Unglued

Free-floating anxiety.
Fear.
Nerves.
Uncertainty.
Hesitation.

I am rattled. Yes, there's a lot on the desk. Scads of tax-work to do. Editing. Planning. Grant applications. If I shared it all it would make your head explode. So I won't. I'll just try and glue my own head together.

Overlaying all of it, constantly, is worry about my disappeared daughter. I was able to track her doings on Twitter and a few more professional sites for a few years. But it is nearly 60 days now and her Twitter account has not been updated and she is no longer a member of the other sites.

And my head can't take this constant barrage of 'what ifs' that I've had in the last two weeks. Through the wonder of this technological age I observed a flutter of activity and accusations as she barged off a film set half way through production a couple of months ago. At the time I thought, OMG, she's at it again, this is kinda sorta public, she will get blacklisted by the film industry. How we do one thing is how we do all things. She's blacklisted her entire family. She's been barging off, huffy, since she was two years old. Nothing has changed. I get so scared for her.

Do we ever stop being parents? No. I'd like to stop. I'd like to be a wise old crone and que sera, sera myself into karmic bliss. But I can't when it comes to my kids.

I find this whole not knowing about her well-being, ill-being, is affecting my perception of everything. The dog threw up all over my bed the other night. Barf bed. Yeah. Horrible. And I must have cried for two hours. My dog was dying. But only in my head.

(Ansa is just fine, she probably ate something on the shore that had been dead for a month and decided to share a midnight feed with me).

My elder daughter had a severe episode of her MS (necessitating emergency intervention) when I was in Toronto last month and my mind keeps going back to that. She is fine too and off with her dad and her daughter (Grandgirl) on March break in Montreal as I write.

I'm just niggling away at all worrisome things at the moment and need to put a positive spin on my life.

All is seriously well. Really. Isn't it amazing what can do one's head in, in spite of this?

And there's nothing I can do about any of it.

Photo and Cartoon of the Week

This has been kicking around Facebook but I thought it worth further exposure here as it so bloody well said, yeah?

And when this shyte has to be posted isn't it hard to believe we're in 2012 and not 1812 ?

How long will it take for the females of our species (50% of us) not to be perceived as growbags?

And for those of you who may not have seen the following due to your newspapers' censoring, here's Garry Trudeau shouting out about another serious erosion of women's rights in the USA:

Five Glorious Things

I've meant to post this weekly, to keep myself mindful and thankful. Mondays. Must remember.

1. Some would view this as a chore but I don't: Every morning in the cooler temperatures I come downstairs and set and light the fire in the woodstove while the dog runs around the meadow in joy at her morning release and I put on the coffee and oatmeal and get her food together and come out again to the now roaring fire.

2. My daily walks along the shore where I get to see the scene above called "Winter Blues".

3. The postmaster, yeah, I've written about him here, but where else would I get a call from the post office to tell me in an awestruck voice: yeah, there's four packages for me today. Two with work. So come down today.

4. My tax software wasn't working. I de-installed, I re-installed over the past 24 hours. Nah, wouldn't work. At all. I called the software support line and just as I started to tell the technician my problem it began to work, all by its little ol' self. We laughed for 5 minutes as I insisted it was her particular ether magic that got it rolling.

5. Finding a new editor through my daughter and her huge network of fab people. And this time, maybe this time, I'll be finally putting out the book of short stories. Soon.

One Hundred Years

He thinks: A hundred years. One. Hundred. Years.

That's how long the old store has been smack dab in the middle of the village. Selling everything way back in the day from anchors to sausages and still doing so. Used to be they'd take lumber and fish in trade. He'd heard rumblings of long ago - grudges passed down through the generations. Of unfair pricing. Of rejecting the wood if it wasn't up to par. And then going back in the middle of the night and taking it anyway, free. Of one of the store's boats being sunk in revenge for this.

But he'd tried. To be fair and honest that is. Well almost honest. If he added up the bills for some of his more trusted customers to settle at the end of the month, he'd always round the pennies up. He'd make a few dollars that way and call it interest. Sure wasn't he entitled?

First it was the gas. Over ninety years they'd run a single pump of it outside the front door. And now that was gone. A flimsy excuse from the oil company, they couldn't come down around the corner in their new big rig. He pretended that was true. He knew it was a losing financial proposition to send out a truck from town to fill up his little one pump underground tank.

Then it was the tickets. He wasn't selling enough to justify stocking him up every week. Plus he'd never had a winner even though there were some that bought fifty dollars worth a day. All hoping for the big win. A tax on the poor, he thought privately. All giving up their welfare checks in the hope of winning a few million dollars while their children scraped by on bread and cereal.

Ten years ago he buried the wife. She suffered a lot. And then his lady friend followed the wife, exact same type of cancer and suffering, four years after that. So he decided to fly solo. Spent all his days and most of the evening in the shop.

And now, well now, he was going to cut back on all those lonesome hours at the shop. Walk around a bit, look at the sea. Hustle up his memories of when the kids were small and Patsy was alive and think about the time they took an extra one in because he wasn't being treated right by his mother. There were a lot of mouths to feed then but a lot of laughter coming out of those very same mouths too. Yes, surround himself with those kind of thoughts and not think about how sick he was feeling lately. As if his own cancer had come back and was now stretching its muscles and playing the waiting game. A shame that their eldest, Marcie, was never right in the head. Stayed stuck at nine years old. And now she was nearly fifty. A right care she'd been, Patsy was good with her but he had had to keep her sedated so she was more docile. Otherwise her rage would eat her up from the inside. He couldn't bear to think of who would soon care for her. His guess was no family member would step up to the plate and he couldn't ask any of them now could he, so it would be a facility for sure, but he shoved that thought quickly out of his head. All the rest of his children were in Alberta making staggering amounts of money off the oil sands. Along with a hundred thousand other Newfoundlanders.

The shop would close soon. Of that there was no doubt. Inside his head, he apologizes to his father, to his grandfather and his great-grandfather. Soon it was going to be time to see them and explain himself.

He was ready.

Death and Other Jokes

Looking out the window
In the space of five minutes
I see
~A funeral hearse (and yes, I saw her death in the paper) with 9 duckling cars trailing it
~A school bus – grade school
~A furniture delivery truck
~Another school bus – high school
~A meat truck
~A milk truck,
~A jeep
~Three passenger vans
~Two private trucks with boat trailers
~Six or seven cars
~Two walkers
~One black dog who walks herself and never crosses the road, hello Bella!
Which goes to show me
In no uncertain way
That life goes on. And on. And on.
Even when we die.

Best Laid Plans

Sweet Maude.

I know I am the middle of tax season when something untoward and unexpectd happens to yank my chain and wrestle me to the ground.

Beware all ye who read here of the most atrocious computer virus EVAH to attack without provocation. Known to those in the know of such things as "Internet Security 2012", it looks exactly like Microsoft Security Anti-Virus down to the logo. Sorry can't link to the details as I am on my netbook very far from home having entrusted my laptop to the wunderkind who has saved my techie-arse many times before.

This may take a while, he tells me, grave of face, sad of demeanour, we would have to do a full scan once we remove it, it is one of the most insidious ones yet.

You don't have to push a button for this one. This installed itself when I had my back turned on the screen while talking on the phone. I shut down right away and fingers crossed I got away with it before it took charge of my bank account, etc. -

Murphy's Law # 89: The busier I am the behinder I get.

Outside Looking In

Outside Looking In

Of all the slaps
Slung by love
None hurts so much
As a shove

Out to the blizzard
Deep with snow
Shivered by the
Sudden blow.

Baffled, hurting,
Cast aside,
Puzzled, frightened
Holding tight

To mem'ries of
Precious years
Which slowly melt
Away to tears.

Cartoon of the Week

And Out The Other Side

Amazing possibilities are out the other side when I suit up and show up.

We have this amazing theatre troupe I've written about and a pretty damn good play. So everyone says. For how can I speak of it, all the characters are dear to me and spring from my fertile imagination. I get to love my characters, they are my babies. And the brilliant cast makes them even more real. And people ask me about them.

"So what happened to Phelim," they ask. And I am flattered. He has become real to them too.

And for years, many times, I drive by this place, a very old church, oblong. Tall and sleek-ed. Lovely old windows. White and blue. And another dream takes hold. And I think, ridiculous. No. This could never be.

And a friend has the dream too. Independently. And we find out the building is for sale. For a song and some TLC. And we go there today. And say to each other as we look around this gorgeous place, key trembling in our hands.

"This is where the box office is. This is where the washroom will go. This is where the dressing rooms can be built on."

And maybe, just maybe, our theatre, our very own theatre will be birthed. Yes, overlooking the ocean. You are all invited to the premier performance. We counted. It will seat 90. Comfortably. How perfect a dream is this?

Through the Doorway

I had all the symptoms of serious malaise. Exhausted (though I prefer the word enervated)coupled with a mild depression(I say mild because I've had a serious relationship with severe) with the "what's it all about Alfie"-ness of the situation just about doing my head in and feeling I was wearing a cloak of invisibility. I want to snap "who cares" at anyone who dares ask me how I am, but I'm better brought up than that so I resort to "i vant to be left alone" a la Garbo but without her money or her gorgeousness and with far more manners. I couldn't force myself out of it and I refuse to medicate.

I just hated leaving Toronto this time and all my good family/friends and lovely clients there. I spent some marvellous five hour lunches/dinners with some where we got caught up on all the doings.

I wouldn't trade living here for anything but I'd like to package up the dear ones and move them in here. So funk happened. A blue funk of loneliness and a lot of work and deadlines and the why-mes waiting around for me to convert them into why-not-mes.

And today is a biting sun-drenched indigo day on the bay and I awoke and got up at dawn. My dreams had been astonishing. Albeit about someone else (other facets of myself as I've learned). I was telling this other someone to "Suck and chew the marrow out of life."

A message obviously for me.

Early this morning, I walked through the shadowed doorway into sunlight and an astonishing lifting of spirits. I feel renewed, refreshed and ready to start some serious sucking and chewing.

Bring it on!

Best Movies of 2011

I don't have television so there are no Oscars for me tonight apart from on the web. Maybe it is my age, maybe it is a deterioration in the overall quality of most movies but I view Oscar night now as a long drawn out yawn with too many commercials, a sycophantic host and self-congratulatory side bits which border on extreme narcissism.

I have a lifelong passion for the movies, going way back to when my uncle owned a cinema in a small town in East Cork and I got to see !!free!! every movie he showed. The A movie, the B movie, the newsreels, the cartoons and the serials on Saturday afternoons. I also have quite an enormous collection of movies. Some I never tire of watching.

One of my biggest disappointments of this past movie season was The Artist. I just don't get what all the fuss and hype was about. I found it melodramatic and cliched. And if that was the point, so what. Not a good point pour moi. A close runner up to FAIL would be Midnight in Paris, with an appalling Owen Wilson (attempting to channel a jaded Woody Allen) in the lead and featuring cardboard caricatures of the greatest literary figures in Paris as a supporting cast. Please. I was seriously offended.

On the other hand, I loved Monsieur Lazhar an amazing story of a Grade 6 class in Quebec whose teacher commits suicide. The child actors in it were brilliant. I also loved Beginners which starred Christopher Plummer as a widower coming out of the closet after 45 years of marriage. Hugo was a delight, loved loved loved Martin Scorsese's homage to movies through the ages and even caught his own (a la Alfred Hitchcock) cameo in it. The 3 D effects were incredible.

Tree of Life and Bridesmaids were also in the enjoyable lineup of movie pleasure for me this past year.

But overall a disappointing season but some of that can be blamed on the unavailability of good foreign film showings here in Newfoundland. To my mind, there is nothing like the big screen of a movie theatre for showing such treasures.

To Live Alone

According to statistics, the majority of adults in the USA and Canada now live alone. A fairly new demographic that is just about invisible judging from the media. No one wants to talk about it or write about it, it seems, apart from some fearless bloggers that tread outwards into uncharted territory. My blog buddy Ronni Bennett wrote about it yesterday and she was also featured in a piece in the New York Times on Wednesday.

I wrote about it recently:

Alone.
Sometimes lonely.
Solitary.
Independent.
Selfish, some say.
Why?
Why not?
To choose
The perfect space
In all the world
For one
Such as me.
By me.
Sea.
Old house.
Woods.
Silence.


UPDATE

Living Single

As of 2000, the most common household type in the U.S. is a person living alone. - Hobbs, Frank. 2005. “Examining American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000.” U.S. Census Bureau.

After Midnight

A shaky Leo sat down by the fire yesterday afternoon and told me about something that happened while I was away. As instructed, he took Ansa for a walk three times a day, the last walk being around midnight.

Last Friday at midnight, he walks her down the shore to the Delaney House, an old house that's been there for well over a couple hundred years. Small, tight, and freshly enhanced with a family of three, including a baby, in the last couple of years. Ansa was doing her business by the rocks when she suddenly barked. Leo, who had been watching her, looked up just in time to see Billy Delaney running along the shore just about to crash into the two of them.

“Wearing his waders," said Leo, his eyes round and frightened in the memory of it, his mouth trembling, “and that awful old cap of his, a dirty old tweedy thing, should have been lumped out years ago.”

“Ansa started to howl, just a bit, and then Billy...” he tried to go on.

“What, Billy did what?” I said.

“Well Billy ran through me. And it hurt.”

“Billy ran through you? What?”

“I could hear the crunch of old waders on the stones and he ran through me and I fell down because my chest hurt so much and my legs went all rubber on me and wouldn't hold me up and Ansa was making an awful crying sound.”

“And what about Billy?”

“Oh he was gone, right gone, right quick. But I could still smell him, he never gave himself a good washing.”

“So Ansa licked my face, and I managed to stand up, but I couldn't walk properly at all. So I managed to make it over to Annie's by the crossroads and told her what had happened. It was going on for nearly one o'clock in the morning then, and I was drinking the cup of tea she made me with lots of sugar for the shock and then she goes ahead and calls Father Korea. I tried to stop her but she wouldn't listen. So next thing Father Korea comes on down with his prayerbook and his holy water saying he thought I'd have to be dying for him to be taken out of his warm bed on a freezing night like this.”

“You can't be serious,” I say, laughing in spite of myself, petting my brave Ansa.

“Oh, but I am,” and Leo has never looked more serious and is slightly offended at my laughing, “and he says all these mumbly-jumbly prayers over my head and sprinkles holy water all over me, and tells whatever is inside me to leave forever.”

“Did it work?” I ask.

“On I'm still fair haunted with it all. I don't know about it working.”

“You're sure it was Billy?” I say.

“Oh no doubt at all, not a doubt it was Billy, drunk as always, gallivanting like a mad man around the place.”

Billy has been dead for eight years.

Coming Home

One has to go away. Even if it is for a day or two only. Just to miss it. To feel the lack of it in the bones. Home.

I've been gone for nearly 2 weeks. You should have seen the dog once she saw me, quivering from head to toe. As I do. At first she doesn't believe her eyes. She shakes her head as if to get rid of her waking dream. Then it is as if she shouts:

It's you! It. Really. Is. You!

And then she throws herself on me. Paws on my shoulders, tongue all over my face, hair, hands. Oh, to be so welcomed. Everyone should be welcomed like this. It is worth all the days of being away.

I light the fire. Together, we warm ourselves in front of it. She brushing against my legs. Whining ever so softly. I glance at the couch where my favourite cushion (an aran one, knit by me) looks askew and slightly mangled.

This is what has comforted her. The normally off limits couch and its cream coloured cushion, licked and kneaded and still bearing the faint outline of her head.

She catches my look at the forbidden territory and hangs her head in shame.

I hug her.

It's alright, I whisper. When I'm away, you're allowed.

Signage

Odd signs around Toronto.

On the back of a Hummer:



Who do unreal men love?

Condominiums are cluttering the downtown skies in various stages of undress being babysat by mighty cranes. One sign read:




And I will damn well marry Charlie next Saturday.

Innies and Outies

No I'm not talking belly buttons. Though I'd like to. Curious things, aren't they? All shapes and sizes. Connections to those who gave birth to us. I lost mine. Seriously. An emergency appendectomy of a slash and burn variety. I tell startled medical people now when I'm having a test that I'm from Venus. We do it differently there so I was hatched from an egg. It gets a chuckle. Or not. Depending on the personality of the technician.

Are you an innie or an outie person? I learned the terminology years ago when my romantic little heart set up a couple as being possible partners in love. They were both extraordinarly attractive and outgoing and to top it all off were both named Joanne. One was a client, the other was my tenant. They had their first date and tenant Joanne told me thanks but it would never go anywhere as client Joanne was an outie and she was an innie. Client Joanne was into motorbikes and extreme sports, tenant Joanne was into reading and theatre and playing her cello.

Well, this was all news to me. But I pay attention. As I do. And was startled to discover that my family and friends and relationships could be so classified. Now, before you start in on me, I do know that opposites attract. And I too have been smitten with the hell-raising fellows who never cut open a book from one end of the year to the other. But on the whole, my longest lasting friendships and relationships have been with innies. Those with an inner life, not predicated on the latest wevs* (fashion, car, star, mag, movie, TV show, cookery guru, etc.) but on their own dreams, aspirations and personal evolution.

And yes, I do know that there can be a mix of innie and outie in a lot of us. But I think most of us do lean one way or the other.

For instance, I find it is my innie friends and family who totally enjoy my haven in Newfoundland and are content to be with themselves without outer distraction and stimulation.





*whatevers

Mixed Feelings

My power animal {totem} is the owl given to me by a shaman many, many moons ago and supplemented by many little owls who have come to live with me over the years.

The price tag of moving away from nearest and dearest is quite high. I am reminded of this when I am with family and old friends in my present little sojourn in Toronto.

There are times when I can't even say goodbye, it sticks in my throat so much. There are certain friends that when I walk into their homes after a length of time it feels like we sat down yesterday. That is the way it was with a friend today. We just pick up where we left off. I have a few friends like that, how lucky am I? My friend in Dublin is the same. We just pick up the thread of the last email or phonecall and carry on across the kitchen table. The language of the heart. No barriers, no doors. Our lives to each other is as an open book.

I think it helps to cement friendships when you go through the tough times and out the other side over the years. With this friend, we say goodbye to each other before the night is over so I can slip away quietly when the time comes. Or I would cry. Or she would say: "I hate that you moved away, I hate it hate it hate it but I understand why you did it."

The rest of the week is more of the same, tomorrow is a mix of work and meeting an old, formerly estranged friend for dinner. A reconnection that lightens my heart when I think about it.

And the highlight of the week is a date with Grandgirl for dinner and show on Sunday. Just the two of us.

Ireland's Shame

I found this piece incredibly distressing. Ireland's court system needs to be thoroughly overhauled when it comes to prosecuting rape.

This is the headline:

Alleged rape victim arrested in Ireland for refusal to testify. Eastern European woman was told by judge to stand in front of three accused and point out her alleged assailants.

The victim was forced to stand in front of the accused and identify them.

But that wasn't all.

The men, who have not been named for legal reasons, were acquitted last week of rape, false imprisonment and assault. But campaigners have condemned the treatment of the woman, who was told by the judge, Mr Justice Paul Carney, to stand directly in front of the three accused and point out her alleged assailants.

The woman, who is from eastern Europe, became so distressed that lawyers later complained they had feared she might collapse in court. When she failed to appear in court the next day, a warrant was issued for her arrest.

Police officers found the woman at her home, where she had apparently attempted suicide, but after receiving medical treatment she was arrested and spent a day in the jail cells of Dublin's Four Courts

Yes, she was put in jail. The victim was put on trial. In the interim she also attempted suicide.

Read more about it here in The Guardian.

"One of the main reasons for this high fallout rate is because complainants decide not to put themselves through what they say is a re-victimising experience."

And based on personal experience and anecdotal data, 90% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported exactly for these reasons.

Shame on you Ireland!

Five Glorious Things

{Picture was taken near my house in Newfoundland before I left}

I'm in the great city of Toronto for some days. Reigniting connections, spending time with family, cruising through the changes in infrastructure since I was last here in September.

My needle was stuck and I was devoid of feed for my blog, whether it was revisiting past writing, fresh writing, any writing. Daughter put me in touch with a new editor, as my last one and I, well, best to say we had far, far different perspectives on how my stories should present themselves.

1. To prepare for the editor, I reviewed some of my short stories and was a little charmed at how the distance from the writing of them made the re-reading of them fresh and interesting. I honestly did not remember how some of them turned out so was deliciously surprised. Does that sound vain? Who cares?

2. I had lunch with a dear old friend yesterday. He is off to Mexico on the weekend, so meeting with each other was a priority. A lingering 3 hour lunch at a wonderful Jewish restaurant which he had never been to where we caught up with life's doings and beings and felt intensely satisfied with how relatively stress free life is today after years and years of angst, problems, death and suffering of cherished ones.

3. I had dinner with another long established friend. This time a 5 hour dinner where we covered the grounds of the persecutions of our ancestors, in my case the Irish Famine Genocide, and in hers the Anabaptists of Switzerland who made their way to Pennsylvania and onward to Ontario. She shared a wedding experience in France where the charming custom is for the bride to enter the church alone and proceed up the aisle talking to relatives and friends on her way. This was followed by a week in Provence for all 350 guests. Her vivid description of her time there had me enthralled.

4. Timewise, I lagged a few minutes after Grandgirl in my returning to Daughter's house last night. But she quickly joined me in my room where we behaved like two schoolgirls with secrets and jokes until the wee hours, not aware we were preventing Daughter from getting to sleep down the hall.

5. Calendar is full both with social and business meetings while I'm here. I am replenishing, topping up the batteries of friendships and family.

I am so very lucky once I stay where my hands are.

How Can I Leave Thee?

Look. See here. I can do gorgeous, you wanna see gorgeous? I'll lie here so perfectly still in the snow. I just won't move until you snap your fingers. Once for get up. Two for sit down. Three like you just did for lie down. In. The. Snow. See? Gorgeous.

I saw the suitcase. I know you're off somewhere. Leaving me. So I have a plan. For the next few days I'm going to be so perfect. Hugging you. Heeling you. Leaning in on your shoulder and closing my eyes in bliss. Does you in, doesn't it? Those tears of guilt start to roll down your cheeks.

You might just change your mind.

I'll help you unpack.