riviera.

08h00 Stagger out of bed. Pull on bright pink dressing gown. Turn laptop on. Feed cat. Make coffee while My Favourite Belgian fetches fresh baguette from boulangerie.

Check emails and blogs

Clean up cat vomit.

Chat on msn with daughter. Accept transfer of term paper to edit, due by day’s end. Reflect on irony of having escaped writing university term papers, now cornered into editing for others.

Eat breakfast in pink gown and companionable silence, casting longing glances at morning newspaper. Accommodate MFB’s values, which place reading at mealtime slightly below flatulence in elevators.

09h00 Re-read emails, yesterday’s sent emails, other blog comments, still in pink gown.

The village next door , much more picturesque than ours.

Write emails. Read online newspaper. Read re-read emails. Check new blog posts. Check again for comments. Check responses to comments.

Shower/shampoo/blow-dry/dress. Wish for thick hair with style resilience. Make bed. Remind myself bed-making job is voluntary position.

Pour first coffee of day. Contemplate why new chapter in novel-in-progress is not progressing

Read blogs

Write half of blog post

Read blogs.

Contemplate my addiction to blogs.

13:00 2-course lunch prepared by self or MFB. Report blog news/Canadian news on my side. Report computer programming news on his side.

Fight the urge to nap.

Nap.

Read blogs.

Read emails.

A mere 10 minutes from the madding crowds of Cannes

Brisk walk in Provencal countryside. Barely able to keep up to American friend despite her small stature and 10-year seniority. Vow to get more exercise.

Read blogs

Realize term paper still not edited.

Read emails

Edit term paper.

Contemplate writing new chapter of novel-in-progress. Decide it’s too late for today. Do online crossword instead.

19:30 2 course dinner prepared by self or MFB. Wider range of conversational topics, including but not limited to blog news, computer programming news, family news, weather, how to get cat not to vomit.

20:00 Evening TV news with gorgeous 50-something female news anchor - whose lover is half her age and looks half as smart. Followed by weather report with gorgeous 60-something female weather forecaster. Contemplate the well-preserved good looks of French women.

Brush teeth. Wonder if Botox would help me look like French weather forecaster. Hope having clean teeth will eliminate urge to snack.

Evening television-watching with MFB while simultaneously doing internet job, laptop on lap.

22:00 Snack

Read/write emails

Read blogs

Contemplate another day without progress on the novel-in-progress. Consider abandoning novel. Consider getting a handle on blogging addiction.

23:30 Bed. Fall asleep over book in 9 1/2 minutes.

A Typical Canadian Day

Proof that I also live near the Rocky Mtns.

08h00 Stagger out of bed. Pull on ratty green dressing gown. Turn laptop on. Make coffee. Feed son’s cat. Feed son’s dog. Stop dog chasing/licking cat.

Cat after dog face-wash

09:00 Chat on MSN with MFB. Accept transfer of documents in French, and agree to translate into English.

09:30 Fast shower/haircare/dress.

10:00 Take daughter’s car for summer tires. While waiting, take 110-lb dog for long walk. Attempt to train dog to heel. Dislocate shoulder as dog lunges at wild hare.

Dog after cat face-wash

Pick up car. Break news to daughter that front wheels of car falling off and require expensive repairs. Cancel afternoon shopping trip as car status uncertain. Return home.

11:30 Son #1 emerges from upstairs room, thunders into kitchen, downs 5 litres of milk enhanced with protein powder, cooks 6 eggs , utters 3 words, slams back door on way out.

Read one-half of online newspaper article.

12:00 Son #2 emerges from basement. Excites dog, who barks wildly. Experience painful aural concussion. Son stands mutely at open fridge door, eventually abandoning quest for breakfast. Leaves for work. Dog howls inconsolably. Remove shoe from dog’s jaws.

Spend several hours removing four month’s worth of grime from overlooked corners, banisters, stovetops and behind furniture. Remove shoe from dog’s jaws.

Fight urge to nap.

Nap.

Blog briefly

17:30 Student boarder emerges from room. Stands mutely at fridge door, eventually withdrawing carton of eggs. Landlady offers pork chops/zucchini/roasted potatoes instead and eats with boarder.

Remove feather duster from dog’s jaws. Feed dog.

Dog walk park. Spring not readily apparent.

Look forward to quiet evening of writing new chapter of novel-in-progress. Blog briefly.

Friend of son #2 arrives. Entertain friend while waiting for Son, who eventually arrives with more friends. Girlfriend of son arrives for sleepover. Spontaneous party erupts in kitchen.

21:30 Daughter arrives unexpectedly accompanied by two male Good Samaritans, holding large ice pack to right eye. Contemplate damage done by 30-mph Frisbee to orbital socket and determine emergency treatment by medical professional un-necessary. Recall when daughter diagnosed by mother as having painful period, eventually operated on for near-perforated appendix. Hope diagnostic skills have improved since.

Drive daughter home, picking up pirate eye patch and anti-inflammatory medication on way. Wonder if taller, better-looking, twenty-something Samaritan will realize an irresistible attraction for black-eyed girl but forget where mother lives.

22:30 Return home to quiet house. Play piano briefly. Investigate source of persistent loud hum from basement. Call son to determine proper procedure for turning off 10,000 watt amplifier without electrocuting self.

Finish second half of newspaper article.

23h15 Son #2 returns home with friend/girlfriend. Impromptu jam session in basement, without amplifier.

Snack. Blog. Snack.

00:30 Chat with MFB on Skype in relative quiet of upstairs bedroom. Realize translation job has been forgotten.

01:15 Bed. Fall asleep over book in 3 1/2 minutes.

05:30 Get up to pee just as Son #1 returns home.

On Happiness

2010-04-25T14:33:00.001-06:00

Mark Kerstetter, whose blog ‘Le Bricoleur’ makes me think and gives me opportunity to learn like no other, rather surprisingly tagged me in one of his posts last week. Surprisingly, because we don’t know each other that well, but that’s also the point of these things, I figure. But I’m happy that he did that, which is quite appropriate, because he tagged me to write about what makes me happy.

And therein, for a while, lay a problem. Being an honest, rather than an inventive writer, I felt a certain pressure to come up something true, in fact, in order to get more than a few hundred words out of it, I had to come up with several true things. So for a few days I have been examining the nature of happiness as I see it, wondering what it is that I can honestly say makes me happy, as opposed to satisfied, or excited, or just pleasurably affected.

It’s a spectrum, of course. On one end—the most readily identifiable one—is ecstasy. On the other, milder end is contentment. Somewhere in the middle are pleasure, delight, appreciation—here I reach for my synonym finder—joy, bliss, jubilance, enjoyment, enchantment and so on. Oh, and there’s the ‘new shoes’ feeling, an expression my mother came up with that describes the delight that comes from the anticipation of, or the unexpected receipt of something really pleasurable. If getting a new pair of shoes was an uncommon event for you as a kid, you’ll understand this.

Normally, ecstasy would be a hard one to start with, perhaps because it is often associated—in romance novels, at least—with things personal or possibly even illegal. But my most recent and memorable ecstatic experience happened in a gymnasium where at least 300 other people were in attendance. A son, a basketball game, a pinnacle of achievement, a moment that every other moment in a life seemed to have been heading towards—all those elements coincided to propel me into an ecstasy that still resonates almost a year later. To synthesize it, seeing my children succeed in reaching their goals makes me very happy indeed.

Playing certain music on a good piano also brings me to the point of ecstasy. Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Rachmaninoff are among those composers who wrote the kind of music that lights up a certain part of my brain, and on the rare occasion that I can decently acquit myself from beginning to end of a piece, I am filled with a pleasure like no other. I don’t have to be the original brilliance behind it—it’s enough that I can reproduce it, in my fashion.

Being around the dinner table with my kids—listening to how they talk to each other, laughing with them, seeing how much they enjoy being together—ranks pretty high on my happiness index. Almost everything to do with my kids makes me happy, but I particularly enjoy how they make each other laugh. And that they take each other out for breakfast.

Having a project. Being useful and productive satisfies and gratifies me and fills me with authentic contentment, especially if the successful completion of a project involved a challenge or required some hard-core problem-solving. In fact, problem-solving all on its own gives me enormous pleasure, because I know that if I keep at it long enough, and am able to free my mind to find a solution, I’ll almost always come up with one.

Making my lover laugh. He is a quiet and serious man, whose sense of humour is intact but not very close to the surface. I associate laughter with love, and of course with happiness too, so making him laugh means he loves me, that I make him happy, and then I’m happy because he’s happy. Making him laugh is also a bit like having a project with a challenge attached, so I get twice the bang for my buck. I haven’t ever made him snort with laughter, but I haven’t given up. One day.

Being in my own space. For much of the time, I live in a comfortable, pretty house in a part of the world that is particularly beautiful and that many would consider romantic. I don’t take any of that for granted, but there is very little in the house that speaks to my taste or history, and there are many remnants of another important relationship. When I open the door to my very own, modest house in an un-special city half a world away, I am suffused with a contentment that has its roots in belonging, security and the very non-Zen principle of ownership.

An excellent book. I can’t imagine not being a reader and think that anyone who isn’t one misses out on one of life’s greatest, most accessible pleasures. Graceful writing, a clever plot, compelling characters —this is guaranteed happiness in a package. I recently picked up 67 of them at a used-book sale and had a smile on my face for days.

The natural world. I am not a committed and steadfast friend of the Earth by a long shot, but the Rocky Mountains at sunset or a full moon in October or the fresh green of newly-leafed trees in spring lights up that part of my brain right next to the Debussy one. Foggy mornings, fat Christmas-style snowflakes falling thickly, the sound of surf at night, the spectacular show of Northern lights in August and the liquid evening song of robins also all fill me with delight.

Connecting with people. Talking with them, learning from them. Discovering their stories. Blogging, which started out as a way just to make myself write more regularly, allows me to do all that. It has, in fact, changed my daily life considerably and for the better. For all these reasons, it makes me happy.

I thought the list would be short, because everything on it had to be demonstrably true, but the more I write, the more I find. A really clean kitchen, for instance. Watching the cat chase butterflies. The sight of that serious man as he rises from our bed in the morning. But that’s enough for now.

So thank you, Mark, for giving me the chance to say all this, and the invitation now goes back across the Atlantic to Christopher in New York City, where I hope he’ll give his views on what does it for him.

Sarah Palin’s Identity Crisis

2010-04-16T07:56:00.001-06:00

Photo: J. Medkeff

In a speech yesterday to 900 dinner guests in Hamilton, Ont, Sarah Palin revealed that she has often been mistaken for a Canadian – even while on the campaign trail! It would be awful to think that all those mutterings during the last election about candidates not being truly American were actually about HER, so here’s a few tips to help her avoid any future confusion.

1. Put yourself out there a bit more, Sarah. It’s not surprising that you’ve been taken for a Canuck – self-effacement is the cornerstone of our national character. Don’t be afraid to blow your own horn – its tough, but if you don’t do it, nobody else will!

2. Give up that socialized medicine stuff. I know, I know, it’s handy to just nip over the Alaska-Yukon border for some cheap TLC, but it makes you look suspiciously pink.

3. Don’t hold back with the juicy bits. Canadian public figures are anally circumspect about sharing intimate details of their private lives with the public – you’d think they had something to hide! If you could be a bit more forthcoming about stuff, it’d only work in your favour.

4. Diplomacy is for sissies. We Canadians don’t like to tread on toes and prefer our sharp objects bubble-wrapped. You have to just say what you think, Sarah, and damn the way it comes out. It’s not the message that matters, it’s the presentation.

5. Don’t be so afraid to put your foot down. We’re famous for hating to make a nuisance of ourselves, so unless you make it clear that private jets and bendy straws are part of every deal, nobody’s ever going to be sure where your loyalties lie.

6. Sarah, Sarah, stop being so darn friendly – it’s #2 on the list of Canadian best qualities. And it’s so easily mistaken for sincerity.

7. Get rid of the lumberjack shirts. You’re a good-looking woman – no shame in that – so flaunt yourself a little. Undo a few buttons. Nothing wrong with being sexy AND a politician, which only one Canadian has ever managed to do and he’s dead.

Good luck, Sarah, and take care with those ‘ruffs’ and ‘rooves’ . A good speech coach should be able to sort those out in no time!

The ‘D’ Word

2010-04-05T08:34:00.001-06:00

The day after I saw my mother for the last time, I picked up the novel ‘Still Alice’, the story of a Harvard professor overtaken by early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The author, Lisa Genova – who holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard – writes skilfully and knowledgeably of the gradual decline of Alice’s cognitive functions, her distress at and denial of the diagnosis, her attempts to cover up her illness and ultimately, her acceptance of the disease. It is a powerful story, sympathetically and realistically told, and insomuch as it is possible, allows someone with a healthy brain to imagine what it would be like to have one that malfunctions so badly. Dementia defies understanding from any other perspective than an observation of symptoms. When my mother—whose Alzheimer’s began in her late seventies—talked about her toy dog in terms that left no doubt she thought it was real, I could see evidence of her dementia, but I simply could not imagine the thought processes that would allow her to look at a stuffed toy and perceive it as alive.

I had first noticed changes in my mother after she had undergone back surgery that had meant being under anaesthesia for nearly eight hours. She seemed different, but I couldn’t really put my finger on any specific behaviour or symptom. I put it down to the trauma of surgery and expected that she would be more ‘herself’ once she had fully recovered from her ordeal. But it never happened. Physically, she regained her mobility and took up most of her former activities, but her behaviour was slightly off. Her decisions weren’t always reasonable and at times, her perspective seemed a bit skewed. She became obsessed with order. She had always been someone who liked organization; her filing system for the thousands of slides pictures she had taken was legendary and every tin of food that went into her cupboard was marked with the date of purchase, so this behaviour seemed in keeping with her personality—at first. Even in retrospect it was impossible to pinpoint the moment when these habits of a lifetime began to take on an obsessive nature—when her judgement about what was necessary and reasonable began to fray around the edges.

As the only one of her three children to live in the same city, I saw my mother more often than the rest of the family and was, in consequence, the only witness to the odd behaviours that began to raise occasional red flags. I never once considered Alzheimer’s as the reason for her failings. She was just getting old and I assumed, without any substantive evidence, that the various surgeries (and accompanying anaesthetics) she had undergone over the last few years had had a cumulative effect. (There is discussion in the medical community about the link between certain anaesthetics and dementia.) But there was no history of dementia in her family that we knew of, and both of her parents had lived into their nineties, sharp as tacks to the end.

I became concerned about her safety on the road and on the advice of her physician, convinced her to take a computerized test that would assess not just her driving skills and reaction times, but her decision-making ability. She failed it resoundingly. A backlog of bills, receipts and important letters had accumulated on her desk, and when I offered to help her organize them it was obvious from watching her endlessly sorting and re-sorting a pile of credit card receipts that she simply didn’t know what to do with them. At that moment, bigger bells began to go off. This could no longer be considered a normal, inevitable loss of mental acuity—this was big-time confusion.

But Alzheimer’s was still not on my radar. Something was up with Mom, but it wasn’t that bad. She took some cognitive tests at her next doctor’s appointment and passed them easily. The doctor explained the effect that vascular ill-health could have on her brain function, and Mom indicated she understood the information, although she didn’t ask her usual pointed, pertinent questions. She agreed to a more comprehensive cognitive exam, but the day before she was to take it, she phoned to cancel the appointment. In the face of her spirited denial that there was anything wrong, it would have been cruel to insist that she go, and I let it drop.

But I did have a stiff talk with her—feeling awful for doing it—but certain that she could and would face the reality that living alone and looking after a house and garden were too much to cope with. I wasn’t sure I would always be living in the same city and available to help out, I told her, and for her own safety and well-being, she should consider an alternative. She listened, saying nothing, but defiance and fear were written on her face. Three days later she called my eldest brother to announce that she wanted to move to the west coast to be near him and would he find her a place to live? She appeared to be determinedly happy with her decision, but my own children couldn’t understand why she kept saying she was looking forward to ‘being with family’. What were they, if not family, they wondered. I didn’t know what to say to them. What I didn’t realize then was that dementia removes the ‘filters’, as one family member astutely put it, and that my mother was quite unaware of the inappropriateness of some of the things she said and did.

She had always been very decisive, but began to go back on her decisions or forget she had made them. After recovering from the shock of losing her driver’s licence, she gave me her old car as a gift, but two months later demanded that I sell it and give her the proceeds. She suspected the handyman who had come to install a wireless doorbell of deliberately rigging it to go off when no one was there. Even when an entirely logical explanation was found, she remained convinced that it was a plot to drive her mad. She offered me a pile of fireplace wood but when I went to pick it up, angrily accused me of taking it without her permission. After she had moved, she began to see me as an enemy, and would rail against me to family and strangers alike. In an agreement made before anyone realized that she was in the throes of dementia, she made a partial dispersal of her estate to two of her children, but refused to sign the cheque made out to me, convinced that I was plotting to get my hands on her money and determined to cut me out of her will. Money being the tricky topic that it is, my siblings and I did not approach this well, and it created divisions that still exist.

It was a terrible time. Despite the mounting evidence, no one in the family saw her behaviour as much more than the intransigence of an elderly person who had always held strong opinions and been occasionally sharp-tongued. She wasn’t the person she had been, but the changes had been relatively subtle at first, and it is hard to overstate the reluctance we all felt to lay the blame on the doorstep of dementia. It is an extraordinarily difficult thing to accept. There was, in the initial stages of the disease, far more about Mom that was normal, than otherwise. And given the lack of a definite diagnosis, which we might have had had she been willing to take the cognitive tests, I looked inward for reasons to explain her new hostility to me. There must have been something I had done to make her feel the way she did, to justify her accusations against me. Somehow she must have misinterpreted an action on my part that had struck her as malevolent. Or maybe I just deserved it.

By chance, I ran into a high-school friend who related her mother’s increasingly odd and uncharacteristic behaviour, which included hurtful accusations against her daughter. My friend’s extreme distress was compounded by the fact that her father was in complete denial of his wife’s state. By this time, I had been doing some reading about vascular dementia, and the various effects of tiny, undetected strokes, and told her what I knew. It was the first time she had considered that her mother’s antagonistic and paranoid behaviour might have its basis in changes to her brain, and that she might not be at fault for what her mother thought of her.

To make matters worse, my mother had always been very adept at covering up her feelings, at presenting a certain image of herself, and was able to maintain this facade until she was well into dementia. The gerontologist/psychiatrist who eventually examined her when things started to get really bad said he had rarely seen anyone so skilled at covering for herself.

Several months after the emergence of her extreme suspicion of me, my mother called me in France—it would prove to be the last time she was able to cope with the multiple digits of my number—and carried on a conversation as guileless and cheerful as if she were talking to her best friend. As I listened to her, her voice so apparently normal, so motherly, so absolutely herself, I began to shake uncontrollably, not from anger, but a profound confusion compounded by grief. How could she possibly say the awful things she had, and yet talk to me as though everything was fine? At the time, although I knew something had to be very, very wrong, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed by someone who had once loved all her children unconditionally.

It took a casual remark by a staff member at her retirement residence to make me realize that cognitive impairment was what had turned my mother into someone very different. The words had been spoken aloud, and in that illuminating and vastly relieving moment, lifted much of the confusion and blame that I had assigned myself for the past year.

Age-related dementia, whether in the form of damage from vascular strokes or Alzheimer’s, is a extremely difficult thing to accept for everyone concerned. Family members who have a regular, up-close-and-personal view of Mom or Dad’s mental evolution may find themselves at odds with siblings who live away, and for whom a weekly telephone call with parents gives no sign that anything is amiss. The symptoms of dementia may come and go, making it even more difficult to establish, and often it feels plainly unfair or exaggerated to put the weighty label of dementia on a loved one’s quirky behaviour or forgetfulness.

The central character in Lisa Genova’s story, after an initial denial of her condition, takes the uncommon step to monitor her own mental disintegration by asking herself a series of test questions at regular intervals. She knows that when she can no longer answer these questions correctly, she will be at the edge of an abyss, if not already in it. Her pragmatic approach, born of a sharp intellect and a rational mind, is not typical of most Alzheimer’s victims.

Although there have been some well-known figures—notably Charles Bronson and the best-selling author Terry Pratchett—who have made their illness public, and in Mr. Pratchett’s case, opened up his experience of Alzheimer’s to a documentary film-maker, it is an extraordinarily difficult diagnosis for most sufferers to discuss.

In a dark corner at the back of my mind—and of my brothers’ too, I suspect—is the fear that I will go the way of my mother. But for the sake of my children and my lover, I hope to have the courage and capacity to look Alzheimer’s in the eye if it comes calling. At the very least, our family has seen it first-hand, talked about it openly and become more knowledgeable about it, all of which will better equip us all to deal—potentially—with this awful disease.

‘Still Alice’ is not only excellent fiction, but provides an essential key to understanding Alzheimer’s—the perspective of the person for whom it is the most devastating. I wish I had read it sooner.

You’ve got a friend…still.

2010-03-24T14:19:00.001-06:00

When Carole King’s iconic song about friendship first hit the radio waves, I was fresh out of high school and had just landed a job at a drop-in centre for the wave of teens thumbing their way across the country in the summer of 1971. It was a heady time to be young and free, and the world seemed full of possibility and promise. I believed in Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, that the words to ‘All You Need is Love’ were true and that every day was the first day of the rest of my life, although in my rush to get to the next one, I missed the point altogether.

Sprung loose from the social confines of high school –where I figured somewhere near the bottom – I was happy to discover that my shyness there had been more to do with not fitting in, and that in my new life, friends—and one in particular—were more readily made.

She was four years older, and for the nearly-17-year-old that I was, it could have felt like a bigger difference, but we clicked immediately. It was a bit like falling in love. We were amazed to discover how much we had in common and full of the delight of an intense connection. We spent as much together as we could and when our paltry paycheques would allow, went out for meals together at a funky restaurant downtown where we talked for hours about philosophy, psychology, love, politics, books, friendship, music, our place in the world and our dreams for the future. She was bright and funny, insightful and vulnerable. I was honoured by her trust and confidence, and gave her mine. We felt so familiar to each other that the only possible explanation seemed to be that we’d been friends in a previous life.

Years went by and we stayed close. She got a degree and a husband, while my career path zig-zagged from one thing to another, and boyfriends came and went. She had children and became a full-time mother; I lived on my own and loved being free to travel whenever I could. When the funky restaurant closed its doors for good, we went suburban and Italian, still meeting nearly every week to talk until closing over lasagne and endless cups of coffee. Words and ideas were our mutual loves; our discussions sometimes so stimulating that electricity seemed to shoot from our fingertips.

We finished each other’s sentences, shared a similar life perspective and sense of humour, wore the same styles, and could almost have been taken for sisters. I respected her judgement and learned from her experience. When later I had children of my own, she was my role model for motherhood. There were times when she faced problems so difficult that she retreated from the world, but even there she saved a place for me. Our friendship survived a long separation and one early, major disagreement that we both were thankful had no long-lasting effect. I never considered for a moment that it could be lost.

A certain ebb and flow in a friendship is natural, and often linked to geographical, professional or lifestyle changes. Some friendships are situational and don’t last once the kids stop playing soccer or going to the same school. On a couple of occasions I’ve avoided getting in touch with someone after a long absence out of embarrassment over my own inattention, and worried that maybe that very tardy phone call or email will only make more obvious just how ‘out of mind’ they were.

There are 9 to 5 friendships that can’t always make the move outside the office. Or sometimes, although there seems to be enough start-up interest for a lasting relationship, the common ground simply erodes, leaving you to later ponder, “gee, whatever happened to.....?”. But in the case of close friendships, in the absence of an obvious trigger, there is a need to understand why they falter and die.

My once-close friend of thirty-five years has been silent for three years now – for what reason, I have no idea. She might have been ill, or depressed, or didn’t have energy or desire to pursue a friendship that she might have felt had run its course. I tried to find out, but after a while I had to accept that her unspoken message in not replying to mine was clear. A last attempt at reconnection—a letter I wrote to her in the hope that she would understand that her absence needed neither apology nor explanation—got no response. I believe that I have to respect what appears to have been a decision made. All I know for sure is that she’s still around, but I only ever see her in dreams from which I awaken feeling unsettled and sad.

It’s a bit naive to think that the book-ends of friendship should or could be announced, the way children often do. “I want to be friends with you”, a six-year-old might say—or the opposite! For an adult to confirm that a friendship term is up is potentially confrontational, almost certainly hurtful, and not really workable. When do you say it, and how? In some cases it’s unnecessary—everybody knows the score—but when it involves a friendship that felt like sisterhood, the lack of an explanation is a heavy weight. Not knowing why or how compounds the loss.

A very decent young fellow I know who had been happily involved for several months with someone he thought was ‘the most sincere girl I had ever met’ has found himself in this situation. His girlfriend broke up with him by simply disappearing off his radar, not answering messages and deleting his plea to get in touch from her Facebook page. He was left to draw his own conclusion that no news meant bad news for him, and it has ripped him apart not only to have lost her, but to be treated with such apparent thoughtlessness.

We’ve all heard stories about wives who leave husbands (or the other way around) out of the blue—just pack up and go—leaving the other to grope in the dark for answers. We might roll our eyes at the idea that anyone could be so oblivious, but the fact that these spouses missed all the warning signs does not make the agony of not knowing why any less awful. A fellow I knew from high school was left in this manner, and it took years of therapy for him to finally come to terms with the fact that he would never have any kind of explanation for his wife’s decision. He wasn’t trying to find an answer that would satisfy—he only wanted to hear a reason. Something. Anything that could help him half-way understand how the woman he had loved and lived with for fifteen years could put an end to their life together, just like that. When I decided to end my marriage, his story was part of the reason I believed I owed my husband a complete explanation, and he got it, over many long and difficult conversations. It didn’t make him feel any better and I’m not sure he really understood the ‘why’, but it did give him, I hoped, something to hang his hat on.

In one of her excellent posts on the nature of humans, Bonnie of Original Art Studio writes about the torment of unanswered ‘whys’ and how asking different questions like ‘how did I contribute to..?’ or ‘what will I do next time?’ can be productive and bring understanding and peace of mind. Her excellent suggestions are well worth reading; they are based on sound principles and certainly effective for many situations.

But for the inexplicable rupture of a good friendship or established relationship, in the unanswered, “Why did you leave without saying anything?” is the echo, “How could you think you mattered so little to me?”

Writing as an orgasmic experience

2010-03-19T04:21:00.001-06:00

Oops, I hit ‘publish’ a little too soon and this post didn’t go where it was supposed to. It’s now where it should be at http://friko-fridgesoup.blogspot.com/

Do you consider your kids your friends?

2010-03-16T10:43:00.001-06:00

One morning when I was about twenty-one, my mother called me up to say she’d been doing some thinking about the women she was close to and had realized that, of all of them, I was her best friend. I remember feeling flattered to have confirmation of my adult status, and very pleased that she considered me a sort of peer-equivalent. My own best friend, when I told her about this, was sceptical. Although she had a good relationship with her mother, she didn’t believe it was really possible to be friends- let alone a best one - with your mom, no matter how well you got along. I didn’t want her to be right, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspected that she was.

As the years unfolded and we got older, we became a little different, too. For various reasons and in unrelated ways, both friendships changed. My mother went back to just being my mother, my best friend and I drifted apart, and I had children – two sons and a daughter in the middle.

In broad terms, my generation – the boomers – has taken a very different attitude towards parenting than the one our parents had. We are more involved in our children’s lives, less authoritarian, more approachable, and often opt to avoid top-down parenting in favour of nourishing what could be construed as a friendship with our children. I fall squarely into this category.

My twenty-one year old son, the youngest, believes that our relationship is unique among his friends and their parents. We’re so tight, he says, and sometimes wonders why this is so. My daughter would say that we get along well and are quite close, but wouldn’t go as far as her brother in defining the relationship as unusual. Their older brother, at twenty six, is a stand-alone guy insulated in his own world where I am not a frequent visitor. He freely acknowledges his love for his family, including me, but there is not quite the same degree of sharing – of experiences or confidences – that there is with the other two. I delight in the compatibility we all seem to have and I appreciate, no, I’m grateful that we have been spared, for the most part, the misunderstandings and resentment that can estrange children from their parents.

But as my children matured into adulthood, I often thought about what my mother had said and have come to the conclusion that my once-best friend was right. My youngest son has entrusted me with some of his deepest feelings and loves the fact that we can talk cars and jam Radiohead together. My daughter and I laugh at the same ridiculous things, share a love of music, traveling and story-telling, and she is honest and authentic with me. My biggest son knows I’m his biggest fan and is mutually supportive of my efforts, and when he needs an ear, he trusts me to listen. But am I their friend?

Once a parent, always a figure of some kind of authority, the way I see it. Our parent-child relationships get more egalitarian all the time, certainly, but I could not stop taking a mother’s perspective any more than I could change my personality. Nor can my children ever completely get past the history of our first decade or so together, when I was the go-to person for nearly everything, the sun around which their world revolved, the final arbiter, and sometimes, the wicked witch. The essential difference between the relationship I have with friends of my own choosing, and the one I have with the beings I cherish most in the world is that my children and I did not come into our relationship as equals.

You might agree with the definition of friendship so gracefully phrased by Dinah Mulock Craik almost a century and a half ago, which says,

‘Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and, with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away.’

It’s an idealistic vision, in that ‘having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words’ has sunk more than a few friendships, but in principle this kind of trust and openness are what the strongest relationships have in common. For a child to feel this way about a parent means that the nuances of friendship are overlaid on the bedrock of parental love, but does it work the other way around?

Is it unrealistic to believe that the elemental role of a parent can be replaced with genuine friendship once children reach adulthood? For a while when I was a daughter, I had thought maybe it could. Now that I’m a mother I’m sure it can’t.

Well, there’s always the men’s department

2010-03-03T08:37:00.008-07:00

When I need a break from writing my best-selling novel, the internet is the place I go – it’s so much less stressful than trying to move that pivotal sex scene forward with dialogue. I take a look at the news for the umpteenth time, re-read my sent emails and sometimes do a little online shopping. I prefer that to the real thing for several reason; for starters, there’s the phenomenal choice minus the pressure to buy, and there’s no clerk eyeing your every move when you say you’re ‘only looking’.

(According to the French newsmagazine l’Express, only 2% of online browsers actually make a purchase from sites they visit, compared to 55% of walk-in shoppers in the real world. This is no surprise, but the French love a challenge and have set up a sort of bureau for the Conversion of the Reluctant E-Shopper. Just imagine what the Russians could do with that.)

Generally I only ever shop online for two things – cheap airline tickets and big shoes. Like 4 out of 5 women, I have a thing for footwear, but by an accident of genetics I have been denied the thrill of investing in the money pit that is a closet full of shoes. On my first visit to the UK in 1969 – when Buying British was still a bargain – my right foot was measured by a weedy shoe shop clerk who was so astonished by the result that he blurted, ‘Good Lord, Miss, your feet are enormous!!’ Fourteen-year-old girls do not handle news like this well, especially when it makes other people’s heads turn.

That traumatic experience has haunted me since. When I want new footwear (as opposed to needing any) I either go online or to the one out-of-the-way store in Canada where asking for my size doesn’t get a blank look or a giggle. Sometimes I forget myself when I’m in a shopping centre, overcome by a yearning desire to have a pair of lovely shoes like the ones in the window. There’s a special tone I use for these occasions – casual, not obviously hopeful, an I’m-a-big-girl-and-I-can-take-rejection – because I already know perfectly well that I’m wasting my time and no they won’t have those Manolo Blahnik knock-offs in a size 12US/10UK/43.5EU.

So yesterday I wandered over to the Clarks UK website because the ugly, cloggy, incredibly comfortable things currently on my feet are starting to wear out. Clarks has always been faithful to my particular needs, even if their stuff is not exactly what you want to wear to the opera.   I ticked the option to sort results by size and came up with…exactly nothing. Never mind the style, there was not a single pair of shoes my size to be found on the entire website!

Dear Clarks, I emailed, please tell me there’s some mistake.

The answer came back within the hour, assuring me that Clarks and Co understood my distress, but that, ‘regrettably, due to a drop in popularity of size 10s’ they had taken the difficult decision to discontinue this size.

A DROP in POPULARITY??   What, size 10s just aren’t trendy any more? Or maybe I've been missing out on the whole optional part of shoe sizing, in which case I want to be a 7!

Are big-footed women abandoning shoe-wearing altogether, or have they become an endangered species? Gad, maybe it’s an age-related thing and we’re dying out. Get me some duct tape. I’m going to have to keep these things going for a while yet.

Not Bad, eh???

2010-03-01T04:48:00.005-07:00

Photo: Facebook Wall, Vancouver 2010 Olympics

Any Canadian worth their mukluks was either in Vancouver or in front of their TV set last night to take in the showdown between the two best teams in Olympic hockey. All across the nation we chewed our nails, sucked in our collective breaths, groaned in disappointment and roared our approval for what seemed like the longest 67 minutes and forty seconds of play the game has ever known.

In the grandstands, thousands of Maple Leafs waved and fluttered in a sea of red and white, declaring our love for our country and our game.   Not only was the prettiest medal at stake, but so was an Olympic record for the most gold medals ever won by a single country in the history of the Games. And what’s more, it was all happening on our home turf! We were swept up by a utterly unprecedented patriotic fervour, throwing off our usual self-effacement to openly revel in how far we had come.

A French commentator said of Olympic contenders that ‘it is the marriage of their athleticism and our emotion’ that makes the Games so magical. Heartbreak, pride, bitter disappointment and ecstasy were writ large across these last two weeks and it is all athletes of whom the world is rightly proud. In quintessentially Canadian fashion, although we wanted to think we could do it, and went into the games with uncharacteristic braggadocio, had we not been able to pull the whole thing off – including beating Mother Nature at her own game – we wouldn’t really have been surprised.

When the men of hockey clinched the deal, the country erupted in an explosion of joy. There has never before been, in the history of Canada, an event that has brought the entire nation to its feet and pouring into the streets, from coast to coast to coast.   For us, Sidney Crosby fired the shot heard ‘round the world. But his winning goal was more than just the icing on the cake – it was a seminal moment for the Canadian psyche. We took on the world and we won, and we might never be quite the same again.

If there’s a better reason to blog, I can’t think of it.

2010-02-21T07:11:00.001-07:00

In a departure from my usual kind of post, I would like to introduce you to a friend who has only recently become a blogger, and for whom this environment is particularly important.

Caroline and I met in 1988, when we were both living in a little French village outside Paris, both pregnant, English-speaking ex-patriates, and I liked her immensely and immediately. Her sense of humour was dry and wry, tending towards black, and her pithy, pointed cracks were delivered in a Yorkshire accent that sometimes brought me to my knees. What’s not to like about someone who makes you laugh like that?

We saw each other a lot for about two years before I moved back to Canada, but then drifted away from each other for the most banal of reasons: ‘out of sight, out of mind’. We were in only sporadic touch, and saw each other just once in 15 years.

About a year and half ago, I picked up the phone and called her number. Her husband told me that she didn’t like to talk on the phone anymore; treatment for cancer of the mouth and tongue diagnosed several years before had meant the removal of most of her tongue.

By coincidence, they were in our area on holiday the following week. We made plans to meet, and over the few hours we spent together she described the path her life had taken after finding a small lump on her neck, and to say that her story was sobering is a gross understatement.

Without most of her tongue, her speech was indistinct and she could no longer eat. Instead, she ‘fed’ herself liquid nourishment via a tube directly to her stomach. She went from being a funny, lively, confident woman to someone who avoided the telephone, social situations and going out in public as it meant getting strange looks or unsympathetic reactions from people who could not understand her. She lost her health, her confidence, her independence and the future most of us take for granted. But she’s still Caroline, and now, by god, she’s got herself a blog.

I’d love for her to meet you. I’d love for her world to get a little bigger. You’ll find her at Caroline’s Cinderella Cancer Blog and If you’d like to have an idea of what she’s been through, take a look at ‘My cancer ‘till now’.

Postscript: I’m very sorry to say that Caroline died on Sunday May 16, 2010, at home in France and surrounded by her family: husband John daughter Jerina and son Jack.

Forever love

2010-02-14T08:21:00.005-07:00

Unconditional Love Artist: AngeJedudsor

The first essay to appear here was about an unexpectedly wonderful visit I had last year with my mother, whose mind had been almost completely lost to Alzheimer’s disease. I wrote several more posts about our relationship, but after her death a few months ago, I decided I was done with examining and analysing the dynamics of our often wary and awkward dance with each other.

Then last week I emailed an old boyfriend to tell him about the bit part he had played in a recent essay about an incident in my chequered past. He got a kick out of it, but it was an allusion I had made in the story to my fear of disappointing my mother that caught his attention. He wrote:

‘Poetic license aside, my sense was never even of a whiff of disappointment but only of the sheer and absolute delight your mother took in you. I don't recall Rhoda's zest for colour but I do recall her zest for you.’

There are an extraordinary number of motherless children among the writers I follow. The most thoughtful comments on my struggle to find the right balance with my mother have come from women who, far too young, lost their own mothers.   They have lived what I believe to be the ultimate loss, along with those who were emotionally abandoned, some in ways too terrible to imagine. I am very lucky not to be one of them, but my friend Brian’s recollection – and he remembered right –made poignantly clear that I am missing more than I thought now that my mother has died.

Motherless children face the loss, among the infinity of other irreplaceable things, of the unassailable, no-matter-who-you-are-or-what-you-do kind of love that is utterly unconditional. If they are lucky they get it from their fathers or grandparents, but perhaps it is a rarer gift from those hearts. This is not to suggest that men are not capable of profound, no-holds-barred love, but I believe that many find it hard to communicate such deep feelings clearly and unequivocally.

Regardless of the difficulties I had in my adult relationship with my mother, she gave me a solid, healthy foundation, and the best part of that was her love, unwavering and independent of whether she liked or approved of what I did. Without that, I would have been a different person and quite likely a different mother than the already imperfect one I am.

A man I once knew well gave me a view of what it was like to suffer from conditional maternal love. His mother’s esteem for her family and friends was like the stock market, the joke used to go, up one day and down the next. We might laugh at mothers portrayed like this in sitcoms and films, but it stops being funny when real children try to make sense of the precariousness of love that is doled out as a reward, or withheld as punishment.

For him, an only child, the message he got from his mother’s conditional love was that if he did the right thing, it meant he was a good son and worthy of her love. But when his decisions were made in his own, or his family’s, best interests, or when she simply didn’t like what he did, all bets were off. He spent a lifetime trying to navigate the shifting sands of her affection, resisting and resenting the power she wielded. As a father himself, he sometimes followed her example and was not able to understand, despite his own experience, how painful this was both for him and his children.

Is unconditional love just for kids? I think so. A friend once told me that her love for her husband was conditional, and considering the warmth of her heart, this admission took me aback. But lovers, best friends, husbands and wives all have the potential to trespass the limits of love; estrangement and divorce are the sad detritus of once-strong attachments.    To love someone despite anything they might do, say or become takes the unthinking, unblinking parental love that every child deserves.

It seems appropriate that it’s finally on Valentine’s Day that I can finish this essay, which I dedicate to my mother, Rhoda Josephine Goba, formerly Sudul, nee Grasswick, who made sure I knew how much she loved me. Whatever other regrets shadow my memories of her, I believe this much: I have honoured her by passing on her gift to my children. If they frequently seem to take my unconditional love for granted, it only means I got it right.

Vive La France!!

2010-02-02T15:13:00.029-07:00

My favourite Belgian went to the bank the other day to make a deposit of cash, a rare event that necessitated his using a machine. In his French bank, deposits of any kind will not be accepted by the human tellers who work there, for reasons I don't know and would probably roll my eyes at if I did. So, after inserting his card and typing in his PIN, he was all ready to stuff his bills into the slot when a peremptory message appeared on the screen.

'State the reason for making this deposit!.'

(He couldn't sleep for the lump under the mattress.)

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Every other Wednesday afternoon, a motley group of nationalities gathers under the plane trees on the village pitch to play boules. The object of the game of petanques, as it is more commonly called in this part of France, is to lob a solid metal ball about the size of a grapefruit as close as possible to the target, a much smaller rubber ball.

A staple of French sporting life and third only to the baguette and the beret as the most recognizable icon of French culture, the game is not, despite what people think, solely the domain of old, stooped French men. Our group numbers about twenty four and the fairer sex is well-represented, as are the Dutch, Brits and Belgians, along with a smattering of Swiss, Luxembourgers, Germans, Austrians and one Canadian.

However, my point in telling you all this is not to boast that our mini European Union is a shining example of cultural understanding, but to complain of the gauntlet of la bise that must be run before the game can start.
The French kiss – the one that goes on each cheek – is that other cultural imperative of French life, and should, if one is sensitive to social niceties, always be offered when encountering anyone with whom one has an ongoing and friendly relationship, even if only situational and relatively shallow. (Did you see Hilary Clinton smack Nicolas Sarkozy the other day at Davos?) Twenty four players equal forty eight kisses, and then the whole deal has to be done all over again before everyone goes home.

It's not that I'm prissy - although I'm not a fan of residual aftershave on my cheeks - but that it gets tiresome. I'm not alone in this – just ask any French teenager how tedious their morning meet-and-greet at school is. In defence of Anglo-Saxon standoffishness, I think a nod of the head is just fine, maybe even a wave that includes the whole group, and in some circumstances, a handshake is not out of place. But gimme a break on the 96 kisses, please.

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Understanding the nuances of when one should and should use the familiar 'Tu' is an ongoing riddle to me, although a few of the basic rules are clear. I know, for instance, that you don't presume familiarity with people until some enigmatic stage in the relationship has been reached, at which point one or the other party usually asks if they can get chummier. 'Vous' is for strangers, police officers, pluralistic situations, old people and the President. 'Tu' is for children – even if strange – although at some point near the end of adolescence one should switch to 'vous', animals, anyone you know well enough to sleep with or confide in, and, I eventually discovered, total strangers in circumstances where you don't care about being polite.

This is why, when I got out of my car to rage at the idiot who had been tailgating me with his nose up my ass and his foot to the floor, he only smirked. I said vous to him , and the very approximate English equivalent of my tirade would have gone something along the lines of, 'Excuse me sir, but if you don't mind, could you please put your *** up your ***. Thanks so much. '

**********************************************************************************

The French are good with signs. Arriving at a major crossroad, you'll see a thicket of them pointing every which way. You follow the direction you want, and come to another intersection. More helpful signs of all colours. White for place names, green for routes nationales, blue for autoroutes. Pressing on, you navigate one roundabout after another, each with its own emphatic signage. But at some point in the series you'll discover that your destination...no longer exists. You've been dumped.

If you're lucky, there'll be an oxymoronic 'Toutes (all) Directions' sign to follow, but sometimes there's also an 'Autres (other) Directions' sign, in which case you should have brought a map.

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French spoken with an English accent bothers me. I don't mean a British accent specifically, but just the way most native English speakers pronounce French words, blithely disrespectful of their egalitarian, unstressed syllables and unable to cope with their deliciously throaty Rs. It is the equivalent of nails on a blackboard to me. Lest you think I am being unfairly critical of those brave souls who venture into other tongues, I would point out that I am a frequent offender myself.

It was once my goal to speak French so well that I could pass for a native and when I was younger and more absorbent there was even half a chance I could have done this - some of the time. Living in France, kids at French school, French friends, Dallas every Thursday night at 8:30 dubbed into French – I listened studiously and learned a lot. As a plus, my ear is acute enough to know that the u in a French testicule sounds nothing like the u in an English uniform. If only my mouth could be counted on to follow suit. Like almost everyone who learns another language after the age of 12, I can't completely avoid the corrupting effect of my native tongue.

Still, I tried and practiced and talked out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror and scrutinized the lips of the evening news anchor to see where they went with words like 'le procureur de la république' and 'ses homologues Européens', shapes no English uniglot mouth has ever had to make.

But then a kind man took me aside after a job interview in Paris to give me the best piece of linguistic advice I ever got. 'Let me tell you a little secret', he said. 'Stop trying so hard. If you manage to lose your accent but make a grammatical mistake, people will consider you uneducated. But if you have an accent, you can make a thousand errors and they will only find you charming.'

My Brush With The Law, or Just Another Story To Tell the Kids

2010-01-24T10:34:00.009-07:00

In the summer of 1978, I was 24 years old and living more or less happily with my boyfriend in a subsidized apartment just off the ninth hole of the municipal golf course. The rent might have been cheap but the view was million-dollar, extending due east over the rolling greens to the shiny skyscrapers of downtown. In the winter the sunrises were gorgeous, and I presumed, without any personal experience, that the same was true for summer. My kitchen walls were covered in bright floral wallpaper and the tangerine couch in the living room was a hand-me-down from my mother, whose zest for colour turned the suburban bungalow of my childhood from white to pink, then turquoise before finally settling on bright yellow.

I sewed my own clothes from McCall's patterns ('Make it Tonight, Wear it Tomorrow!'), was nice to my neighbours and called my mother at least once a day. I took in a stray cat, was good at my job – good enough to be promoted to Manager until it was discovered that managing the office and managing my arrival time were two separate skill sets – and went to the library once a week, on average. If occasionally I gave crazy drivers the finger or got a warning to pay my overdue heating bill, it wasn't because I was a bad person.

So when a knock at the door one evening interrupted our dinner, I was a little surprised to find two cops standing in the hallway. They eyed me sceptically,

"Deborah Soooodoool?"

"Sudul. It rhymes with poodle. And noodle."

"Oh, we're in the right place then." They both laughed. "We were expecting somebody East Indian." There was really nothing to say to that, so I laughed along with them.

"Looks like you've got a few parking tickets outstanding," said the red-headed one. He looked at a paper in his hand. "Well, more than a few. Nineteen, actually, as of the beginning of this year. Would that be right?"

Well, damn, that would be right.

When the weather was fine, I rode my motorcycle to work because it was fun and cheap and because there was a little space where I could leave it for free behind the office. But when it turned wet or cold, I took the car and played hide and seek with the parking cops, ducking out of the office every few hours to move the car or plug the meter with a couple of quarters. At least twice a month I'd find a ticket under the windshield wiper. The best thing about that was that if I left it there, I was good for the rest of the day. Procrastination ran interference with my best intentions, and tossing the ticket in the glove box put off the annoyance and financial pain of putting a cheque in the mail. It also made it easier to forget.

The two cops seemed to be waiting for me to do something. "Maybe you'd like to get your purse?" the redhead prompted.

"Pardon me?"

"You might want to have that with you when you come downtown. This," he waved the paper at me, "is a warrant for your arrest. ""

He couldn't be serious. I started to laugh, in that hiccup-py kind of way you do when it's involuntary and inappropriate.

The boyfriend offered up some reasonable points about wasted taxpayer money and having bigger fish to fry. We all agreed that this attention on me and my tickets was ridiculous and laughed together as one. I was almost convinced that this jollity would put an end to the whole thing and I could go back to my supper. What it actually meant was that I found myself in the back seat of a police cruiser without any inside door handles.

I hoped my neighbours were blind or completely incurious and slunk down as we drove off, only to stop a few blocks away at a house where a woman was mowing the lawn. Red and his partner got out to talk to her but soon enough, they came back to the car and she resumed her mowing. Red volunteered that she too had a bunch of unpaid fines.

"But she swears that she paid them all yesterday. " He rolled his eyes. "Now, if you'd told us that, we would have given you the benefit of the doubt," he said, helpfully, "at least until tomorrow. I'd put ten bucks on her being at city hall paying them first thing in the morning."

"Really," I said.

It was a windy evening and on the way downtown a big gust blew through the car, scattering papers out the window and over six lanes of traffic, which I took to be a direct intervention from Above. Red's partner threw on the brakes and they both jumped out to chase after their errant paperwork, while I crossed my fingers that the one with my name on it would get sucked into an updraft. Red's triumphant face told me it had not.

We pulled up in the alley behind the police station. The back door had none of the 'Serve and Protect' PR of the public entrance and I started to feel a bit sick. Red brought out a pair of handcuffs – "It's just standard procedure, nothing personal" – and only reluctantly relented when I promised him I'd go along peaceably. Riding up to the fourth floor in an elevator smelling of pee sucked the last bit of humour out of me and when the doors opened to a room full of cops and Red crowing, "Look who we've got!", I thought I might die.

The woman behind the thick glass partition itemized the contents of my purse and when I balked at giving her my scarf, said drily, "We don't want you to hang yourself, honey." Bail was set at $75. I called the boyfriend, who didn't have the cash. The only good thing about that was that I'd already used up my one phone call and it was he who had to call my mother. I didn't know which was worse – being in jail, or being a disappointment.

I was frisked by a matron who clucked disapprovingly over the reason for my visit and led me to a big cell holding half a dozen women, most of whom seemed to be under the influence of substances I generally avoided. Matron took pity on me when I started to cry and put me in a single cell instead, with a sink, a toilet with no seat and a mattress I didn't dare sit on. Smoking was allowed, but I had to make an official request for a light.

After four hours of solitary confinement that felt like twenty-four, my bail was finally processed, but not before I had re-examined my attitudes about the nature of crime and punishment. From the other side of the fence, it seemed like a silly idea to put procrastinators like me, or for that matter, anybody who hadn't actually hurt anyone, in jail. Fraudsters, vandals, petty thieves – surely society would be better served if these people did something useful like painting a community centre or reading to the blind. After reimbursing their victims, of course.

But I have to admit that my time in the slammer made me resolve to do better. I vowed to get up early enough to take the bus to work. To stop procrastinating – about everything. To use the glove box only for Kleenex and the tire pressure gauge. And failing that, to always have bail in my pocket.

Take Me Home, James

2010-01-07T11:05:00.011-07:00

A few days ago, I left home in Canada to come home... to France. Sort of.

As almost everyone with even a smattering of French knows, there is no equivalent word in the land of Baudelaire, baguettes and bisous sur la joue for 'home'. Although foyer seems to come close, it is clinical in its lack of warmth and inclusion, and while the casual chez moi is widely understood to mean the physical structure where one lives, or even the feeling of being in a welcoming environment, it does not have the profound significance of a place where one truly belongs. That such a place might be where a childhood was spent, where independence flourished and new roots took hold, or some enveloping comfort was found resists generalization.

When I am asked where my home is, I avoid the automatism of answering that it is Canada. That isn't where I spend most of my time, and it isn't where I have invested my emotional life as half of a committed couple. But that's where I feel most at ease: where customs and language are familiar, where I know how to read the body language, where I have a long history and a lot of people I love live. If the question is put to me in the company of my favourite Belgian, I hesitate to discourage him from believing that I am just as at home here in France with him, but the truth is, if it weren't for love, I wouldn't be here.

Every emigrant experiences loss. For some, it is personal and terrible, but in even the most wished-for, non-conflict-driven emigrant experience there is the potential of loss of cultural belonging, of linguistic ease, of meaningful community contact and of shared history. Little wonder that, in countries of significant immigration, cultural enclaves form and solidify in the inestimable comfort of familiarity. In the region of southern France where I live there are clubs for almost every nationality, and some new residents come here simply to enjoy the climate and geography in the company of their own kind, without any intention to assimilate into local life or learn the language beyond the basics.

This is my second experience at living as an immigrant – both times in the same country – and I continue to have difficulty establishing this lovely place as my home. The fact that my children are in that other place is certainly a factor, but my first time around they were here with me – all of them French-born – and I was still not able to settle. Maybe it's because I'm female, and my attachment to place and community of origin is harder to sever; many men do not develop the close friendships that are so important to women's sense of community and I've heard more than one man say that his home is just where he happens to be. According to the highly unscientific survey I have conducted of ex-patriates over my fourteen-odd years in France, men have an easier time of adapting to a new place, particularly if the motivation for their relocation is professional. For many women, including me, the best we can do is to consider our adopted country/city/state/province a 'home away from home', which seems a little unconvincing.

If I were to furnish the 'inner home' that William Bridges suggests in his book 'Transitions' is the ideal place to live, and of which I recently read at SpitandBalingWire (a soon-to-be émigrée herself) then perhaps I'd feel more grounded. But how can I do that? I appreciate each 'home' for very different reasons, and don't spend my time pining for what I don't have, at least not too often, but I can't seem to get to the point where I am truly chez moi.

My admiration for forward-looking immigrants who leave familiarity behind and determine to lay down roots and history in a new country is boundless. In blogs that I have come across, there are some notable examples of people who have thrown appreciative arms around a culture, language and way of life entirely different than what they previously knew. Friko, Owen and a Cuban in London are long-time, well-integrated ex-patriates and Ginnie is an intrepid American sexagenarian who took up residence in Holland a month ago.

When my plane touched down in Nice last Monday, I wanted to feel a kind of settling, a rightness that told me I was where I should be, but for as long as my life straddles an ocean, I doubt that I will feel that fully in either place. But it occurred to me before I left Canada this time that although my life can hardly be called nomadic, I have something in common with that way of life. Despite their transience, nomads maintain cultural and affective ties by travelling in communities, and since I began to write in this space, the friends I have made come with me wherever I go.

Running On Empty or, How Patience is a Belgian Characteristic

2009-12-27T17:24:00.011-07:00

I made a pledge years ago, when the 26th stopped being a real holiday, that I would not set foot in a store for a Boxing Day sale. It would continue to be a day for lying on the couch, eating Christmas mandarins and reading the book Santa left for me. And I’ve kept my word, eschewing that horrendous frenzy that is post-Christmas consumerism, but there isn’t always a book under the tree, and sometimes I feel like spending the day after Christmas somewhere other than on the couch.

So this year we had the idea that all of us – me, my favourite Belgian, and my three offspring – could go up to the mountains to do some skiing and snowboarding. Actually, the ‘we had the idea’ was really ‘he had’ - my Belgian - with me chiming in because it seemed like a fine thing to do, at that moment. But by the time Christmas night rolled around, my enthusiasm had waned considerably at the prospect of a very early morning, the uncertainty of finding rental boots for a son with Very Big Feet, having to make a trip to the Daughter’s house to pick up her gear, convincing the Elder Son that being together on the slopes was a better idea than his going shopping, and imagining myself hurtling inadvertently down a black run, scared shitless and swearing a blue streak.

Daughter tried her best to be head cheerleader and almost had me convinced, but then Eldest Son’s feet dug in too deep to move, and the whole idea started to unravel. My Belgian tried to salvage what was left and suggested that we just take Bigfoot Son and the Daughter, but since my approach to life is generally of the all-or-nothing variety, and with the vision of plaster-encased bones looming larger in my fevered imagination, I pulled the plug completely. And went to sleep feeling like the biggest party-pooper ever.

Morning dawned, and my mood was lighter. Let’s just go for 1/2 a day, with 2/3 of the kids, said I, brightly. But oh, we still have the boot problem. And OH, what about the PUPPY??? Forgot about him. He can’t be left alone all day, and Eldest Son will be in the mall and unable to help. So let’s drop Puppy off at a friend’s place. But OH, Friend wants to come WITH us. In that case, let’s take Puppy, Friend, and while we’re at it, Friend’s puppy TOO, but OH, the car isn’t big enough for everybody. Let’s rent a mini-van, my Belgian offers, helpfully. But it’s Boxing Day, and even though every retail outlet on the planet is open and offering 70% off, the car rental company is not. And furthermore, Daughter needs to go back to her place to take a shower first, after spending two nights on the couch at her mother’s house. Back in an hour, she says. We all know how that goes.

When finally we leave, it’s way too late to do any skiing so we’ll just go to the mountains for lunch and maybe a swim in the hot springs. We go to the Friend’s house, and Son-With-Big-Feet hands his car keys to me. He’ll ride with Friend and Two Puppies in the other car and they’ll meet us at the restaurant.
Son’s German car has a 1/4 tank of gas, and by my Japanese car standards, that’s plenty enough to get to the mountains and almost back. My Belgian mildly suggests getting more. Sure, sure, I say. But there’s no rush. Off we go, with now-grumpy Daughter in the back seat wishing she had never agreed to spend the day with her disorganized family, 3/4 of whom are pathologically incapable of making a plan and sticking to it.

It's a lovely day and it's great to be out of the city. The mountains move closer but the needle on the fuel gauge moves to the left exponentially faster. The Belgian’s renewed suggestion to get more gas takes on a firmer tone but I am the picture of insouciance. Oh, don’t worry, I say, there’s one about 20 km away and we’ll definitely stop there.

But OH, the engine is starting to miss. The road climbs uphill and pressing the gas pedal down is not having the customary effect. My Belgian gently asks why I am swearing. Other than that he says nothing, not even I-told-you-so. In the rear-view mirror, Daughter’s eyes are rolling. I pull off onto the shoulder just as the engine dies completely, and there is now total silence in the car.

Daughter calls her brother, who tells me later how relieved he is that she is only calling to say we’ve run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and not that we are already at the restaurant wondering where the hell he is. We wait, fogging up the windows, buffeted by the hundreds of cars passing us at high speed.

My head fills with disaster scenarios. We will be struck from behind by someone who has mistaken the shoulder for the road. Son and Friend will be hit at the very moment they arrive to rescue us. Or, Son and Friend will not be able to buy a gas can at the service station that is only five short km away. (Couldn’t the damn car have kept going for two more minutes???) Or, they will be able to buy a gas can, but Son will be struck by a passing vehicle as he attempts to fill the tank. I am driving myself crazy and get out to check which side the fuel tank is on. It’s on the right, so that’s good news, anyway.

An interminable time later, Son and Friend arrive with a full can, laughing their heads off. We have not yet been struck from behind. Nor do they get hit. The engine starts. We arrive at the restaurant for lunch at 4 PM and let the Puppies out for a pee in the parking lot instead of the frolic through the snow that we had planned. The sun has already dipped behind the mountains, leaving only the very peaks brushed in gold. The food is good, but then anything is when you’re really hungry and cold and relieved to be safe.

The hot springs pool is just what we need. Submerged to our chins amidst clouds of steam rising into the crisp indigo sky, we laugh about the day. I lean into my Belgian’s arms and gaze up at the 3/4 moon. Life is good again and I’m going to overfill the tank before we head back home. And next year I'll make sure to put a book under the tree myself.

Something I've been Wanting to Say To You

2009-12-23T13:10:00.005-07:00

A friend who teaches elementary school has a student who got into trouble for an incident that fit his modus operandi perfectly. When she confronted him, he denied any wrongdoing and was then suspected not only of the deed, but of lying about it. When the story was finally unravelled, it turned out that he was innocent. His teacher felt terrible for having doubly accused him and apologized profusely. He told her that her apology didn’t matter, that he didn’t feel any different or better because she had said she was sorry. She thought about that, and later took him aside to say that she now realized her apology was really for herself, but that her words had made her feel better. With time, she hoped, they would have the same effect on him too.

Well, they won’t, he said.

For a long time now, I have wanted to make an apology . Two, in fact. But hearing this story made me re-examine whether there was any point to saying I was sorry, if the words used to express regret are not well-received. And while it’s generally true that the giver of an apology feels a lessening of their burden, but the relief isn’t always reciprocated. ‘Do you accept my apology? ‘, we might ask, but the response is not always positive. How difficult it is to extend our regret to another, only to see it slip through their hands.

Reconsidered thusly, my apologies may simply become acknowledgements. There will still be a faint hope accompanying them that repair is possible, but an acknowledgement does not carry the same weight of expectation. An apology is a bit like a birthday present, offered without obviously anticipating anything in return. But if, when the giver’s birthday rolls around, nothing comes her way, there’s likely to be some disappointment.

A misunderstanding of the highest order passed between a brother and me some years ago and it remains unresolved, leaving traces still evident despite the erosion of time. On the surface, we appear to have gotten over it, and part of my reluctance to say anything now is a fear of re-opening an old wound. But I can’t bury things like he seems to be able to do, and my old distress, half-conscious though it is, regularly turns over and mutters in a dark corner of my mind. What also stops me from apologizing is that I believe I had valid reason to say to him what I did way back then, although I never dreamt that my words would have such a devastating effect.

And longer ago than that, events that I put in motion changed the course of my former husband’s life to such an extent that he cannot bring himself to speak to me. It is our youngest child’s greatest wish that his siblings, his father and I simply be able to share a meal together once in a while, on the rare occasion that we are all in the same city.

For that to happen, I would need to make an apology – or an acknowledgement – of what my husband suffered when he lost a life he had thought would always be his. For the sake of my son, I think I can do that, but there is something standing in the way. Until I started writing this essay I didn’t understand that it is the very real possibility that my regret will only be met with continued hostility. That it just won’t do.

That’s the crux of it. I’m afraid to say what wants to be said in case nothing comes back. No reciprocal acknowledgement, no acceptance, only silence. Or worse, outright rejection. But as Christmas approaches, I am pulled by a strong urge to make things right, to offer a gift in the true spirit of giving without expectation of something for myself.

Unwrapped, no strings attached and straight from the heart.

Is that 'Ode To Joy' I hear?

2009-12-07T20:54:00.001-07:00

Late, late last night, still awake long after my beloved had given himself up to sleep, I thought of the people I have begun to know in the last months, and in the night stillness, their voices seemed to come to me as faint, distant bells. Signalling their presence in tones sometimes resonant, sometimes delicately crystalline, they compelled me to listen and after a time I began to hear their clear, pure notes joining and blending together in a harmony of ideas and intention, motifs and themes.

In Penned but not Published, the writer asks if symbolism informs our writing, or our lives. Music has always been part of my life, and I once heard it described as the purest form of human expression. It seems, then, entirely right for me to consider music as a symbol for what is created in this place of writers and artists. It is our vast concert hall, and without benefit of a conductor, we play and practice, our melodies simple, tender, bold, complex, amusing, heartbreaking, dark and unforgettable; the kind of compositions that we remember long after we first heard them. We create an exquisite opus, contrapuntal and melodious although dissonance is an integral part of the whole – without it, music is saccharine and superficial.

Then today, The Pliers wrote of paving stones and the grass that holds them fast to the earth as metaphors for the things we must do in life, and how we choose to do them. She refers eloquently to “ the rush of feeling connected to another, above and beyond words and the rule book delivered by the stork along with one's corporeal form; the joy of trusting one's non-traditional ways of knowing” .

Her reference to the rule book, or rather, to its irrelevance, brings to mind another analogy. At the risk of mixing far too many metaphors, I liken my initial experience of this community of writers to being the new kid at school. On the playground at recess there are already well-established groups, and relationships within those groups – a hierarchy to be respected and an etiquette to be observed if the new kid has any hope of gaining entry to the circle. Depending on her level of self-assurance, she might try to integrate herself boldly, or hang around on the periphery, watching and waiting, analyzing the behaviour and personalities of the others to best assess her chances of acceptance.

It took me a few months to realize how preposterous this scenario was as applied to the blogging community. It took me that long to figure out that, in this environment, the usual rules do not apply. In the relative anonymity of this milieu we can present ourselves in only one context, without the factors that often influence how we form relationships in the physical world.

We are, simply, what we say. What we write. We may accompany or decorate our writing with lovely images, but we have, essentially, only one way to present ourselves to the world. In regular daily life, we assess, judge, analyze and absorb information about other people from a number of sources; the way they look, dress, the accent with which they speak, the pitch of their laughter, the quirks they reveal simply by their existence.

Here, almost nothing of that comes into play. In his book ‘Blink’ Malcolm Gladwell relates the experience of a female French horn player who auditioned several decades ago for a place in a major European orchestra from behind a screen. This was not conventional practice at the time, and although her playing was deemed far superior to the other applicants, she was denied the job once her sex was known. She didn’t give up, and her fight to be accepted for what she could do and not what her physical self was interpreted as being capable of became the basis for the standard practice of blind auditions for many orchestra players today.

Essentially, we are those musicians behind a screen. We play, we are heard and we are judged (yes, we are!) only by how we present our song. But there is an essential, crucial difference between an audition, the playground and what we do here as writers, and that is that we are not in competition . On the contrary, support of each other is what makes the music beautiful and each new voice only enriches the chorus.

Now I Get It

2009-11-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

In the Anglican Church where I spent countless Sunday mornings as a child hung a tapestry embroidered with the words ‘God Is Love’. This little phrase, so often evoked by the minister, made no sense to me and I puzzled over it for years. It’s fair to say that it was only one of many things said in church that I found unfathomable.

About twenty years later, a Christmas card arrived in my mailbox from a former boss who signed it, ‘Love, David’. I had never thought of him as anything more than a good friend and his use of the word ‘love’ took me aback. This was a term reserved for family members or people with whom one had long-lasting, deep relationships, and I had been taught that casual use diluted its meaning and impact. While I pondered the significance of David’s ‘love’, that old phrase—the one I had never managed to figure out—suddenly came back to me, and for some reason I turned it around. It became ‘Love Is God’, and then everything fell into place.

A long time ago someone must have decided that people needed to have something concrete to direct their spiritual efforts to—a ‘being’, as it were. Love, which represented the very best about humans, became personified as God. So, in my ‘aha’ moment, I decided that the phrase ‘God Is Love’ meant, well, ‘Actually, God Is Really Love’.

God is, as I have understood since then, the connection between us all when we care for each other, but it is not limited to the committed, long-term love we feel for a child, a friend, a parent, or a lover. Love, or God, also exists wherever there is understanding and complicity, in the kindness of a helpful gesture and in our humaneness when we give of ourselves to others.

My previous definition of love had been narrow and exclusive, but I began to realize that there were all kinds of other circumstances in which love flourished, however briefly. When we recognize need in the hesitation of an old person and offer a hand, when we respond with compassion to a victim of tragedy, when we delight in a momentary, meaningful exchange with a stranger, this is also love.

And it is the manifestation of God, because...God. Is. Love.

My mother, my daughter, my sons, my lover

2009-11-20T23:13:00.002-07:00

Our relationship with our mothers drives all others.

When I read this in a book a few years ago it struck me as an exaggeration, one of those smart phrases that condenses complicated wisdom into a smug sound bite. I was in counseling then, trying to figure out what part of the difficulty I had with my mother was my own doing, and put the question to my psychiatrist. Is this really true? I wanted to know. Absolutely, she said.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I had already started to understand that I wasn’t the same person with my mother that I was with my children or my friends or my husband. I felt off-balance, not entirely genuine. My confidence and assurance slipped away from me, or came out in the form of brittle bravado and a need to be right. I wasn’t really sure of my own identity when I was around her, and didn’t much like myself, either. My other relationships reflected the true me, I thought.

Naturally, the bond I examined first and most closely was the one I had with my daughter. My relationship with her was much better than the one my mother had with me; I didn’t try to impose myself or my views on her, or use the force of my intellect to intimidate her. I was more transparent with her, more honest, more accepting of her differences. Didn’t take credit – at least not overtly – for the person she was. I avoided making comparisons, stepped back from pointing out our similarities. Distanced myself from her, let her make her own decisions. In short, I tried to do things differently, tried to be different – tried not to be my mother. I almost managed to convince myself that she didn’t really need me because the last thing I wanted was to need my own mother. And was brought up short by the fact that my relationship with her was most definitely being driven by the one I had with my mother.

I had seen how hurt my mother could be by her expectations of love from her sons, by their insistence on going their own ways, by their sometimes infrequent attention. My role, as perceived by me and given motherly encouragement from time to time, was to compensate her for what she didn’t get from my brothers. On the other hand, I schooled myself to accept but not expect from my own boys, to take exactly what they were prepared to give without yearning for more. But my mother’s perception of loss became mine, and I secretly feared that the same thing would happen to me. And so my relationship with her influenced those I had with my brothers and my sons.

It hardly seemed possible that my most intimate, adult relationships could be affected by how she and I were with each other. These were stand-alone partnerships, above the fray of family dynamics and mostly exempt from its history. My connection to boyfriends, then a husband, then a lover had nothing to do with how I felt about my mother. But what was I doing by taking over, dominating many of these so-called partnerships? Showing how very competent and capable I was, hiding my self-doubt so that I could be, not just the equal of my mother, but better yet. It took a sensitive man to make me recognize what had been my pattern. He suggested that I did not have to prove anything to anyone, and in that perceptive remark was the re-making of my most important relationships.

None of this was my mother’s fault. She was not the introspective person I am, and preferred not to discuss nor even to examine, as far as I know, her own issues with self-esteem, of not having lived up to her own billing. I used to wish that she could just let it all go, those layers she had wrapped protectively around herself, so that I could really get to know the very human and imperfect woman underneath. But she did the best she could, and her best was driven by love and a desire for her children to be happy. Isn’t that the same for all of us?

There are stories I read by women whose mothers nearly destroyed them, who manipulated them with cruelty, or failed in their mothering through ignorance or their own inflicted wounds. The imprint of their experience is indelible and devastating. My story is not theirs, but only a small examination of the enormously significant role we take on as mothers.

With thanks to Friko for having planted the seed for this post, and with admiration for the brave and excellent writer of Shattered Into One Piece.