The Other Side of Sixty

Memoir

2012-01-29T14:09:00.005-03:30

I started this memoir a few years back. A chap book (strictly for family) about my mother. Two of my family members have read it so far and are enthusiastic about it. I feel if I don't write all of it down and quickly, my memories will start to fade. Letters (she was a prodigious writer to me being an emigrant) have survived which I will include. And some photos, particularly of her outside of her maternal experience as mother to us, her children.

She had first hand experience as a young child of the horror of the Black and Tan era in Ireland and the blowing up (by the IRA in Rebel Cork) of the local barracks in her village.

She was put out to service at the age of twelve to the local merchant even though she had skipped a class at her village school as she was so bright. No opportunities then. For anyone.

Through this process of writing down her life I feel I am getting to know her all over again and with the distance of her passing, see her struggles and evolution more clearly.

There is never a day goes by when I don't think of her. She died far too young and I surmise she would only have gotten more interesting with age.

Mollyfodge

2012-01-27T22:38:00.004-03:30

My mother mollyfodged along with her sisters and her mother and before her, her grandmother. I remember a book I read when I was eight or nine. It was a book that I'd won and I can't remember for the life of me for what. But several chapters were taken up with mollyfodging. With cabbage. Which made rainbow colours when you mollyfodged properly.

Maybe I won it for an essay or verse speaking. Verse speaking was popular in my time. As soon as you could learn something and speak phrases by heart your parents would ask you to stand up at a family event and show off. I remember running through verses like they were a race to be run and be completely breathless at the end of the recitation and flop down, mopping my brow dramatically. Still too young to be embarrassed, that was to follow around ten or eleven when my pleas of “Do I have to?” and “I don't want to” were quickly trampled on with the reprimand that it was common courtesy to perform when asked to at a function. Manners. One's party piece was to be kept polished and willingly presented to others when asked and in return their party pieces were performed: by old, young and in between, at a family gathering. Isn't it a shame that those ways are gone now? In spite of the mortifying embarrassment of it all. It got us ready to be more at ease in public, perhaps. More confident.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, mollyfodging. I did a bit of it myself, not much. At one point I thought I could make a business out of it. For it is an art that should be revived. And maybe some of you out there have. I might try it again in the summer coming up.

Oh lawdee, some of you are now wittering on as to what in fodge I'm talking about?

Mollyfodge:
“Lichen on rocks and trees used to make a dye – mollyfodge is picked off trees and used by women of Summerville to dye materials.”

And further posts on the Dictionary of Newfoundland English can be found here.

Murphy's Laws

2012-01-25T19:18:00.004-03:30

"The more you want to hide and be on your way, the more people will insist on grabbing you by the arm and engaging you in a long discourse."

I have this appalling habit on this righteous planet. I love nightwear as daywear. There, I said it. Particularly my pyjamas which come in many colours and combinations. If I were the owner of this world I would make jammies mandatory wear. For everything. I envy the young of today who have taken this rule to heart and venture just about everywhere in their jammies and often with a teddy bear in tow too. My kind of people.

I have this long designer coat given to me by my generous benefactor. It is a lovely coat. Elegant. Deep turquoise, gold buttons. You know where I'm going with this, right?

I've discovered if I can jam my jammies (lol) into my boots, throw on the coat, glove and hat myself to keep out the chill and hide the bird's nest of hair, I can make you lot believe I am conforming to Senior Wear Canada.

So thus disguised I go to the local store today. And meet half the neighbourhood who are in the shop. This is the bigger shop on the peninsula, about 7km from my house and it has vegetables and fruit and meats and fish. I had to peel off the Aran hat to show the pattern to two interested knitters, and one of my card buddies had to tell me about the time he worked in Toronto and loved it, then an injured fellow from one village over gave me an update on the physiotherapy on his arm, taking far too long, and the shop owner himself was upset that I hadn't been around in a while even though I assured him I had, but it was his wife and daughter who were running the show at the shop while he had a day off and yes, they showed me their 250 pictures from their Irish trip. Mistake. He asked me what were my favourites and did I think he'd enjoy it if he tagged along next time? What should he see?

Meanwhile, I keep a tight grip on Da Coat which is covering a brilliant emerald green and orange jammie set. I have enough comments on my bright pink Uggs without causing the complete collapse of what passes for Outport Society with a surprise display of my unmentionables.

Reading

2012-01-23T16:14:00.005-03:30

I love reading and have since I was four, for I was a bit of a long time "only" for the Catholic Irish family of that era, so my father had both the time and inclination to teach me and insure an everlasting addiction by marching me to the library and getting me my very own library card.

But this post is not about books. This post is about people. Reading people. Especially strangers who subsequently reveal more about themselves and confirm my very first take on them.

Some have it that I have the second sight, like my granny before me. I believe I do. I can read handwriting. And tea-leaves. But I truly believe that such readings are in the realm of psychology, reading the eyes, the face, the body language, the walk. Most are awestruck at my ability. I've predicted a few nasty events, to the point where I stopped handwriting analysis, too much is revealed in the flourishes, the upsweeps, the downturns, of someome's psychic condition. I don't want to know if an inherent carelessness results in a bad accident. Or too vulnerable a core results in a suicide. (Yes, these and more actually happened).

Someone I met recently had such pain in her eyes I speculated privately about the depth of it. Today, at a book club meeting, she briefly referred to a horrific marriage years ago that left her and her four, now adult, children scarred and damaged. I nodded internally.

After the meeting she came over to me and said: "I've known you in some other life, I knew your name before you even spoke it for the first time, do you think that's freaky?"

"No," I said, "For I've known all about you too."

Post Office Conversation

2012-01-20T12:55:00.005-03:30

We have an odd arrangement for postal services in my wee outport. Some families receive delivery to their homes, other, 'newer' (from fifty years ago and sooner) families have to go to their designated PO Box inside the post office and use a key to retrieve theirs.

All well and good, one might say. Except the sole post office master also runs the hardware, grocery and gas divisions of the store and has to go across the street to his house for housekeeping reasons and shut up shop many times during the day, without notice.

His hours are mysterious and unposted on his door. He is often spotted behind the counter cutting up vegetables for his dinner on top of outgoing post. And slicing cheese for sale in the shop with no protective gloves, hairnet or sanitized surface.

I could write a comedy about the post office. But I have to live here after all. But to gutsplitting laughter I have performed a skit for a few close friends on how it all operates. I won't even start in on telling you now how the post office became computerized. That is an entire post by itself.

Yesterday I go to pick up my mail and as usual the flyers are jammed into my box and the legitimate mail has barely enough room to fit. On top of this there is the baffling card ("parcel behind the counter for you!") which I hand to Peter (not his real name). His tongue finds his cheek as he puzzles the card and he looks under the counter, over the counter, into a box full of how many unfortunates', and possibly long dead addressees', mail.

"Don't see it", he says to me.

"Well I did receive one parcel in the mailbox" I say to him helpfully.

"Let me see that," he says.

I hand it over.

"Ah that's it!" he says, fussing with his computer.

"How do you know there aren't two parcels?" I say. I have long since developed an enormous tolerance for the weird happenings in my post office. I no longer wear my Big City Girl Pants. And notice how I haven't even gotten into outgoing mail challenges have I?

"A good guess." he says, leaving me wondering when I will get the call that he found the carded parcel.

"Look Peter," I say as I leave, "You must be forgetting. I don't want the flyers, they cram my mailbox, I don't read them and the paper is too shiny to burn in the woodstove so they end up in the trash. I just hate the waste and...."

"You keep asking about that," he says, "For years now."

"And you keep saying you will take care of it. I know you're busy...is there anyone else I can call about this, like head office?"

"Ah, no, no, don't do that. I'll take care of it."

"If you don't mind me asking, what do you have to do to stop it going into my mailbox?"

"It's simple really," Peter leans over the counter confidentially.

"I'm all ears!" I smile.

"I put a red sticker on the backside of your mailbox for the postal guy to see and he knows not to deliver the flyers."

"Could I help you then? Could I go into the room and put the red sticker on for you?"

"I wish it were that simple, girl. I really do."

"You mean I can't go back there, like rules are rules?"

"No, I ran out of red stickers a while back."

Concessions - Part Two

2012-01-18T21:27:00.005-03:30

See Concessions - Part One here.

I love the little vanities observed in others. Particularly in women who are old enough to be my mother. I have one friend, not a shred of make-up visible on her face, hair au naturel, and her nails are always long and exquisitely polished in pearly pink.

I think I had my nails 'done' about five times in my life. A complete waste of time and money. They are chipped and sorry looking within about ten minutes of having them professionally manicured. I don't know how that happens and I'm at the stage where I don't care. Sweet concession. But I've always begged to ask: why does anyone bother?

I think one of the big concessions for me is driving. I can drive. I can drive at night. But oh boy, rain or fog or snow at night has me in panic attack mode. Reflections piercing the eyeballs. Those new blinding halogen headlights on cars. Speeding trucks pitching filthy water/ice on my windshield, legitimate fear of hydro-planing on the highway, accidents, the odd deranged moose venturing forth in the darkness, all of the above makes me white-knuckle the steering wheel.

Not good.

I think I'll be bunking with friends in town on such nights in future.

Precious Moments

2012-01-17T01:01:00.004-03:30

Daughter is here for a week and we have been spending time together, talking books and politics in front of the fire, hosting a large gathering at our Nollaig na Mban and touring around the Irish Loop to give her the feel of the place in winter time. Today, we caught the lavender sunset in Renews, pictured above. Such sights can leave one speechless. And we were.

It was a biting cold day with a dazzling sky. I caught the waves hitting the shore with a lone bird overhead in this photo taken in St. Shott's earlier.

Back to the routine on Wednesday but right now it is lovely to be out of it with my precious daughter by my side.

Concessions - Part One

2012-01-10T20:03:00.004-03:30

Concessions to ageing that is. They slither in unannounced. Subtle changes, small accommodations. I resent some of them. I hate slowing down. But I find I have to. I've always walked fast, showered quickly, tossed the wet hair into a wash and wear shape and proceeded with my day.

I am more careful now. Ever since falling out of the tub and cracking my head off the sink I learn to be cautious. To hold on to something. To think about where my feet are going. It adds a couple of minutes right there. I eat breakfast. I had to train myself to do that as I never used to. I find I function much better with porridge or oatbran inside me. And I read the paper. Including the obits. Over the breakfast. And I meditate. And sometimes I will journal. And there's another couple of hours gone right there.

I find I get lost in my thoughts sometimes. Another concession. For I lose the odd word here and there and have to mentally flip through the internal file labels and extract the word. Sometimes it lurks hidden, misfiled. But it emerges later when I don't expect it. And I love getting lost in my thoughts.

What are you thinking about ?

Hawthorn and primroses and bluebells. In spring in Ireland. Was there ever such a scent in a boreen?

Innocuous thoughts as you can see. But lovely.

I never had the time to do that.

And then I plan lunch and dinner if I'm not going out. And there's always the phone. And this blog. And answering emails and often a bit of snail mail which I love (notice the increase in snail mail lately?) And a walk on the shore with Ansa. And some writing and some reading. And by the time I get really rolling into the day it is nearly over.

And I think, what did I do today? as I pick up my book or my knitting. And I look back and wonder how I ever managed with a full time high pressure job and the kids and the house and the animals.

And I ask myself what was that all about and why was it all so complicated and important?

And how easy it is today as some concessions are truly wonderful.

Sometimes in Winter

2012-01-09T22:45:00.003-03:30

I've always loved the unusual music and lyrics of Blood, Sweat and Tears since they first charmed my eardrums in my early twenties (Note to self: NO, seriously, that long ago?) and this is one my favourites of theirs. I've never found it sad, as one might expect, but quite uplifting.

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS
"Sometimes In Winter"
(Steve Katz)

Sometimes in Winter
I gaze into the streets
And walk through snow and city sleet
Behind your room

Sometimes in Winter
Forgotten memories
Remember you behind the trees
With leaves that cried

By the window once I waited for you
Laughing slightly you would run
Trees alone would shield us in the meadow
Makin' love in the evening sun

Now you're gone girl
And the lamp posts call your name
I can hear, them
In the spring of frozen rain
Now you're gone girl
And the time's slowed down till dawn
It's a cold room and the walls ask
Where you've gone

Sometimes In Winter
I love you when the good times
Seem like mem'ries int he spring
That never came

Sometimes In Winter
I wish the empty streets
Would fill with laughter from the tears
That ease my pain

Cast Parties and Nollaig na Mban

2012-01-07T19:06:00.004-03:30

My heavens, (said she in ladylike fashion) my post on Nollaig na Mban has just about gone viral.

Just in time, say I, as I am planning my NM event here for January 15th (next Sunday) when Daughter is here. Tomorrow (8th) I have the cast (and crew) of my play here for lunch. Marvellous times are ahead for us all, we are black and blue from pinching ourselves, and we need to nail all further rehearsal times down, prepare for fresh debuts and sort out far flung travel arrangements, etc. More on that later.

Needless to mention all this cleanup and reorganization of my home has paid off in droves. Dark secret - one bedroom - in spite of all my good intentions - has become a bit of a catch basin for STUFF.

There hasn't been much time for anything else and Daughter arrives on Tuesday. I am so looking forward to that.

And the cast event tomorrow is icing on the cake. It's extraordinary when you put one foot out into uncharted territory where the footsteps following can take you. And I hadn't a clue when I first conceived this play that it would take me on the best journey of my life. Beyond my wildest dreams.

Pinch.

Treasures

2012-01-06T00:04:00.005-03:30

The wife of a friend makes these miniatures out of her own handmade crocheted lace and satin and sequins. She stiffens the lace in the old fashioned way with sugar. She handed me a little box of them tonight – they look like snowflakes. Along with these there was her home-made molasses bread, a dark fruit cake, marshberry jam and cookies to stagger out her door with. The casual generosity of Newfoundlanders still takes my breath away.

Ungapped

2012-01-05T01:17:00.004-03:30

Strange this.
We meet again, a year later.
And it is like we pick
Up the long conversation
Exactly where we left off.

I am old enough
To be your mother.
I know that never stops
Men who are old enough
To father the women
They end up with.

But it stops me.
I can't entertain such thoughts.
But you speak of moving here
Permanently.
And me helping you
With this and that.

And your eyes sparkle
And you tell me things
Did not work out
With that woman in Toronto
And could I read to you.

Please.

Sometime.

Soon.

As you love my voice
And the words I give you.
And then you'll tell me more
About Michael Collins
And I'll tell you more
About how I got here.

The Great Reorganization

2012-01-03T10:47:00.006-03:30

I find I start what I think is a, well, maybe four hour job and a nightmare unfolds slowly before me extending into days.

I am glad I started this now mammoth project early enough as I am entertaining a large crowd twice in the next 10 days. This ahead of the game thing is completely unlike me, as I procrastinate until life is just about unbearable and I am a snarly, bitter mess stuffing everything into closets and under beds at the last minute. Because when I move stuff around there is always piles leftover. As if it birthed more stuff in the middle of the night when I was asleep. I mean if you haul it out to move it to a more appropriate place you should enough room for everything, right? Wrong.

I had wools everywhere. I make anyone else's stash look pathetic in comparison. So now it's all moved to the Seomra Beag (Little Room) and mighty fine it looks on its shelves moved from the main hall. Of course organizing the Little Room meant moving the sewing machine and other temporary shelving, and my antique ironing board given to me by a dear friend when I arrived in Canada first when ironing was de rigeur, pre- permanent press and fashionable wrinkles. The thing weighs a ton but I brought it out here, I couldn't part with it as she has long passed on, dead tragically young in a car accident. Everything I keep seems to have a sentimental attachment.

And I put my little round (heavy, handpainted) table in front of the window with my chair so I could dream and plot what I can do with those wools.

Then books have to be re-sorted and cardboard boxes emptied and contents distributed. So Day 3 and I am still in the process of this mammoth task but actually sensing an ending to it. Which cheers me up intensely and will allow me to focus on menus and guests which I thoroughly enjoy.

And it feels so good. Truly.

Books - 2011

2012-01-01T13:52:00.005-03:30

For those interested, see last year's annual book review, listing all the books I read in 2010 and recommendations on the best reads of the year.

I surpassed prior years' totals in sheer book count by reaching 64-1/2 books read in 2011. I didn't quite reach my (to date) unachievable target of 100 books in one year.

The books in BOLD are the ones I rated the very best.

Alone at Sea - John Morris** (why all the irritating footnotes?)
The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton****
Daily Coyote - Shreve Stockton****
Three Cups of Tea - Mortenson&Relin
Garcia's Heart - Liam Durcan***
Letter from Point Clear - Dennis McFarland***
How Will I Know? - Sheila O'Flanagan** (irritating cliche of lip chewing used excessively)
No Such Creature - Giles Blunt***
The Other Side of the Story - Marion Keyes***
The Empty Family - Colm Toibin****
Winter's Bone - David Woodrell****
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner **dropped.awful.
The Singing Boy - David McFarland ****
Solar - Ian McEwan****
The Glass Room - Simon Mawry*****
One Day - David Nicholls****
Book of Longing - Leonard Cohen***
The Unseen - Katherine Webb*****
Skippy Dies - Paul Murray**** my, what a BIG book
Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver*****breathtaking
Blackfly Season - Giles Blunt***
By the Time You Read This - Giles Blunt*****could not put down
Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans**
Trunk Music - Michael Connelly***
Fortune's Rocks - Anita Shreve*****
With No One As Witness - Elizabeth George****another 800 page whopper
There Are Little Kingdoms - Kevin Barry*****brilliant
The Unit - Ninni Holmqvist****
After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell**
The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories - Lisa Moore
A Bird In the House - Margaret Laurence {reading it again, it's so wonderful!}*****
Sister - Rosamund Lupton****
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell****
The Age of Longing - Richard B. Wright****
While I was Gone - Sue Miller****
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery*****
The Hand that First Held Mine - Maggie O'Farrell***
Natural Order - Brian Francis****
A Virtuous Woman - Kaye Gibbons****
Broken Ground - Jack Hodgins*****
The Good Sister - Drusilla Campbell***
The Forgotten Waltz - Anne Enright****
Before I go to Sleep - S. J. Watson*****
My Lover's Lover - Maggie O'Farrell**
The Birth House - Ami McKay*****
Twenty-Six - Leo McKay Jr.****
Belle Maro - Marshall Godwin**(Unfortunately could have used massive editing)
Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay****
Change Baby - June Spence***
The Woefield Poultry Collective - Susan Juby****(funny, funny, funny)
Her Fearful Symmetry - Audry Niffenegger* (remind me not to read her again)
A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton (gee whiz, 1/3 the way through I realized I'd read before :( )
The Murder Room - P.D. James (can't get into it)
Send Them Home Sweating - Vincent Power**
Piece of Work - Laura Zigman* Gah at 1/2 way through.
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes*****Splendid
Arthur & George - Julian Barnes*****fabulous literature
The Sea Lady - Margaret Drabble(BC)****
Pulse - Julian Barnes****
The Wench is Dead - Colin Dexter***
Life of Pi - Yann Martel(going to try this one again)****
For Love - Sue Miller****
Judas in Kilkenny - Theresa Lennon Blunt***
Diamond - Dawn Rae Downton***
Skin Room - Sara Tilley (not finished so scored a half)

Top Picks
I loved ~

"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" which all takes places in an apartment building in Paris and features a precocious 12 year old girl.
"The Sense of an Ending" which was all about memory and how distorted it can be.
"Arthur and George" was gripping. No more can I say without giving major plot points away.
"Solar" and "The Woefield Poetry Collective" had me in tears of laughter.
"The Birth House" was extraordinary and I have just acquired her new novel.
"Unseen" was a recommendation by my 60+years of friendship friend, Helen and I agree with her assessment, a beautiful book.
"The Glass Room" was magical with the main character a house.
"Before I go to Sleep" was unputdownable from beginning to end and also involved memory.

And as always, I would love recommendations from readers out there.

2012

2011-12-31T13:51:00.002-03:30

And by wealth I mean the kind that does not involve money.

And I would add~
Peace,
Abundance,
Passion
and most of all~
A sense of wonder!

The Gift of Wisdom

2011-12-29T16:07:00.006-03:30

Age presents wisdom (acceptance, too) if we let it. For instance, happenings that would have devastated me years ago no longer do.

For the first time ever in my life I awoke this past Christmas morning with nothing to open. In past years the pickings were getting slimmer but there was always something. It was a strange feeling, this absence of even a token, but also exhilarating in that our worst fears are often nothing to be afraid of. I don't really celebrate Christmas anymore. I find it so far removed from peace and goodwill as to be oxymoronic. A friend worked on the distress lines in Toronto and told me this is the peak season for violence, mayhem and murders and both attempted and real suicides and alcohol poisonings.

So I batten down the hatches, light a candle or two, remember my loved ones, both past and present and cook myself a turkey with all the trimmings. I also carefully select those I visit. I am partial to the families that still believe in magic. And there are a few. And I visited these and shed some tears in private afterwards. Missing my own. Intensely.

But also appreciative of my life, alone or with others. It is always my choice and how wonderful is that for a gregarious loner?

So no, this is not a pity pot post. Just a reflection on my life and the wee bits of growth and evolution I have had on my journey. A wise shaman said to me one time: Happiness is a direct result of the subtraction of stuff.

So I was alone. But not lonely.

Of Barns 'n Sheds 'n Quonset Huts.

2011-12-27T10:12:00.004-03:30

It took me a while to notice it, it blended so well into the snow-blanketed hill opposite my office window. It was the occasional spark off the grey sides of it that drew my attention, a brief reflection of the hide and seek sun on this winter day. A new barn I thought, what an odd place to put a shed, on top of a hill fully exposed to the elements of Newfoundland. Must be a newbie come from away. Doesn't know his or her arse from her elbow when it comes to outbuildings and their placements. Ha! I carried on working snorting to myself.

Odd that. I was gazing off into the distance over the hill, figuring out a plot point, a little character twist, when I could have sworn the shed moved. Maybe the owners realized it wasn't such a hot idea after all placing it way up high. It must be over a half kilometre to their house from there. If that indeed was their house below on the shoreline. There she goes again, she's moving fast now. Faster than a hundred people could move her. Even if they were running. And who'd run with a huge shed on their backs? And come to think of it, it wasn't really a shed was it, maybe one of those old galvanized post war buildings, what did they call them? Quonset huts, though hut this surely wasn't. Too sleek for that. The bit of sun coming out was really lighting the thing up now. Thing, did I just say thing? What the hell was it anyway? Oh my good gawd, would you look at that? She's taking off. Coming my way it looks like. She looks more like a circle now. A thick circle, she's spinning so fast, going right high over my house. Blocking out the peeping sun for a few seconds. Look at the birds scattering and squawking and hiding, and the bay all churned up from the force of the spinning overhead. And my dog cowering under my desk.

It's it amazing how disruptive a weather balloon can be?

Tears Spring Unbidden

2011-12-25T20:58:00.003-03:30

Some things just warm an old cynic's black heart, like these from yesterday:

In my favourite gorgeous wool shop, A Good Yarn, on Bates Hill, two youngish guys come in (all are young to me these days, notice that, elders out there? - cops are in preschool, doctors are in the playground, teachers are working on their ABCs) and request a $100 gift certificate each for their spouses. It stopped me in the midst of stroking some serious yarn from Cupids. Husbands notice their significant others KNIT? Husbands note that a hefty gift certificate from a yarn shop would be the BEST GIFT EVAH for a knitter? And these buddies were together doing this wondrous thing?

Tears spring unbidden.

Me to cashier (just out of diapers) at Sobey's : You must be so busy, but I bet you appreciate the money!
Cashier: Yeah, it sure helps me out, my last year in high school.
Me: So is my granddaughter, what are you planning?
Cashier: Well, I'm only 17 so planning a general year at MUN and then I'm looking at medical school.
Me: Wow, that's pretty long term and committed.
Cashier: Well my dad's in medical school, he's like a total role model for me.
Me: Your dad is in medical school????
Cashier: Well, he's very young, only 38 and just finished 20 years in the military.
Me: You must be so proud!
Cashier: He's one amazing human being, my dad. I would love to set up a medical practice with him.
Me: You will.

Tears spring unbidden.

"Tis The Season

2011-12-23T12:37:00.004-03:30

'Tis the season
And good reason
To wish you all ~
Renewal
Hope
Love
Abundance
Light from darkness
Peace from strife
But
Most
Of
All
~
~
~
~
Contentment.

For Ansa

2011-12-22T13:00:00.004-03:30

Through the back door, Ansa, showing off her 5% husky heritage in the snow.

"She is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are her life, her love, her leader. She will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of her heart. You owe it to her to be worthy of such devotion."

- author unknown

Best Christmas Gift

2011-12-20T23:34:00.004-03:30

The news chilled my heart. An old estranged friend was having serious health issues. Hospitalized 3 times in the last 3 months. Worse each time. ICU, drips, test upon test. I dithered and dathered. Took stock of how the friendship ended (my choice). Remembered the good times and there were many. A shared trip to Ireland, weekend visits to her parents when her mother had Alzeimer's, connections with each other's children, followed through advice to each other. Shared broken hearts at one point in time from failed relationships. And on.

My mind was made up today when I heard she had been released from the hospital and was home. I looked at the phone. Answered emails. Looked at the phone. What the hell. Even if she hangs up on me. What have I lost?

I finally picked up the phone and she answered on the first ring. When I told her who it was she burst into tears. We talked for two hours. Yes, it is serious what has happened to her. She has an inoperable clot on the brain and her lungs are just about shot from two bouts of double pneumonia. And her driver's licence has been taken because of her condition. The very worst thing, we agreed, and laughed in unison. And we talked of old times and good times. And she remembered things I wouldn't have thought anyone would remember.

And we said a few times, gawd, it's like yesterday since we talked last. And it's like the rubbish that interfered with it all was just that. Rubbish. To be forgotten.

And we both cried at the end of the conversation with promises of more talks, more remembrances and hopefully future plans.

I can't begin to tell you how mighty and fantastic this Christmas gift has been.

I hold her in light and love. And she will get better.

And most importantly: drive again.

Ita's List

2011-12-18T12:41:00.007-03:30

The graveyard had a festive look to it. A light layer of snow had smoothed out the hodge podge of headstones, black, grey, white, marble, wood, stone, cast iron. Gave it a pleasing December uniformity. I slowed and stopped, taken by a stooped figure bent over a grave.

Her appearance was edging more towards the grotesque than the eccentric. A long greenish coat, hooded. Footwear that could only be described as old-fashioned with ancient galoshes, unfastened, flapping around her ankles as she trod gingerly around the oversized graveyard plot, leaving huge footprints.

A massive scarf, knitted in the colours of a shabby rainbow, bleeding dropped stitches and a half-hearted incomplete fringe at one end was thrown around her neck. She had stuffed a large pair of snow-mobile mitts into each capacious pocket of the coat.

The hair I could see was scandalous. Her yellowed scalp bore an inch of white roots followed by the lankest blackest straightness of any hair I'd ever seen. I felt an unwelcome revulsion at the filth of it.

A much younger woman stood off to the side, bored, texting furiously on a pink pad. She didn't even raise her eyes to look at me as I approached the older woman.

She was very busy, I could see that. Draping pieces of Christmas tinsel on to some small wooden crosses. Standing back to evaluate her handiwork. Moving forward again to adjust the sparkled thread in some intrinsic pattern only she was privy to.

"A time of remembrance" I said to her, a bit nervously, for how dare I intrude like this. A stranger. A nosy stranger.

"Yes, my darling," she said, as only old women of Newfoundland would speak to someone they didn't know. Something caught in my throat. How long had it been since I'd been someone's darling? I wanted to hear it again.

"A lot of family graves here, then?" I gestured at the many crosses.

"I replaces them every few year, my darling", she stood up painfully. I was surprised at her height. A tall outport woman, far, far older than I had originally guessed.

I told her who I was. I told her I was a writer.

"I'm Ita O'Neill, my darling," she said, "and this here is my family!" and she slowly waved her hand out over the plot as if introducing everyone. I bowed generally in their direction.

"I'm ninety-one," she said then, "and over there is my great-grand-daughter, her nose and hands so busy with no one who is here, the way of things now, right my darling?" I nodded. We are all so busy with no one who is here, I thought. It is easier than dealing with those who are.

"And these," and she spread her hands outwards and over the graves, "are my babies."

"Your babies?"

"My ten babies. Imagine that. All dead within a week of their coming into the world. Some right after their birthing. Some within a few days, no doctoring then. No reasons at all. All born with my black hair. All dying. None to have a birthday or Christmas or schooling." She draped a piece of tinsel over the last white cross.

"Well nigh over sixty years ago now since the last one. Albert. I gave them all names when I put the holy water on their foreheads. I never had the money for a real headstone. With the names all fancy on it. A list, like."

"Maybe this way is better," I offered, "Now they've all got their own markers."

"And I'm the only one now who knows which darling is under each cross."

"Tell me," I said, "I'll remember".

Bernadette. Rosemary. Peter. John. Annie. Bernard. Sheila. William. Agnes. Albert.

Grouchy Geezer Gripes

2011-12-16T20:30:00.008-03:30

Both Nick and Ramana had recent posts on "Undesirables" and after commenting on both and offering examples, it suddenly hit me that the most appalling undesirable in my life is when I am talking to someone on the phone and they take another call expecting me to hold. Or interrupt me and announce "I have to take this other call" leaving me hanging. I also have call waiting (part of the telephone package I have, unfortunately) but the most important call is the one I'm on and I wouldn't dream of taking another call. Isn't it all about respect? I always hang up on such ignorance.

Another gripe is when I have a meeting with someone and they keep bouncing off to answer the phone and then have the gall to come back and say "Now where were we?" and before I can complete my answer, they bounce off again to take another inconsequential call (I hear their side of the phonecall, they are all trivial). I never answer the phone when I have company of any kind over. I consider it rude and every call can wait until my guest/client has left. I have got into the habit of bringing a book to such houses and reading while inwardly wanting to pack up and leave and maybe I should.

And isn't it an odd thing. I know atheists with absolutely no fear of death. The only ones who fear it are the religious. What happened to the promises of streets paved with gold on the other side and sitting at the right hand and pearly gates? Wouldn't so-called holy ones look forward to that? Embrace death, so to speak. Say: "At long last bliss!". But no. They "battle" it according to the obits. Sometimes a long, hard battle. Why?

Who's Yer Daddy?

2011-12-13T15:04:00.006-03:30

Like I've said before: if you want the news, turn off the news.

This is never more evident than in the illustration below, which shows our media concentrated in the hands of the very few.

Government and media by the corporations for the corporations.

And morons are still wondering why the Occupy Movement?

Wake up!

{click to enbiggen}

UPDATE
Thanks to my blogger friend Twilight here is a link to George Monbiot and his takedown of distorted and irresponsible journalism.

Kyoto Failure, Durban (and so on and so forth)...

2011-12-12T17:56:00.002-03:30

Ho Ho Ho

2011-12-11T17:10:00.002-03:30

“Gawd!” he sez to me last night, “I just hate this season, how 'bout you?”

“I wouldn't say hate,” I responded, “Indifference would be my default position on it.”

“Ah, good one!” he sez, “How 'bout the rest of ye?”

“Stressful.”
“Frantic.”
“Busy.”
“Unhappy.”
“Depressed.”
“Lonely.”

Not one person out of about twenty around us said:

Happy.
Joyful.
Content.
Peaceful.

“For Gawd's sake,” I said, “Why don't ye all pay attention to those ads and commercials and follow the instructions, like?”

I got a laugh, I did.

>
>

PS My interwebz got unbelievably worse, now offering me days of no connection due to too many users on the system, so forgive me if I'm not visiting you as much as I'd like or responding to comments. I am seriously considering going back to dial-up and twice weekly visits to my favourite WIFI cafe. Desperation-top-of-the-line letters to the premier of this province go unanswered. And right she is - why should the Blackberried One care about her peasants?

December 9th

2011-12-09T12:51:00.005-03:30

The voices in my head are particularly loud today. Invited voices, I hasten to add. Voices of the past, a child's voice, her 9 year old body hanging upside down from a tree in the back yard at a heart stopping height. A fearless child. A child never without bandaged knees or split skin somewhere on her face. A child who would insist on wearing different coloured socks. "One matches the sweater, the other matches the pants", she would say to me, rolling her eyes, as if to ask what was wrong with me anyway. A child who wore baseball caps and a leather cowboy jacket until they just about decomposed on her body. A creative child who painted black snow and blue trees and red grass.

I write of her every year on this day, her birthday, my estranged daughter. There is a balm in the writing of it. I know I am not alone. Each time I write someone comes forward and says, yeah, me too. It helps.

I was lucky enough to find her on Twitter. So I follow her quietly, not every day as I did in the beginning but every week. Modern technology: I am so grateful for bringing me my precious child but also a couple of very old friends who were lost to me. Estranged Daughter is a film-maker in England: Avant Garde films. Indie films. And also a social activist much like her sister and me. She is also a creative knitter (!) and writer. This much I glean.

And leave her be.

Happy birthday, dearest daughter!

Snivelling, Snarfling, Sorry Little Mess.

2011-12-07T13:54:00.004-03:30

When yon skittery elusive microscopic bug bites, one succumbs. A bug that flies from hand to hand, hug to hug, kiss to kiss, public toilet seat handle to careless hand.

I am so cautious about picking up bugs. As usually they translate into "Brownkitis" as my blog friend Grannymar calls it. Bronchitis to the uninitiated. And me and Brownkitis have had a long and turbulent relationship and he refuses to divorce me. Far too fond of my body he is.

So here I am a bit of a mess, with last year's leftover cold relief in my achey body and my dog wondering why we hop from bed to desk to sofa like some drunken two year old.

The joints ping, the lungs sound like they could use a good turn in the tumble dryer. Ah, but the stomach holds up. Good ol' tums. Cast iron, as my mother would say.

And why am I posting all this?

Well as Friko commented yesterday:

Wouldn't it be sad if we couldn't let off steam here, in the company of the like-minded?

Is anybody listening to us otherwise? No, not likely.

Blame Friko.

Oddities

2011-12-05T13:11:00.004-03:30

{Luna, watching over my house yesterday evening}

Now and again, in an obituary here, everyone predeceasing and post-deceasing (eventually one would assume?) the dead person is listed both by name and relationship. Then the oddest thing: “several great-children” will be added. Or in some cases “several grandchildren'. Why, did no one bother to count them? Or was the seed so profligate it was impossible to track?

St. John's, oldest city in North America, must have the most efficient and speediest snow ploughing of its streets I've ever witnessed, but guess what? Its sidewalks have to be seen to be believed. The snow is piled high against them so you can't cross the street (even at pedestrian crossings) and in winter one has to walk in the midst of traffic as the sidewalks are impassable. There are many bad accidents as a result of cars hitting unfortunate pedestrians who have no choice in getting anywhere but to risk life and limb or stay home-locked for the entire winter. I have never witnessed such utter disregard for ordinary walking citizens whilst the vehicular culture is elevated to the level of a sacrament.

Can anyone figure out why DST (Daylight Savings Time) still exists? Days are getting so short here and by the time we get to Solstice (December 21st,) our sun sets at 3.30 p.m. just when we need the health benefits (Vitamin D amongst others) the most. Kids don't get to play outdoors after school (do they do that anymore?) as it's dark. Anyone?

My, How She's Grown!

2011-12-01T16:16:00.005-03:30

Daughter is in South America at the moment and Grandgirl is on her VERY OWN (At 17+ OMG!) in their house in Toronto.

I've been talking to her every night. Not checking up on her or anything as I've assured her, but availing myself of the opportunity to have these nightly chats. I restrained myself from laughing out loud the other night when she said:

"Oh boy, Grandma it is so HARD to live by yourself!"

"How so, hon?"

"Well there is so much to do, you just never catch up with it all. I'm exhausted!"

"So tell me?"

"Well there's laundry for starters. Then I had to take the garbage out after sorting it. Then I had to change the kitty litter. And oh yeah, walk the dog and give her her meds. Then I had to decide about dinner and what to nuke up. And yeah pack my lunch for school. AND load the dishwasher and unload it. It never ends!"

"Welcome to the real world, darling."

"But you're forgetting something really important here, Grandma."

"And what's that?"

"On top of all of that I have, like, hours and hours of homework!"

Well I hope Daughter reads this when she gets back.

You think maybe she'll feel more appreciated?

Lexilove

2011-11-29T00:13:00.004-03:30

Hello, my name is WWW and I am a Lexulous addict.

Lexulous is a scrabble type game available on FaceBook amongst other lesser known sources. Well, I should say I am controlling my addictive self to the level of playing 10 games at a time. I could be up to a 100 if I let myself go. I've always loved scrabble and adored crosswords (non-cryptic) back in the day but find them a little too easy now, all the words overused, etc.

Interesting how all types of personalities are represented by Lexulous players. Some are in it to pursue sexual innuendos. Others (like me) for the love of the language and the game and some light chatter: how's your weather? Some state they love the (clean)chat. Some are courteous – oh well done, good game. Some are snide: Now where did you learn a word like that? Some apologize for placing the words vagina or penis. Some are whiners: oh, this game is rigged as you got all the good letters. Some are ignorant: What state in Canada is NL? Some are enthusiastic: oh please let's play again, I really enjoyed this!

Some of my friends challenge me, I mean how hard is it to lay down a few words? I always warn them I am really, really good but what can that mean, huh, and then most concede before the game is even over. One old friend insisted we never go vertical with the letters at the start as it made her head hurt, they had to be horizontal. Seriously. No, I don't play her anymore.

One stranger has played me for well over a year and is unfailingly cheerful and congratulatory as I am with him. We share a love of words, the more obscure the better and always rhapsodize on bingoes (7 letters off in one go) or super-bingoes (8letters off in one go on a double triple).

But most are my real life friends. Others are my blog readers never met in the flesh but over the years have graduated to friendship and full identity reveal.

But it is the fleeting challenging stranger players who provide me with windows on our endlessly fascinating human condition and all its foibles.

Of Tides and Jupiter

2011-11-27T23:08:00.004-03:30

I note the tide getting higher, during leap tides, than it has been previously in front of my window. It jumps over my small bridge to the shore and lies there, smugly, annoyingly, blocking my access to the beach for a couple of hours. Twice a day. Twice a year.

Two times a year, spring tides, or leap tides, are exceptionally high, close to forty percent higher. This is due to a change in the moon's distance from us. The moon is actually 30,000 miles closer than usual, and as we've stated, the closer you are, the greater the gravitational force.

Rising tides, global warming. Will one eventually swamp my house, set it free, floating, bobbing gently as it sweeps out into the broad Atlantic. Ireland will be underwater by then and so will England and who knows how many other countries. So where will we wind up, my house and I? On top of some mountain no doubt. Like Noah's ark.

I watch Jupiter nightly, it is so bright. Our nights here are star-studded, I imagine I can touch them.

I think how dare we, us paltry planet earth types, name these galaxies, these other planets, these stars. Ownership. As if. Who knows what these planets call themselves. And how can we say they are 'uninhabited'? Because our poor little eyes cannot see or our dismal ears hear or our limited intelligence understand?

Perhaps we are the lowliest species in space. Humanoids that are pitied for our inability to get along, to co-habit with each other in peace and harmony. Held up as the bad example of how awful the destruction of one tiny planet can be when rampant over-population and greed take over.

I know. Inside my mind is a dangerous neighbourhood and I should never go in there alone.

Unwelcome Guest

2011-11-25T11:20:00.002-03:30

Slithering from the sea,
You crawled in overnight,
Taking comfort in the
Fixings of my porch,

You touched everything,
The trees, the feeders
The broody roofs
The stark fences

The door stones
The withered herb garden
The potato drills
The strawberry beds.

You were early,
Way too early this year.
My back to you, Snow.
For I am not ready.

Procrastination

2011-11-23T23:19:00.004-03:30

I have a PhD in procrastination. I don't know why I do it. Which drives me crazy in itself as I am over-analytical by nature. It's like I save up stuff in case there is NOTHING to do. Insanity, right? As if by fobbing off and deferring I can live forever or something. Do most people die with an unfulfilled To Do List do you think?

I live in fear that someday, somehow, somewhere I will sit twiddling my thumbs at the end of The List. Finally complete. Waiting for the grim reaper to scythe me up, gibbering and drooling into my Ensure.

Right now the list is long. Persnickety stuff. Like 8 big boxes in the front hall that need decanting. But to decant them means moving the bookshelves (after offloading them) out of my office to said hall. Then offloading the existing shelves in the hall and bringing them upstairs to the craft room, my cute liddle craft room. Then shelves in my bedroom will be moved to my office and reloaded. And then a smaller shelf from the utility room moved to my bedroom and useless shelves from the craft room moved to the utility room.

Okay - you in the back, stop snoring. And the rest of you, unglaze your eyes please. Pay attention!

And then crafts decanted from the big shelves in the family room and put in the craft room. And then there will be room for all the contents (books, movies, albums) of the boxes removed from Daughter's basement in September and brought out here. I know it sounds like I'm chasing my tail all around the house here but seriously it makes total sense.

So yay, I say unto you, I am going to apply what has always worked for me before. I commit to one hour a day on the timer, to start-up this massive mobilization and put all the STUFF where it belongs.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes.

Anti-Disappointment

2011-11-22T00:03:00.003-03:30

I had mentioned to another CFA* who is part of my theatre troupe, that I was having severe withdrawal from intellectual stimulation, discussion of ideas, critical thinking, etc. She, similarly afflicted, had found her solution in a book club par excellence which took place the 3rd Monday of every month about 45km from here.

So off I toddled today. The library where it was meant to be held was temporarily flooded so a member of The Hook & By Crook Book Club held it at her home. What I had not anticipated was this lavish lunch being served first. There were fifteen of us around the table and as it turned out, I knew or had heard of about 1/3 of them. One of them an author of a well loved local book, others from a choral group out of St. John's and still two more who had emailed me about a year ago requesting me to conduct a writers' workshop.

I've never felt such immediate comfort with such a large group of people in my life. They were all, without exception, extraordinarily well read, erudite, witty and with carefully thought out opinions on the topics the book had raised. And so very kind. I was exhilarated.

The next meet up is in December in another member's home and we will all be fed again, pot luck this time, and the price of admission is a well loved book from our own libraries, packaged up beautifully and given away with enclosed personalized comment.

I honestly think that the last remaining void in my move here has now been filled.

And so extraordinarily well.

*Come From Away

Disappointment

2011-11-20T20:45:00.004-03:30

Disappointment is the feeling of dissatisfaction that follows the failure of expectations or hopes to manifest. Similar to regret, it differs in that a person feeling regret focuses primarily on the personal choices that contributed to a poor outcome, while a person feeling disappointment focuses on the outcome itself

I've been hit sideways with a few disappointments in the last wee while. And yes, I had expectations. I normally don't, which is what's so odd about it all. I roll with the punches (or maybe I pretend that I do). I enforce a daily gratitude meditation (sometimes short, sometimes long) at the end of each day. A reflection really.

I am more than aware that disappointment in an outcome can truly steal from the positives in a given situation. I am not allowing that. But still.

I remember being sixteen. A few published items under my belt. And literally engrossed in art. I couldn't get enough of it.

Our school on an island (seriously, in the middle of the River Lee) in Cork City imported many great male teachers for us. One of these was our art teacher, another was our advanced mathematics teacher and yet another was an ex-military man who was our gym teacher – the workouts (for girls! girls?) were unbelievable. I truly believe in light of today our school was extraordinarily progressive for its time. And having been recently back for a class reunion and reuniting with many of us, that is reinforced by the PhDs and MDs amongst us. But be that as it may.

I did a little web search and found the art teacher, John Teehan, mentioned briefly on another website. He was very encouraging to me. And his classes (taken over lunch periods, unheard of today, right?) were riveting.

I applied for fashion design school in England, with samples of my designs, etc. ( this was the era of Mary Quant, et al) and was overwhelmed when I was accepted and offered a scholarship.

You can imagine the reaction of the pater familias in suburban Cork when I made the announcement of my intention to henceforth toss aside my provincial education and head off on the Innisfallen for London, England.

I discovered what apoplexy truly was.

And my crushing disappointment lasted months.

And yes, I do wonder still what direction my life would have taken if I'd hopped on that ferry.

But I am no longer disappointed. Much has fulfilled me since then.

Disappointment can only take up headspace if we allow it.

Next?

Shadow Work

2011-11-17T12:30:00.004-03:30

Well, that was a new one on me yesterday as I drove into St. John's with the CBC Q programme playing. Funny how we can accept things without thinking. We have a vague feeling something is wrong but it takes a guy like Craig Lambert, Harvard magazine editor to highlight it - riffing off on how we, the customer stooges, have taken on unpaid work since self serve gas pumps came into being. Shadow work he called it.

Even the term self service has been coined to evade the more realistic terminology:

Self service = no service.

Think about it: we are now our own bank tellers, gas pump attendants, checkout cashiers at the automated checkouts and our own travel agents.

Unpaid work. A sneakily implemented transference of labour from paid to unpaid.

He went on to talk about the number of hours we give away in deleting the spam in our inboxes every day. Not the sale pitch spam but the outright fraudulent ones from sorrowful widows in Africa offering us 2 million to use our faxes and bank accounts. Even two minutes a day would add up to 9 hours over a year and would be incalculable over a lifetime.

My daughter brought up a good point in talking with her about this on the phone today. The countless hours we spend searching for products which we are willing to buy with our hard earned cash in big box stores. I admit to wearying of this from time to time and spending more money in small shops (now few and far between) to receive personal service.

And hunting for pricing on something. Can I find an assistant? Or reach nine foot high shelves with ne'er a clerk in sight. I admit to taking a tongs off a shelf one time, unwrapping it, and reaching high for a casserole dish, in absolute frustration and with a dinner party that night staring me in the face.

Unpaid labour.

Meanwhile, most days we smell of gasoline after filling up somewhere, get frustrated at the out of service ATMs when we can't access our VERY OWN money from our VERY OWN bank accounts, and humbly lug our huge (often wobbly) shopping carts across the tarmac, offload them and THEN willingly take them back to the herding area. I remember bag boys who did all of this.

To add up all of this labour would frighten us, I'm sure.

And we know who's laughing all the way to the ~~bank~~ ATM, right?

Memory

2011-11-15T22:22:00.005-03:30

I'm in the throes of reading the 2011 Booker prize winning book: "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes, recommended to me by one of my brothers.

It's one of those books that gets me reflecting on my own memory, how accurate is it, how much have I changed it to erase hurts or slights, or enhanced it to heighten the pleasures or deepen the sweet nostalgia. And also on the incompleteness of my life to date. Dreams left unfulfilled, days wasted. Nights too.

Friends unmade. I thought of that tonight when playing cards and I've sensed a good friend lies underneath someone I've known superficially for quite a while and I am at a loss for words as to how to make that more clear than I already have with time, seriously, running out on me. My life at least 3/4 lived, if not more.

Funny how books can do that to one. Gets your mind rambling down hitherto unknown boreens knowing the candle to light the way is flickering down to a nub. Wondering how reliable memory is, especially for a writer who tweaks the twists and turns anyway.

Thank you Julian Barnes for the brain-stretch. It is invigorating.

Boreens

2011-11-13T13:18:00.008-03:30

I've always loved the word "boreen" an Irish word, anglicised for every day use in Ireland. It means "little road". Bothair (bo-her) being the Irish for road. Add "een" to anything in Ireland and you have the diminutive. Little Mary=Maureen (maura + een). Little woman=Colleen (caill is woman or old woman + een).

I was having a day of frustrations and minor disappointments yesterday. Nothing earth shaking, just a series of what-else-can-go-wrong-and-then-it-does kind of days.

I took this picture of a boreen heading off down the main road not too far from my house. Outsiders aren't aware of the enormous number of lakes (called ponds) in Newfoundland. We have thousands. Every time you turn a corner there is a seascape or a lakescape. This man was taking in his boat for the season. There is much trouting on our lakes.

Then I forced myself to go to a party. A Ruby (40th) wedding anniversary of dear friends. They'd booked a huge hall. 120 of those present were going to be relatives. The other 10 were close friends. I am honoured to be considered thus.

I'm not a fan of going to big parties or dances or dinners by myself. Visions of my lonesome at a solitary table hauling over a candle and reading a book extracted from my large purse while merriment and enjoyment surround me. Or knitting quietly in a corner pretending I'm one of those mad women out of fiction. Or best of all, happilly at home having refused to go on some flimsy excuse.

Anyway I went. I clung like an infant to my hosts for a while but pried myself off them when I realized they had other guests so went off, got myself a water and barged up to a large table and asked to join them. (Do any of you realize what absolute bravery this takes? No?)

And yeah, I had, oh, about 8 dances. Grand dances. Booty shaking dances. Laughy dances.

And then one of the women and I at the table get talking. She was a widow of two years and told me she didn't know how she got out of bed every morning. She was a sister of my bride-host. She'd lost her husband of 42 years the year before. But worse than that her only son had committed suicide three years before. He'd come home from up North with a failed relationship under his belt and she had found him in their garage the morning after, an apologetic note to her in his pocket.

And all of a sudden my day took on a new light. And today - which is again full of frustration and disappointment - is just another day. And I had no trouble getting out of bed to partake in it.

My boreen ain't half bad.

Sister Margaret Anne

2011-11-12T12:43:00.003-03:30

Photo taken yesterday whilst out and about locally.

She was a plain woman. Some might say ugly. A whiskered and misaligned face which drooped in chronic disappointment at life and those participating in it. Nature compensated her with beautiful hands, large, well formed and competent, the hands of a sculptor, and naturally blonde hair which she wore in a fluffy halo around her head. An incongruous appearance.

At the age of thirty-six, when her widowed mother died, she left her nursing order of Catholic sisters and reclaimed her birth name of Grace. She wrote to a man who had an advertisement in the lonely hearts section of the Catholic Register. Serious replies only, he said. Loyal, he said. Looks not important, he said.

How was she to know when he drove all the way from rural Saskatchewan to Brampton, Ontario to meet her and marry her within the month that he was a drunk and would beat her every Saturday afternoon and make her perform disgusting things in bed? She a thirty-six year old virgin and twenty years in a convent her only life experience?

She desperately wanted a child so suffered the daily indignities of living with such a man. And of course there were the vows of holy matrimony, and the leaving of the convent to consider. Pride? Yes, she swallowed it.

Her longed for child resulted in a great hulking daughter with the bright red hair of her father who outweighed her own mother by her tenth birthday. This was the year Grace left her husband and had a restraining order placed on him by the courts. Her divorce and subsequent annulment on the grounds of unrepentant abuse and chronic alcoholism followed swiftly.

Her daughter moved out when she was barely sixteen. Searching, Grace found her living in a commune on Bathurst Street in Toronto, high on drugs and alcohol. Grace refused to speculate on the type of income that would support such a lifestyle and thought it best, after pleading with her, to leave her there. It had been a challenge to love such a child, a child who seemed like her father reincarnated in female form.

Grace drifted backwards, drawn more and more to the life that had been so safe and uncomplicated. She retook her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and asked for, and was given, work in the wards of the terminally ill.

She would often say to me that she didn't know what that long intermission was about as all she was taught when she was out in the real world was how to hate the man who had abused her and the ungrateful daughter who was his seed through and through.

And I'd say - Hate? Is hate all you learned? Can't you let it go?

And she'd shake her head vehemently and her crooked mouth would settle into a grim straight line and she'd hiss:

You don't understand at all, do you? Hate is all I have left.

Eleventy One

2011-11-11T14:49:00.004-03:30

Remembrance of lives unlived
Sacrificed to
Dark men in deluxe rooms
Far from battlefields
Of blood and guts
Scattered amongst the rats.
Too young to know of
Puppeteers and propaganda
And profiteering war machines
And masters of the universe.
Yes, I weep.
But not for words like
Bravery, sacrifice and courage.
I weep for their terror
And the evil of men's ways.

Blog Jam

2011-11-09T13:46:00.004-03:30

Did you know that Mississipi just narrowly defeated a bill defining a fertilized egg as a "person"?

Sometimes I am so grateful I live in Canada and don't have to deal with these incessant insanities of our neighbour to the south of us. My ongoing sympathies to my wonderful USian friends who have to suffer these idiocies while the reality of our doom-headed planet is ignored.

Sometimes I shed just a tiny wee tear when I see Graham Nash and David Crosby, those of my Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young days (oh major, major fan I was, I was) who performed at the New York Occupy HQ yesterday. Why do I cry? Oh, you know, like they got OLD and, well, so did I, but we are all still shouting out against injustice.

And a Limerick man explains the Wall Street shenanigans for everyone:

It Could be Nothing, Then Again...?

2011-11-07T17:36:00.005-03:30

I thought I was quite beyond frissons of literary excitement until I was suddenly confronted with an invitation to a gala at a gorgeous centre in St. John's.

I'm not obviously.

Beyond literary dreams.

Thoughts gallop around like a so many wild horses inside my head.

Thoughts like these:

Sure isn't every citizen of Newfoundland and Labrador invited?

But they wouldn't all fit.

Why do they want me to RSVP then if everyone is invited?

Am I on the shortlist for a prize?

Don't be stupid. It's only the young ones getting the prizes these days.

Your genre has no appeal except to the auld wans, right?

It's all graphic this and graphic that these days.

Maybe it's just everyone who entered.

Mein Gott, I wouldn't mind an honourable mention.

You're just being silly.

It's a courtesy thing - they've published you, don't forget.

Maybe it's because of the play?

Would all black look good on me?

Will I look odd if I'm not in the commonly accepted mating pattern at such events?

Would you stop making such a big deal out of this?

ENOUGH ALREADY I SAID!

Sometimes I bore myself stupid.

Happy Fallter

2011-11-05T19:15:00.005-02:30

We go from brilliant sunshine coaxing the very last of the leaves down from the trees on to a kind of saucy icy rain which drums its fingers on my windows for about five minutes. Then we move on to a curtain of fog descending over the headland across the bay from me. Then that evaporates, leaving ethereal trails around the houses.

I hear the plaintive call of My Three Loons and watch a few straggling Canada geese honk across the sky in a ragged formation. These are the bargain basement geese who can't seem to find enough of a cast to perform a first class V across the sky. The lazy arse ones who don't read their emails telling them to leave. Now. A month ago.

There should be a name for this season, this pause between Fall and Winter. Fallter I think. As here, certainly, it doesn't know what to make of itself as it falters and tests out some weather patterns that mix all the seasons up. Nothing to get a grip on yet, move along, nothing to see here.

I like it. I never know what to expect and hourly surprises are lovely.

I think I'll keep the Fallter.

Let Me Count The Ways

2011-11-03T12:20:00.004-02:30

The interwerbz has gone from impossibly bad to inconceivably worse (i.e. no service whatsoever for days) so apologies if I'm not dropping by.

I thought of this post while sorting and blanching a whole pile of organic brussels sprouts. I have the most eccentric and wonderful thoughts whilst performing mundane tasks. Talk to my therapist.

Contrary to popular misconception it is not the Eskimo or Inuit peoples who have 100 words for snow it is the Sami People.

However, the Irish could give them a fair run for their money with their many words for 'drunk' bearing in mind also that there is an additional twist to this as English isn't the historical first language of the Irish. But as everyone knows, the Irish embraced English and bent it into something extraordinary.

So here those words are, listed in alphabetical order. Feel free to toss me some more!

Banjaxed
Banjoed
Battered
Binned
Blathered
Blind
Blotto
Bolloxed
Buckled
Cut
Demented
Fermented
Flootered
Floothered
Galvinized
Gargled
Gimped
Hammered
Jarred
Knackered
Lacquered
Langered
Langers
Lashed
Legless
Loaded
Locked
Lubricated
Mangled
Mouldy
Mullered
Oiled
Ossified
Paralytic
Pie-Faced
Pished
Pissed
Plastered
Polatic
Polluted
Rat Arsed
Rotten
Rubbered
Rubbished
Ruined
Sauced
Scooped
Scuttered
Shellacked
Slaughtered
Sloshed
Smashed
Snookered
Sozzled
Spaced
Stocious
Tanked
Tattered
Toasted
Transmogrified
Trashed
Trenched
Trolleyed
Trousered
Twisted
Wankered
Warped
Wasted
Wrecked

Pacing

2011-10-30T12:16:00.004-02:30

The first time I felt the Black Dog pacing was at an impossibly young age. Age 6. I would not have known it was the Black Dog, of course. I would have called it being afraid and very sad.

At that age, I had had measles which affected my eyes with ulceration. It necessitated hospitalization as the infection had also spread to my adenoids. In those days there were no children's hospitals so I was put into an adult hospital. I remember all of my stay there, it stands out in a kind of gothic starkness. There were no children in the ward I was on. Just all these adults. And casual cruelties were thrown my way (my eyes were bandaged for about 4 days)- being deliberately misled as to where the washroom was, my few toys being hidden, my hair being pulled,another patient assigned to feeding me and deliberately missing my mouth, all this accompanied by raucous laughter,etc. In those days it was called "teasing" today it would be called abuse. I was wretched.

It was to get worse.

My throat was healing from surgery, my eye bandages were removed when my mother visited with some handmade clothes for my doll. Including a little nightie. When she was leaving, I followed her out of the ward and as she went down the main stairs I screamed and screamed until my throat bled. I fell on the floor until I was carted off (roughly I remember) and told to behave myself.

The following night my father visited. In a rage. He told me I had upset my mother terribly and if I didn't promise to behave myself she would never visit me again.

It was to get worse.

I woke up the following morning to be told there was a great surprise in a cot (crib) down the ward from me. Come and look.

I did and there was my baby brother, under a year, pulling himself up by the bars, recognising me, delight all over his little face. I remember touching his soft head, rubbing my hands over the bandages on his ears. It seems that the measles had given him massive ear infections and primitive tubes had to be inserted to drain them so he wouldn't go deaf.

I remember feeling overwhelmed. I remember thinking my parents had gotten rid of their defective models and were just keeping their perfect middle child (another brother).

I resigned myself to a life on a Dickensian ward, knowing that keeping my mouth and tear ducts shut would mean a possible sighting of my mother again.

My therapist said it was one of the defining moments of my life.

It certainly removed the foundations from it. The idea of abandonment has always haunted me. More than anything the abandonment of myself by myself.

On another note, in adult hindsight, I can't imagine what my parents were going through with two of their children in hospital.

Knowing the reason for one's anxieties and irrational fears will not fix them. I'm just very grateful the episodes get further apart as I move along on my journey.

I'm not at the point where I can chase the Black Dog off my psychic landscape yet. But his visits are shorter and I recognise his pacing and know that he will get bored very quickly if I don't feed him.

And I think I know what to do to protect myself. Very little contact with other, more 'normal' humans, and some contact with those who know exactly where I am.

Pace on, BD, pace on.

New News

2011-10-28T19:56:00.004-02:30

(1) One of my stories is up at The Elder Story Telling Place

(2) Quotes

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes .. Pass a law that says that if the deficit is more
than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."
-- Warren Buffett

(3) And (tongue firmly in cheek) ad of the week:

Old News

2011-10-27T00:46:00.003-02:30

I stumbled across this postcard which was in one of a pile of boxes I am slowly plowing through and sorting. I am reluctant to throw it out. It bears such sadness. It's from Leeds and sent to me on April 15th, 1984.

I find the picture itself rather odd. It looks like an artist's rendition of a municipal building. But the people sitting in front of the wall belie that impression.

The message says:

Dear -------Thank you for all your thoughtful help. I was too late. Buried Dad last week. Will see you in June. Love Pat.

Pat is consigned to the mists of time but the poignancy of her message lingers on.

Conversation

2011-10-25T22:44:00.005-02:30

At cards tonight:

Ron: Hey Phil, do you know anyone with a harness?

Phil: Yeah I do, b'y, what d'ya want it for?

Ron: Not for me, b'y, it's for John.

Phil: What he want it for?

Ron: For his shrimping pool.

Phil: Oh right, that's some pool, I seen it.

Ron: Yeah, that's why he needs a harness.

Me (bemused at this point): Why would someone need a harness to catch shrimp?

Ron: Wha?

Phil: Wha?

Me: And I don't think he'll have shrimp up in that pool it's on a hill and not connected to the sea.

Ron: Wha?

Phil: Wha?

Me (knowing the difference between my seas, rivers and fish varieties): Like it's freshwater?

Ron (sighing tolerantly): Of course, yeah, it's freshwater. He needs the harness to finish the sides of it, it's very deep.

Me: So why is he putting shrimp in it?

Ron: First I heard of that.

Me: You just said....

Ron: Wha? No, I didn't. He'll be using the pool as a shrimping pool.

Me: (light bulb flashing, translator in overdrive)Oh, a swimming pool!

Ron: Yeah, that's what I said, a shrimping pool.

Note to red-faced self: Please, please, please, stay out of any shrimp harnessing conversations.

The Moral and Ethical Authority

2011-10-24T20:21:00.004-02:30

Am I missing something?

So this bunch of (mainly white) old men living in the lap of obscene luxury in the Vatican are calling for a crackdown on the financial markets now that the Occupy Movement has established its global street cred and gained such enormous traction.

"Oh, hang on everyone, wait for us, we're on the side of the people, the poor downtrodden people!"

a document released by the Holy See is calling for a "world authority" to crack down on capitalism and suggests some are considering it. Written by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and released on Monday:
Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority

Read more about it here.

It is difficult to put a figure on the extent of Vatican wealth. The closest average I can come up with in dive-bombing around the web is around 50 billion US dollars. Most of it is invested in the banking, insurance and commodities stock markets. And as we all well know transparency isn't one of the Vatican's strong suits. Somehow so much poverty in the world never equates in my mind with so much wealth in the Vatican. Is this how Jesus pictured his future church? Upon this rock which shall be rolling in red velvet and yay I say unto you a listing of stocks and bonds rippling down the steps of the Sistine Chapel?

So pardon my cynical black heart here. Isn't there a self serving whine to all of this noise about looking out for the financial interests of we the people and hear ye now from henceforth only fairness in all financial dealings?

All this coming from these outrageously wealthy masters of cover-up, these irrelevant old hypocrites

Exploding the Fantasy

2011-10-22T23:30:00.005-02:30

The fairytale aspect of life is presented ad nauseum both by books and films and TV shows. One of the primary sells being that the magic princess/prince will arrive, snow white charger optional, and whisk you into a life beyond your wildest dreams. Nightmare more like. At least for over 50% of us.

Case in point: Carol (not her real name) is a 40 year old woman living up the road from me. Attractive. Five children. Two husbands under her belt. Children by 3 different partners. None of whom give her a dime of support for her family's well-being. So we the people do it with our slim taxation dollars. Us 99% I am referring to, of course. I doubt if it crosses the 1%'s mind that such people exist. And if it did it would be “their own fault,” “bootstraps,” and “I'm alright, Jack”.

Nothing wrong with Carol and her life, though there are some that judge her. All the time. Her unhappiness leaks nearly every day from her Facebook posts. She is poorly educated and if you knew why, you would weep (snippet: as a toddler she saw her mother murdered in a bath of blood by her father). Her dream for the knight to ride in and save her has never left her mind since she was fourteen. She just made poor choices in the past, you see. But HE is still out there and will find her. Just like the soaps she watches in the afternoons. So she does herself up right sexy before she even opens her door and zeroes in on any available upright man who walks around. HE will be the one. It is a constant uphill struggle as sometimes they use and sometimes outright reject her. But her poverty and belief in this dream enables her to continue getting up in the morning.

It never crosses her mind to get an education now that all the children are in school full-time. To change. To determine that her happiness is an inside job. Not the knight's responsibility. I've spoken to her about this. About the joy of personal fulfilment and she looks at me sideways. This credo has absolutely no perceivable benefit to her. I just don't get it, you see.

How many countless others are waiting like her for this fantastical teevee land of Father Knows Best and its ilk?

No one talks about failure having much better odds than success in a relationship. And if we included the incredibly unhappy and abusive ones that manage to hold together in a kind of misery loves company toxicity, the odds would be overwhelming indeed.

Why does no one ever talk about limiting the size of their families in this overpopulated and abused planet - while we breed ourselves to the point of extinction? Children are being raised in poverty just about everywhere by single parents. Why? Because they believed in that Princ(ess) Charming and forever with a brood of happy kids frolicking in the meadow. Hell, if the sex is good than it follows that everyone and everything around us would be too, right?

I was one. The only lifestyle that improved after my divorce was that of my ex-husband. All sorts of both material and other benefits were cut from my two children's lives. I had bought into the dream too, you see. Like most of us. Forever and ever, amen.

What a crock of shyte as my people would say.

It is time we stopped this massive delusion.

So that Carol's children won't perpetuate the insanity.

Blog Jam

2011-10-21T23:07:00.006-02:30

I'm one of those boring people that can watch a movie twenty times over a period of, oh, a long time, and still find something new in it. Mind you, it has to be a good movie.

Hence watching The Red Shoes again last week. I don't know how many times I've watched it and am still mesmerized by the ballet in the middle. And yeah, the ending is weak, but who cares. It sure puts Black Swan to shame.

One of my frustrations in living in Newfoundland is that we never get so-called art house, foreign films and good documentaries here. As in shown on the big screen. It's never the same on the little screen.

I usually go on a movie rampage when I hit Toronto, my hunger is so keen for real films in a reel (sorry) theatre.

And on another note I'm rather ticked off in that I can't seem to stay up late and have a fairly normal day of it the following day. Not at all. I was with some friends last night, great talkers - you should hear all our monologues going off at the same time, over and over - and we cracked the clock around 3.30 a.m., very normal for us. But oh today! I don't drink, neither do they, so there are no hangovers. Just this: OMG: my legs, where are they, OMG: what time did I get up, why is the sun looking sideways at me? OMG: why am I reading things twice for the meaning to penetrate. And on. Some useless day for this cranky old lady today.

But: no regrets. I so love the chat. And there are so few in my world who love it like I do.

As a result I figured I could watch a film without overly taxing the few braincells left to me so I am halfway through Mr. Roberts as I write this, another old hairy one. But what's not to like about Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon and a demented old James Cagney chewing the glue out of the scenery?

Did I ever mention I have a breath-taking collection of old movies?

No?

You see this obsession all started with an uncle who owned a cinema back in the day. Hooked like heroin. At the age of 6.

For Sale: 300,000 Babies

2011-10-19T23:21:00.004-02:30

I was processing some papers for a dear Irish friend the other day. As I was reviewing the documentation in her file, I was struck once again by how the Irish government (and people) handed over all responsibility for medicine, education, registering of marriages and even the methodology of births (see here for my post on that) to the Catholic church. Shame on my government, shame on the brainwashed people who believed so unquestioningly in this cult. That abused everyone around them through massive cover-ups of their paedophilia and their funnelling of billions of wealth gained from such government-funded enterprises to their leader in the Vatican. And don't get me started on their tax-exempt status around the world.

And if you tell me about missionary work I will tell you that the poor unfortunate children in Africa and other Third World countries do not have access to lawyers or to courts that will hear them.

I am exhausted from all the exposed corruption in the last while as are the rest of you, I am sure. But this latest about Catholic priests, nuns and doctors stealing and selling as many as 300,000 babies in Spain for eager adoptive couples made my already sickened heart retch again. For those sad deceived mothers (shown the same frozen infant's body over and over again to convince them their baby had died) and for those lost babies, growing up outside their country, cultures and families.

Is there no depth to the depravity to which this wretched and corrupt organization won't sink?

Read more about it here.

Cartoon of the Week

2011-10-17T23:29:00.002-02:30

Night Owl

2011-10-15T00:40:00.006-02:30

This is the latest addition to my owl collection - a birthday gift of a commissioned handcrafted rug from a dear friend.

My animal totem, given to me by a shaman many, many moon cycles ago is an owl. For wisdom, he said, and for night-loving and wooing. I don't think he was punning but I like to fancy he was. Either or. I've woo-hood back at any owls who flit around here and I would like to woo another night owl like myself if he ever presented himself.

I fight this night living thing all the time. It is late now, I look out over the mirror of the bay and see the lights reflected on the water and feel happiest. Day time is not my preferred time but as it's nearly everyone else's I have to suit up and show up when dawn appears.

A belief in former lives would say I must have been a courtesan or a night club dancer or at the very least a jazz singer in a smoky boite.

And of course any relationships I've had were mainly with day people with a few notable exceptions. With one, we would always make a point of having breakfast at Vesta's in Toronto at 4.00 a.m. As we both had to work, this was only accomplished on the weekends to our great glee. We often walked the boardwalk in the dead silence of the deep night, only the waves and the odd flutter of a sleepy bird underscoring our conversation.

With another we would drive off to, well, anywhere. Niagara Falls. Kingston. Sarnia. Only the midnight ribbon of highway beneath the car and some well loved music on the car stereo.

Now I savour the silence as I write this. How wonderful is the silence of an outport late at night. It comforts like a warm cloak.

Simon and Garfunkel were right. Darkness and the sound of silence. Truly my old friends.

My Summer's Still With Me

2011-10-13T23:45:00.003-02:30

It is extraordinary to me that I can plant all these pots of flowers in spring of each year and NEVER have to water them. The weather takes care of that. Rarely too hot and enough rain to keep these babies happy. Still in bloom today. We expect our first snow, usually, in February, which always startles people who view Newfoundland as a land still in the Ice Age. Well, no.

We have a micro-climate where I live and since I've been living here, we always have a green Christmas. Our trees are still more green than russet or rust as our spring is always later than others (May-June). Late June is when my lilac blooms for instance. So our fall is later too.

My driveway which is long and winding, was ploughed 4 times last winter. Yeah, 4 times. Not much of a winter and it was always worse in Ontario. It can get biting cold when the Nor'easter blows and being An Outport Woman I can be caught huddled around my woodstove when that happens, reading a good book and tossing bon-bons while my woodstove soup simmers away.

Ah poor me - life lived in the rough by the Outport Woman.

The Dreams Beneath

2011-10-12T13:35:00.003-02:30

I was thinking back to my fourteen year old self. I remember walking along the beach in West Cork in summer, picking up shells, discarding them if marred in anyway, looking at driftwood, seeing the pictures inside, bringing pieces back to our tiny rented cottage (parents, six children, 5 tiny rooms, no bathroom), my mother looking at me aghast:

And where do you think we'll find room for this?

Me finding a space over the cliffs in a difficult to access bay and finding a cave for my treasures, thinking:

Some day, I'll have the sound of the sea beside me all the time and my treasures will be part of my life.

I was walking along the beach with the dog today, we love this daily romp, she and I. She finds her own treasures (crabs not quite cleaned out by the gulls, unlicked clam shells) and I look for old glass and driftwood and feathers and shells. And my fourteen year old self presented herself and said excitedly:

Look, we made it happen, you and me!

And we brought our treasures home.

And together, we looked for the pictures.

Might

2011-10-11T00:16:00.005-02:30

He thought to have one last sail on her before winter crept up on the dock. He'd have to put her away immediately after. Haul her up to the boathouse and wipe her all down. That should take care of the rest of the day.

It was October chilly, nothing that his thick aran sweater wouldn't handle and he'd tug the old wool watchcap tight over his head. Alone. That was why he got up so early, so no one could see him rowing the wee dory out to the boat, his Sleveen, and want to tag along. Now he was tying the dory on to the back of Sleveen so he could anchor just off the island of Colinet where his ancestors had settled back in the day. The island his grandparents had to leave in the sixties when Newfoundland had the massive resettlement programme. Poppy and Nan never got over it. They had their house towed by boat off the island and put it up again on the mainland. Facing the island that they loved so much for the rest of their days.

He remembered Poppy saying to Nan, every morning, "What's the weather like on Colinet today, Rose?" and she'd look over at the distant island and always answer: "Right easy over there, John, right easy."

They were buried there, on their island, and he wanted to visit them. So he did. Rowed in the wee dory up onto the beach below the old graveyard, carefully walking around the wide gaping hole where the old wooden church had been. Taking his cap off, in respect, when he stood in front of their gravestone, not praying exactly. But close.

He circled the bay a few times after, showing off a little, though he couldn't see anyone, it was still early, but you never knew who was looking out their windows. He'd always loved the way the Sleveen handled herself, no matter the wind, its speed or its direction, she bent into it, or danced in front of it, loving the lick of it, the slap of the water on her sides.

He should have felt sad. He'd anticipated it. Packed one of his old hankies in his back pocket just in case.

But he felt happy. The gulls shrieked overhead, the wind bit into his face as it puffed out the white sails against the blue sky above him, the ropes were easy on his hands. The Sleveen was riding right gentle today. As if she knew. And of course she did.

It would be the last time.

You might see Christmas, the surgeon said yesterday, as if he was handing him an early present.

Might.

What an enormous word.

Lump In Throat Time

2011-10-08T21:33:00.008-02:30

Before it all started.

I was a guest at a rural high school graduation last night. I had never been at such an event and perhaps won't be again. There were 26 graduates, amongst them 2 sets of twins.

Their beauty was breathtaking, both the boys and the girls - young men and young women facing their future, most already in university, some on waiting lists for colleges of their choice.

This was most definitely a community event. Apart from the grandparents and parents in attendance, all the local municipal mayors, the member of parliament and even the senator of the area was there.

I was stunned at the listing of scholarships: from the local firehalls, the legions, private citizens, townships, in memories of, etc. The school's graduating class average was in the top 10% of the province. No mean achievement.

The advantage of rural school education was made abundantly clear, the investment by the teachers in their students, often taking them in to their own homes at night to tutor and nurture. The hunting down of errant high school seniors, always located in the kindergarten room playing with the little ones. The series of projected photos of ALL of them as babies, as grade school students, in play, in study, on trips, all together from infancy.

It was joyful to see the capped and gowned students receiving their diplomas and scholarships and honours and then tossing their caps in the air before revealing their gorgeous dresses and suits.

One of the most moving moments came when two of the girls came on stage in all their finery, both sobbing but wanting to honour and talk about their mothers who had died in the past six months. Young mothers in their late thirties/early forties. Who should have had most of their lives ahead of them still. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. I can't imagine their pain.

The finale (at least for the adults) came with the Grand March, which had all the students walking slowly in single file down to an arch at the end of the hall and then pairing off, to march down and loop around again, this time in fours, and so on up to eights.

Notice how the young men's ties and handkerchiefs match the girls' dresses?

And then, oh my, lump in throat cubed, the graduates danced with their parents and grandparents.

First One To Say It

2011-10-06T23:37:00.004-02:30

Hats off to Sir Mervyn King of the U.K. The first major politician to say: Yes folks, we're all fubared. The rest of the pols have all been hiding behind the Ministries of Disinformation long enough and it takes true guts to come out of the closet like the good Sir and tell it like it is. He's also giving us the possibility of no pensions and no savings. I'll repeat that: No pensions and no savings. I would add healthcare might be in jeopardy. You start pouring meaningless paper into a tanked economy and it might slow the fubar for a month or three but we are all facing the black chasm. No one is spared. Even up here in smug old Canada.

I love how he advises us all "to do the right thing".

As if the unregulated wankers who got us into this mess to begin with ever did or ever will.

World facing worst financial crisis in history, Bank of England Governor says

"The world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s “if not ever”, the Governor of the Bank of England said last night.
Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.

Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.

Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.

Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.

“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”

Photo of the Week

2011-10-06T11:07:00.002-02:30

'Strue

2011-10-05T13:20:00.004-02:30

One of my conversations, yesterday around the bay:

Ed: Did you read about that married couple who couldn't get accommodations anywhere in town?

Me: No - but rental costs are going up everywhere.

Ed: Oh, they could afford it alright.

Me: So what was the story then?

Ed: They were gay!

Me: In this day and age that kind of discrimination exists in St. John's?

Ed: Well, I'm not prejudiced at all, they could live with me, I wouldn't have a problem!

Me: (looking at Ed in a new light, never thinking him so liberal) Really Ed?

Ed: Of course they couldn't sleep in the same room in my house, I'd put them in separate bedrooms.

Be Careful What You Read and When You Read It

2011-10-04T17:14:00.003-02:30

The supposedly grand old lady of newspapers, The New York Times, was caught with its knickers down today for the manner in which it framed the OWS demonstrations, subtly changing the language in the space of 20 minutes:

'changing the first line of a story about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The change subtly shifted the blame for the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge from the police to the protesters. In the first version of the story, police allowed them onto the bridge and then “cut off and arrested” them. In the second, there was a “showdown” in which demonstrators “marched onto the bridge.”'

Thanks to my friends at Sociological Images.

Read it here.

Has The Revolution Begun?

2011-10-03T23:35:00.004-02:30

There has been very little significant coverage of the Revolution on Wall Street. All main stream media has to talk about are arrests. But I thought to ponder the manifesto and discuss it with a few friends today. It all makes so much sense and I applaud those participating. Will they make a difference? I doubt it. The oligarchy's tentacles are everywhere, including the police-puppets. But the movement is spreading and we're not going down without a fight:

Occupy Wall Street Protesters General Assembly—Declaration of the Occupation of New York City:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

* These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Shifting Landscapes

2011-10-02T12:48:00.005-02:30

I was sending a long email to a friend last night and I got to thinking about friendships. How hard they are to maintain for some when geographical distances come between and how easy for others who pick up the phone or toss off an email or post on your FB wall or as as a few of my friends and I do, send each other cards or interesting articles from magazines and newspapers. Watering the landscape of friendship. Supportive and loving.

With my move to Newfoundland, I knew which friendships would survive and which ones would perish. And most survived. And one I valued very highly didn't. But I had known it wouldn't due to the lack of effort she made with the long distance gardening tools. No calls initialized, no comments on FB, no letters or emails: no plantings in the garden of friendship in other words. It was left to wither and die.

This new remoteness was further underlined when we took a flight to Europe together (I'd paid extra to fly to Toronto to be with her and catch up on our chat both ways) and on the way back she chose not to sit with me. I still don't understand it. When actions come from a place I wouldn't tread, I am baffled. And mightily hurt.

All part of the shifting landscapes of friendship, I suppose. When actions cease to be out of love and become out of a desire to hurt or punish. To uproot.

I am lucky with the friends who sustain me and love me. And tell me so. As I tell them. It is important that we break down our own false barrier of pride and reach out and say "I miss you", "You are dear to me", "Our friendship is important", "I love you", otherwise how do we know?

I've just renewed a long ago friendship with someone who vanished into the bowels of the USA many years ago. I found her in FB, and she had been searching for me too and had even found my daughter but was too shy to barge right in and e-announce herself.

We knew each other back when. Our twenty-two year old dreams shining on our hopeful faces, making the huge nose-holding leap to sail the Atlantic and find fresh dreams and leave that repressive, strangleheld Ireland behind us. I am so glad we found each other. I would think of her often.

But the old landscapes stay fresh in our memories too. Even if it is just to remind us of how we used to be and never to lose that self. No. Never lose it.

A First!

2011-09-30T11:45:00.004-02:30

As some of my readers know, I do not lay me down and stay quiet. I write. I protest. I rant and roar sometimes. And I did that recently to my local MHA about the abysmal treatment of us outporters when it comes to Da Interwebz. I did not hear back from him.

Well guess what? This morning who arrives at my door with hugs and kisses but said MHA outlining the latest news in this game of "soon" and "soon" for reliable internet access. $8million has been allocated for full high speed service for us outporters and bids are being tendered by providers as we spoke. Well pol-promises I view with more than a jaundiced eye, let me tell you.

But the fact that he drove out here and talked to me, hell, I don't know a single soul on planet earth that this has happened to. Involved government? Well, I never.

And I don't gobsmack too easily.

Shabby Shopping

2011-09-28T22:27:00.006-02:30

Well, that's what I call it. Scrounging through second hand stores and charity shops for all sorts of goodies, including books and movies. I've no time for malls or big box or brandname fancy chains. But show me a Goodwill or a Sally Anne or a Value Village and I'm just about over the moon.

Almost an addiction for me. And my family too. And my friends.

I have a rule though:. If I haul in I have to haul out (donate). So far it works. I'd been looking for an apple picture to hang beside my apples (I'm a bit of an oddball that way, hanging like with like) and found one in the Sally Anne on half price day for $1.50. No tax either. I rather like it. Thing is if you get fed up with a shabby shopping item you just throw it in the charity bag and replace it for another $1 or $2.

And if you're wondering about the tigeen (an teachin - the little house), I had to use the internet up there yesterday and I felt I was flying above the trees. Seriously.

Look:

Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth

2011-09-27T14:17:00.006-02:30

Do you ever find you're running behind yourself and can't catch up? That's me. I know I am stressed to the max: far, far too much work in and far, far too little of me to go around.

I am taking a break to write before I go completely around the twist. I took a few hours off on Sunday (friends are kind enough to feed me) and I felt guilty. Then I knew I was in trouble. Guilty for taking off a few hours? I am in madness. I wish I could time the work that comes in the door, but it is always in one big flood of boxes and requests and emails. Speaking of.

The interwebz is gone hopeless again here which seriously impacts my days, so I took the time yesterday to write to my local MHA (Member of the House of Assembly in Newfoundland) yet again, with a copy to the local paper. Our local election is October 11th - which might fire up his arse a little, yeah? - and to date I haven't heard back.

Dear (Name redacted)~

I am sure you are getting just as tired of this as I am of writing to you and I even had columns in The Telegram published on this issue. I've been seven years now, count 'em, seven years, advocating for high speed service in my peninsula of (blocked for privacy).

Seven long years of empty promises of "next year", "soon", etc. The turbo stick was a temporary stop gap measure, which when it works it is OK. Adequate. About half the speed of broadband at more than twice the monthly cost. Oh monopolies like Bell Mobility can charge what they like and tell you to suck it up when you call frequently to complain as I do. They even have the nerve to tell me to walk up a hill and use it there, or go out on the road for better reception or get more users complaining (which I did) and they might check the cellular towers. They tell me to run my business from the top of my hill or the middle of the road in front of the house where there is better reception!

All very amusing I am sure to those who are complacently using their broadband and fibre optic in the comfort of their homes and offices only a few kms from here. I am told it is hardware failure, yet I take my turbo stick across Canada with me and it works perfectly everywhere else and has the capacity to work perfectly here. On those few occasions that are getting rarer and rarer. Why the inconsistency of service? No one has the answer except to blame me, the user for not working where they tell me to work, in the midst of traffic or at the top of a nearby hill with the birds.

I find it appalling that we continue to be treated like second class citizens out here, not 90 km from the metropolis of St. John's. Where I have to take up my knitting as I wait for page downloads and uploads and updates to software which can take hours while I do nothing else on my system. The inefficiency and unfairness of it all in trying to run my business makes me crazy to be perfectly honest.

Reliable high speed access is a RIGHT in this day and age. Like health care. Like education and fire and police. Why on earth is it not being fought for? Am I the only one living in this ongoing frustration, losing business (and my mind) because of the failure of the government to provide the most basic of business infrastructures?

I was in Ireland during the spring and even the out islands have broadband service. They were shocked to hear that our island of Newfoundland doesn't have this basic technology in the places that need it the most (remote health care, education, web-based business start-ups, information sharing, remote and satellite branch offices, etc.)

What is the latest on this? Am I still stuck out here losing business due to the inadequacy of my government in providing what so many others have taken for granted in the last 25 years?

Best personal regards as always,
Signed
Me.

PS And I as I write this, my internet connection has been dropped four times. FOUR TIMES.

Rebel Without a Cause

2011-09-26T00:13:00.003-02:30

Thoughts come my way at the oddest times. Odd thoughts. To be dragged out and consumed at a later date.

My father would have been 99 today. He should have been alive to see it. He took up cigar smoking rather late in life and enjoyed them far too much. He inhaled them. Seriously. The lungs of an ox. He died 15 years ago from heart disease. I'd say caused by the smoking. But there's some that might dispute that. The man would walk a couple of miles a day and go for the long haul on the weekends. Healthy and hearty of appetite. A good grubber as we say in the parlance of my people.

He would find it hard to keep a straight face as two of his children (myself and my brother) would run marathons late in our lives. He thought it a bit ridiculous. Me already a grandmother running my arse off around the city of Toronto. Why wouldn't we walk? How foolish was this?

He became belligerent about his latter day smoking. He would insist that fumes off the tailpipes of buses caused more lung cancer than his puffing away on his Maria Bendettis or whatever they were called.

I wouldn’t let him smoke in my car (or my house) and I would descend to the role of persnickety parent with him:

“No one has smoked in my car, Da, so finish it before you get in.”

“What in God's name would one cigar do to a fumey old car? Are you mad?”

“No, but I will be very soon, get out of the car and finish that thing on the side of the road, or put it out.”

He would roll his eyes at me and there would be great heaving sighs and mutterings thrown my way as he angrily did what I asked. No one likes being stranded in the middle of Pennsylvania. And he was against hitching as you'd never know what kind of axe murderer (or worse, he'd say, and I'd think, what's worse?) you could pick up. I would feel as if I'd caught one of my own teenagers smoking weed as I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel waiting for my oul fellah to do what I told him.

I find I'm getting to that age myself. Where my foolishnesses are ripe for admonition (you're not driving all the way across the country BY YOURSELF? You're not eating SUGAR? Did you go out for your DAILY WALK?). I remember the dear old mother of a friend, post heart attack, ordering banquet burgers loaded with bacon and horrible greasy cheese and glaring at us in defiance as we sucked up our belaboured criticism and let her at it.

It's a teetery old line we walk, us seniors. Stranded halfway between rebellion and toeing the line.

I get it.

The Story of Burt - Part 4 of 4

2011-09-22T09:43:00.003-02:30

See Part 1 Here

See Part 2 Here

See Part 3 Here

He would take the time and effort, ever after, to carry pockets full of loonies and quarters and give them to any street person who asked, always with compassion and an ear if one of the unfortunates wanted to talk. .

One thing I always noticed about Burt was how clean he always smelled and how he had an endless supply of pale blue t-shirts that matched his eyes. His favourite mode of dressing was in jeans, with a checked shirt over one of the t-shirts. He told me he showered twice a day. And he had 24 of those blue t-shirts. He managed a shipping company when I met him. He started off loading the docks and within a couple of years was promoted through the ranks.

I'll tell you how Burt saved my life. We became good friends in spite of the fact that he had never befriended a woman before and he told me this at the start. But over the years it just happened. We would look out for each other. I prepared his tax returns and arranged for his pension payments and gave him a freezer I didn't need and we would cook for each other. And then tramp the country together and fish. Two people more distinctly at odds both in background and education and interests you would be hard pressed to meet. He taught me how to live in the bush on the berries and fungi and even edible tree bark. He would shove envelopes with cards and a $5 bill into my mail box with always the same notation on the card: “Somebody loves ya!”

One night I was feeling sick. A bad flu bug. Burt had called me and was concerned. He said if I wasn't well the following day he would take me to the doctor. I told him he was making a big deal out of a flu bug. The following morning after a sleepless night I was feeling worse. He showed up at my door leaving me no choice but to go to the doctor. Who could find nothing wrong. See? I said to him I told you so, now let me go home and go to bed.

Burt kept insisting there was something seriously wrong with me so the doctor sent me off for X rays. Still nothing wrong. Burt insisted again so she sent us to the emergency department of the local hospital where they ran blood tests and my white blood cell count was through the roof. I don't remember much about all of this except lying on a gurney and Burt telling me they were going to operate immediately, my doctor was on her way over to assist the surgeon as my appendix had ruptured and I had advanced peritonitis. I don't know how long the surgery lasted. My family were at the hospital when I awoke, along with Burt who told me I had technically died a few times throughout the long night. His old Indian tracker instincts had been bang on the money.

Over the lengthy recovery process Burt was there first thing in the morning when he would leave after an hour or so and reappear again last thing at night. I've never forgotten it. I had a really terrifying experience in a hospital as a small child and Burt wiped that particular slate clean. I've never felt that purity of love and caring before or since – either given or received. A safety and a certainty of feeling that were unshakeable. Not that we didn't have our differences, we did. And they were many. But they were never insurmountable and the thread of our love for each other was woven into the very fabric of our friendship.

Burt's end was quick. He had a 24 hour form of leukaemia closely related to pneumonia. If he'd chosen his death, that would have been it. Fast and painless. I had never heard of such a disease until his doctor enlightened me. Apparently one of the more famous people who died of it was Jim Henson of Muppet fame.

I was able to be there for Burt's end as he was there for my second life. I was shocked at the number of people who overflowed the church for his funeral, he had touched many lives. I finally met his siblings. His mother had died the year before, a few weeks after his last fishing expedition with her. Fishing set Burt's life to rights. Fishing with his brothers, his mother, with me. It was something he and his father had done, you see, and he said he always felt his father beside him when he fished, coaching him on casting, on tying the flies, on gutting the catch.

I put his fishing rod in the casket beside him. So he'd be ready.

Edgar Benoit, still alive in a care home back in New Brunswick, sent a cheque to cover the costs of the funeral.

Some people leave footprints on your spirit that never leave. I think of him often, think of how he would have loved where I live now with the fishing all around and the simplicity of existence.

He would approve.

Somebody loves ya!

The Story of Burt - Part 3

2011-09-20T22:05:00.002-02:30

See Part 1 Here

See Part 2 Here

The series of foster homes Burt was in remained a blur to him. All he remembered was getting angrier and angrier until it was like a huge ball of pain within him and then he discovered that booze and drugs would give him a short respite, that is when he managed to get his hands on them. He recalled his mother visiting a few times but he couldn't meet her eyes when she told him to be a good boy, that Mr. Benoit had his reasons for the breakup of her family and they lay between himself and God. She had no choice. He had no clue where his siblings were.

I always found it extraordinary that Burt never ever blamed his mother for her decision to put her four children into child care services and then on to foster care. I brought it up with him several times. Of course Edgar Benoit was a monster but his mother was complicit, no? Burt would become enraged, the only time I had ever seen him angry telling me never, ever spit on his sainted mother's name like that. Never. She did what she had to do, she had no choice. Door closed.

Mr. Benoit and their mother had moved into a small bungalow by a stream, far away from the town, where in later years her adult children would come and stay for a few days and fish in the nearby stream with her, circling Edgar warily, barely polite, not that he encouraged any kind of conversation, even at table.

One of his brothers joined the US army and rose to the rank of colonel during Vietnam. The other brother ran a garage in Ontario. The sister met an American friend of her brother's and moved to New York with him.

None of them ever referred to that night again or blamed their mother for condoning the disintegration of her family. Edgar became the focus of their rage and despair and hatred even though in later years he became completely blind and totally dependent on their mother and softened somewhat. They refused to speak to him. They spoke of killing him as if it were like taking him out for a beer. They invented plots where they all got their hands dirty and covered for each other. The elaborate plans for his death became pretty much their only topic of conversation when they got together over the years. Which was rarely. None of them had children, Burt by choice, and he was sure the others had made the same decision. He couldn't really tell you why if you asked him.

Burt had many years of pain and turmoil once he escaped to the vast anonymous city of Toronto. He couldn't hold down a job even though his charm and innate intelligence landed him a few good positions. The alcohol would win out every time, sending him teetering by turn from apartments to rooming houses to shelters all the way to park benches and bottles of rubbing alcohol. At times his pain consumed him, it should have killed him, he admits but for his rage at Edgar giving him a life force, a purpose. Revenge.

He recalled, one time, that in a fog, he managed to hitch all the way to New Brunswick and showed up at his mother's home, in rags, reeking of alcohol, many of his teeth rotted out of his head. His mother took him in and gave him some money and a rosary beads and bought him clothes and nursed him back to health after she insisted he go to the local parish priest and take the pledge and swear off the drink. His thanks was to rob all the valuables out of the house and find a hidden stash of cash in Edgar's tool shed and skip out of town without a goodbye.

As such men do, he found a simple loving wife to take care of him for a while, she worked hard and he spent most of her money on booze until they were forced, financially, to live with her mother. A miserable experience for Burt as his wife paid more attention to her mother's instructions as to how to run their married life and consequently withheld money from him for the first time. Which forced him to find a job yet again until the cycle started once more.

This time he was turfed out of his mother-in-law's house and there was no in-between residence in apartments and rooming houses and shelters. He hit skid row directly. Bridges and bottles, he said to me. His life was delineated by bridges and bottles. With maybe the odd blanket to keep him warm as he lay on a sleeping bag on some cardboard boxes. It was one of those charity workers that he despised who woke him up one night. These workers would come around and drop off muffins and sandwiches and hot cups of cocoa and coffee and blankets. Do-gooders. He hated them. The worker squatted beside him and said to him: “I was under a bridge a year ago, just like you, and I've not had a drink in a year and I got my life back.”

Burt told him in no uncertain terms to eff off and rolled over. The worker leaned over and put a business card in front of his face. “Now if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired give me a call and I'll be there.” And with that he got up and walked off. In spite of himself, Burt put the card into a pocket and a week later, after he fell down and bashed his nose in and lay all night in his own blood, he found a call box and put in the dime that would save his life and get him sober.

The Story of Burt - Part 2

2011-09-19T15:05:00.003-02:30

See Part One here

By the end of the year, their brother Denis was born. A beautiful sunny child, beloved by all but never more so than by Mr. Benoit who became a man besotted. The child was given his own bedroom beside his parents and his wardrobe put the rest of theirs to shame. Burt remembered no jealousy about this. If Mr. Benoit was happy, and happy he surely was, the lavish gifts bestowed on their half-brother was a small price to pay. Burt's load was suddenly lightened. Mr. Benoit threw him the odd book to read, the extra break in the day and instructed his mother to cut down and resew some of his own pants to fit the lad as he approached his twelfth year.

Denis had just turned three when Burt awoke to smoke and flames screeching across the dark night sky ourside his bedroom window. It was moonless that night, Burt recalled. He awoke his two brothers who shared his room and they grabbed a few of their meagre possessions and then got his sister who was cowering, frightened, in a corner of her own bedroom, and he led them all to safety down the back stairs and across the courtyard to the stables so they could release the few animals and chickens Mr. Benoit kept there.

Burt told them to stay with him, he didn't want to lose sight of them as the hotel was being devoured so fast by the flames and the heat was so intense. They went around to the front of the hotel and across the street where a small crowd was gathering and the geriatric old fire truck had arrived with a great clanging of its bell and the firemen were ineffectually leaking water onto the inferno through the hose.

Mr. Benoit came staggering out of the front door, half carrying their mother who looked to have fainted. Alarmed, the children gathered around her, Mr. Benoit pushed them aside.

“You have Denis? He asked Burt, looking to the rest of the children, “Where is Denis?' his voice rose into a scream that Burt would remember all of his days.

“Denis?” and he dropped their mother to the ground, and began to race back into the building until he was stopped by the four volunteer firemen who had to pin him to the ground.

At that moment, on the upper floor, Burt saw his little brother in silhouette against a hall window, his thumb in his mouth, but only for a few seconds, for the flames were greedily snatching at him from behind until he vanished in the horrible sound of the building disintegrating in a roar of collapsing floors and ceilings. A sight spared Denis' father who was still face down in the driveway, screaming his son's name.

After that, it was all over. Mr. Benoit could not look at the surviving children and ordered his wife to put them into care for he would not have them around him to remind him of how they survived while his son died.

To be continued

The Story of Burt, Part 1

2011-09-18T14:36:00.005-02:30

Burt with my daughters

I must get his story down before I toss off my mortal coil. I started and finished it on the ferry, that blighted ferry, so out of lemons comes lemonade, yeah? I mentioned Burt before, here. He was truly one of a kind.

Burt's father died in a mill accident in the town of Dalhousie, New Brunswick, when he was 8. He and his two brothers and sister who were younger, along with their mother, were left penniless. He still remembered the raw hunger in his stomach when he went to bed at night. His mother was a proud woman who kept their worn old clothes in immaculate condition. He would see her sitting by the stub of a candle, late at night, mending and darning and knitting if someone had been kind enough to give her some wool.

When Mr. Benoit, the owner of the local hotel, started to come around a few nights of the week the children wondered about it. Mr. Benoit had lost his wife in childbirth a few years before and the baby had only lived a week before it followed its mother to the grave. He was a tall man who never smiled and who was given to glaring at the children in such a frightening manner that they would scamper up to their attic room and stay there until dawn by which time Mr. Benoit would have left.

Burt was old enough to speculate on what went on between his mother and Mr. Benoit. Except she didn't call him Mr. Benoit anymore but Edgar.

A month later a whole series of events took place. Mr. Benoit married their mother in the side chapel of Notre Dame and they all moved into the private residence end of the Benoit Hotel. The boys shared a large bedroom with 3 single beds and their sister got her own small room. It all seemed like something out of a fairy tale.

One afternoon, their mother sat them down in her bedroom which had two windows overlooking the falls. A spectacular room, with real lace curtains in the windows and an armchair in which she sat while they lined themselves up along the edge of the bed.

“It’s a miracle,” she told them, “My prayers have been answered!” And here she bowed her head. Burt's mother was devout, saying the rosary, offering up intentions, pleading with the almighty for relief and never blaming him when things went spectacularly wrong.

“Now, Mr. Benoit is still to be called Mr. Benoit by all of you. He would prefer it that way. You are all to behave yourselves around him, he does not like noise or questions or out of control or disobedient children. We are all truly blessed that he has opened up his heart and home and taken us in. He is a good man.

“And now also, Burton, you are to quit school immediately and help him around the place, repairing and fixing and cleaning.”

This was a blow to Burt as he loved his books and had hoped to get enough education to enlist in the army. But he had no choice.

The work was back breaking and seemed never to stop from dawn to dusk with short breaks. He learned how to replace roof tiles and broken pipes, paint and repair windows, fix squeaky doors and leaky toilets and threaten unruly drunks and sweep everything that needed sweeping all day long.

to be continued

Thoughts from the Water

2011-09-16T18:55:00.005-02:30

Sailing route from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Argentia, Newfoundland, pretty much across the open Atlantic ocean.

Well, here we are. Our sailing time was 4.00pm and it is now 6.30pm. They let us on the boat, The Atlantic Vision, about 30 minutes ago with no sailing time in sight because of Maria. As of noon today, the sailing was still on but I imagine they are cautious now as Maria roars through Newfoundland and incidentally right by where I live. I took the precaution before I left of moving all the lawn and deck furniture in and battening down the winter door at the front of my house. I am glad now. I just hope all the trees will hold.

There are many boats and ferries at anchor in the harbour as I look out my gorgeously huge window. This is not a porthole by any stretch of the imagination. The weather outside is innocent: blue skies, a few white caps on the waves, but not a hint of Maria on this side of the crossing.

No news on when we will be sailing but we have been assured there is a ton of food on board and much to entertain us in the interim. I feel sure there is many a story to be told in this waiting for the crossing.

Thoughts from the Road

2011-09-15T20:32:00.004-02:30

I am staying the night in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. It is a pretty wee town, picturesque and prosperous, judging by the fine old buildings and the number of boats at anchor in the river. I was in the original Glasgow back in the day, I must say I am more impressed with the New World version. Cleaner and more hopeful.

Does anyone else do this? I see that Strawbella's (the car's) odometer is about to click over on to a major number with lots of zeros and I get all excited. I really, really want to see all those 0000000s tumble over at the same time. I get ready about 100K beforehand. The tension's unbearable. Will she do it? Will it all go smoothly? What if she gets stuck? And yeah, somewhere near Springhill, NS, the monumental event takes place to cheers from me. 170,000K is now on the smooth face of Strawbella.

And in New Brunswick, just past me, is where I always think of my friend Burt. Burt saved my life back in the day. He was one of those New Brunswick country men at odds with the city around him but making the best of an uneasy co-existence. He liked nothing better than being out in the woods and me along with him. He often caught our supper in a nearby stream. A great trouter. I learned a whole pile about simple living off Burt at a time when my life could not have been more complicated.

He would show up at my door on a Sunday morning, just when I'd put down a self-important busy week and haul me and the dog off for tramps through the undergrowth followed by, very late in the day, a peculiarly Canadian supper called a hot chicken sandwich - layers of cooked chicken slathered between two slices of the whitest bread ever, untoasted, with a mound each of green peas and french fries: all of this business covered in thick brown gravy. I was too starved to ever refuse.

(to be continued)

Blog Jam and 9/11

2011-09-12T23:33:00.009-02:30

Well from Friday on I got worse and worse, to the point when having dinner with a friend I couldn't finish it (you'd have to know me to know I never go off my feed). Every bone in my body ached, my glands were swollen, my head was stuffed. Daughter said I must be the canary in the coalmine. By Sunday, after a couple of sleepless nights I decided to pack up and leave. Quickly.

Thanks for all the support on this. I have researched smog in Toronto and even though hundreds (maybe thousands?) die of it each year, there is very little research as to symptoms and long term effects. It is scary. I am reminded of my naturopathic doctor who, about a decade ago, performed research on behalf of the government into the pollution in Toronto and presented her papers in Ottawa and promptly moved far away telling me before she left that it was one of the most toxic cities on the planet.

I am taking it easy driving myself and Ansa across the country (it's an amble, maybe a final one) and feel so much better already, my bones no longer ache, my head is clearing, my mind is not in panic attack mode. I think Daughter is correct. The air is so clean in Newfoundland that the shock of Toronto smog is unbearable to my system. I am now about 450K into a 2100K trip to the ferry.

I was over at Nick's - please go read his post on 9/11 - and composed quite a lengthy comment and to my utter frustration it vapourized, so I'm assembling my thoughts on this again.

I was out with a friend for dinner and she was discussing all the endless hooplah around the 10 year anniversary when I suddenly threw at her:

"But the terrorists have won, haven't they?"

And she leaped up in joy and said:

"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! No one has said this are they all blind, deaf and dumb?"

We discussed this at length, the trillions in treasure spent on illegal invasions and "homeland security", money which could have been spent on universal health care and child poverty, infant and elder mortality (one of the highest in the "first" world) - how many more million children need to be on foodstamps and without basic healthcare - the soaring unemployment rate, the homelessness of the once middle class citizens (millions again at last count). If it was Osama Bin Laden who instigated the tragedy of 9/11 (and believe me I am totally sympathetic to the victims and their families) he must have been rubbing his hands in glee at the bankruptcy he has created in his hated USA. Mission accomplished indeed.

And speaking of Bin Laden, whatever goodwill was left for the US after these catastrophic "wars on terror", the tortures and renditions of many innocent "foreigners" along with millions massacred as "collateral damage" - half estimated to be young children - the final nail in the coffin of moral high ground was the manner in which he and his wife were murdered in cold blood, in a country they had no permission to be in, without trial, and the bodies thrown out at sea. Justice. Frontier style. Government as lynch mob.

I am enraged for my many American friends and those who read my blog who have my total respect and admiration and who are witnesses to their country being so thoroughly trashed in the decade since 9/11 with their treasure stolen for the oligarchs in fruitless foreign invasions and massacres.

The opportunity for continued world peace was wasted and the continuing global economic havoc and instability will not be over in my lifetime, if ever.

Out of Sorts

2011-09-10T11:40:00.004-02:30

Did you ever feel like you are standing some distance from yourself, wondering why you don't feel like yourself? No? Well, that's me at the moment.

I don't feel well, I don't feel deathly ill, but somewhere in between. Coughing, difficulty breathing, leg pains, thigh pains. "Off": that's me. The older I get the more the city air (a loose term for oxygen, I know)affects me. I tend to shallow breathe. It might only be me but I feel it is toxic. It reminds me when I was down in Mexico City and my brother told me an environmental engineer with a fresh contract in his hand for a project, had moved his wife and family down there and three days later they all took the first plane out. He'd done some testing. And fled.

Does anyone test the air in Toronto? I know anyone who lands in St. John's to visit me remark about the air immediately they arrive as they suck in huge lungfuls of it.

I was feeling really sick last night and trying to sleep and a party next door breached many decibel levels. I'd forgotten that. Even over and above the traffic and sirens and airplanes overhead, how very noisy next door parties can be. Could be I'm a fully fledged geezer now.

I was going to stay on for another week or so, there were some events I wanted to attend but my mind is made up today. I am heading back out to Newfoundland at the beginning of this week.

I just can't take it anymore.

Cartoon of the Week

2011-09-08T22:00:00.004-02:30

click to enbiggen

This was sent to me today and it seemed oddly apt to yesterday's post.

Changing Times

2011-09-08T01:00:00.004-02:30

A dear friend whom I was meeting for dinner tonight (I know endless rounds of delightful dinners out with friends seems like a permanent lifestyle for me at the mo)texted me to say she had severe pains in her abdomen and was taking herself off to the hospital.

Whoa, nelly, what? I text her back. Where are you? What hospital? Silence. I leave messages at her home, on her blackberry, on her office line. Silence. One of my messages I say: Yeah, I've been there with severe abdominal cramps, mine was a ruptured appendix followed by peritonitis.

She finally texts from a Women's College Hospital ambulance, they are taking her directly to Toronto Hospital for emergency surgery. We continue texting. She is outside the operating room, saying it is pointless for me to be there, they have diagnosed her with a perforated appendix (I know, I know, I should be a diagnostician)and are taking her in for the surgery immediately.

All digits are crossed for her. I am so glad she had the sense to take herself off to the hospital once the pain hit and that she is now in good hands. I won't relax though until I know she is OK and I hope to see her tomorrow.

I find it extraordinary that in a few short years so much has changed in how we communicate and how instantaneous and immediate it all is.

Chat

2011-09-07T12:12:00.006-02:30

I'm a great one for the chat. I love conversation. Always have. Got hooked at a young age hiding somewhere inconspicuously: behind a chair, in a corner, on the stairs, listening to my mother and her friends unthread lives and stitch them back up again.

We learn so much from the talk of others. "An caint" as we have it in Ireland. And what was that again about Irish conversation? A series of monologues?

Conversations with women are different than with men, I believe. Women like to thrash things out, go around a topic, land for a while, veer off again. Men tend to treat dilemmas as problems to be solved. Women are not looking for solutions when they talk. They are looking for the shared stories, the sympatico, the empathy.

"Take this," she said last evening, as she handed me the framed picture she had made, "The star lights up at night."

Yes, on those dark nights it will glow quietly on my bedside table and remind me of her. My dear friend who has suffered and triumphed and who will dance again.

Dis & Dat

2011-09-06T00:29:00.003-02:30

Back by popular demand, a picture of the happiest dog on the planet taken by Grandgirl before we left Newfoundland.

At my age I don't take too much for granted. Like this evening, going downtown in this blessed cool weather (The Avalon in Newfoundland where I live is now warmer than Toronto, go figure!)with Daughter and Grandgirl and walking around together and bookshopping and then hitting a new cappucino spot. How lucky are we to have each other? And we are all aware of this. Understanding each other. Very clear on these First World privileges that allows us to do such things for how many can't?

Daughter has MS and I've had a few health issues in the past year so the fact we are both mobile and free to celebrate these three generational events is something we never take for granted. There is almost a bitter-sweetness to it.

Connecting with friends here is also wonderful. I've missed them. I always do. Though I never second guess my decision to move to Newfoundland which has opened up my life in a way that would never have happened here in Toronto. My perfect life would allow me to spend two months of the year here, plugged in to enough family, friends, culture, art and music to fill me for the other ten months. Toronto is a wonderful, vibrant city and I love it.

Destination!

2011-09-04T15:16:00.004-02:30

I tried so hard to get a closeup of this pretty and unusual flower but Ansa kept butting in. OK then.

Dateline: Toronto

I must be wrecked. I am not used to this heat and noise anymore and to land into a heatwave and overhead plane practices for a Labour Day airshow along with all the usual city noises of screaming ambulances, firetrucks and police car sirens batters my psyche intensely until I assimilate once again. And after 2 days, this has not happened yet.

Planning the social (and work) calendar is something else again - fitting the old friends in for catchup time. Daughter says I can use her house as a base and entertain here if I want.

I am hoping the weather will cool down. I can't imagine what the 50C+ weather conditions were here in the height of summer. Now it is over 30C (humidity factor is always calculated into these figures) and it sucks the air out of my lungs. Wuss=me.

Meanwhile I am basking in the air conditioning and barely stick my head outdoors.

Bubble

2011-09-02T00:23:00.008-02:30

Dateline: Near Montreal.

There's something about a long road trip. As if one lives in a bubble, a balloon, floating above one's normal life, detached.

It's even more enhanced when accompanied by a beloved companion who shares her quirks and eccentricities and her rich imagination and who is also extraordinarily well read and informed.

We toss around all sorts of ideas, comment on the ridiculousness of human existence and this insatiable want that seems to overcome so many people, this desire for "more" that drives unjust wars and extreme poverty all over this tiny planet. The sad materialism of so many evidenced by ridiculously large vehicles speeding past us, Hummers, SUVs and their ilk, often with just one driver. Usually miserable too, if the face is the mirror of the soul. Nobody sings, we observe, except us. What is a road trip without singing?

I talk to the waitress at the wonderful bistro where we had lunch today, a wee bit off the road just before Quebec City. Turns out she owned the restaurant that served a heavenly beef bourginonne. And the menu was handwritten at the beginning of every week featuring 3 daily choices each day (soup, entree, dessert and coffee all for $9.99). She asked where we were from and where we were going.

She said: "When my last baby left home, for a whole year I accompanied my husband, a long haul driver, across the entire country, from coast to coast and my favourite place was Newfoundland!"

I said to her, "It's a shock how beautiful Newfoundland is, it is Canada's best kept secret!"

"My dear," she said,"We live in the most beautiful country in the world, don't we?"

And I nodded, feeling quite emotional at sharing this brief and wonderful moment with a Quebecois.

Afterwards, Grandgirl said to me that she finds this type of understated patriotism so much more meaningful than flag waving and anthem singing and hands on hearts and swearing allegiance and pledges.

"It's so heartfelt, so real, it makes me so proud to be a Canadian!"

Amen baby!

Graveyards

2011-08-31T20:18:00.004-02:30

Old Graveyard, Placentia - click to enbiggen.

Dateline: Fredericton, New Brunswick.

A long day's driving from the ferry in Sydney, Cape Breton to Fredericton, New Brunswick this evening to the accompaniment of Grandgirl's playlists and mine, some of which we have melded into a joint list. I got her hooked on Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone at an early age and she got me hooked on Dido, Cold Play, Adele and Train. We call ourselves the backup singers these unfortunate stars have missed out on as we add our special savour to the vocals. Makes the time fly.

Graveyards are another thing our family "does", I was hooked on them at a young age by my father and I in turn got my daughters addicted and now Grandgirl is equally enthralled. The headstone above is from the old Placentia graveyard we traversed yesterday.

I was struck first by all the drownings listed, these were obviously seafaring people. And I also can't imagine the grief of the widow, when having lost her husband, leaving her with a one month old baby, she then loses the baby six months later when he was seven months old. And then four more sons predeceased her - two together in drowning.

The often extremely sad lives of those who went before us depicted on these lonely headstones in far flung graveyards can only be surmised upon (the dashes between the dates). I imagine Mary Kelly's fortitude may have come from the strong religious beliefs of those bygone days: that one day she would be re-united with all she had lost.

Sidetracked!

2011-08-30T20:38:00.004-02:30

Placentia

I'm writing this on the Atlantic Vision, the wonderful ferry running between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and which is even better than before as it now has highspeed.

Well, ahem, we're a day late. And, ahem, there was a slight problem in that I thought we were sailing on Monday 29th, when in actual fact, ahem, it was Tuesday 30th. Says so right on the ticket. The ticket that Grandgirl and I failed to look at until the security guard pointed it out to us at the gate to the empty ferry terminal.

So no, we didn't skulk the 200K back to home (something about waving goodbye to all and sundry as we left and then showing up on the evening of the same day with a red face). We stayed in Placentia. At Harold Hotel. A most fortuitous decision as it turns out.

We went for a wonderful walk on the Placentia boardwalk after dinner. The dregs of Irene were all around us, unseasonable heat, raging wind and the ocean beating off the rocks below us. Magnificent.

Today we visited the old graveyard, some of it early 18th century. The old caretaker was shattered to hear I was of the lapsed catholic variety. I regretted telling him as soon as the words were out of my mouth as he took it so personally. He insisted on showing me a grave that held a Margaret O'Brien whose epitaph read "She died as she lived in God's Grace." And told me to think about that. I too could live like that, it wasn't too late.

"Maybe I already am in the grace?" I said to him and he shook his head sadly muttering about the one true church.

After the attempted conversion, we went for another long walk, this time by the wonderful river with the boats tied up and the sun splitting the rocks.

Meanwhile I ran into the president of the historical society whom I had met a few times at conferences and took the opportunity to talk about my play. We popped into a gorgeous new cafe recommended to me by a friend. Stunning. Home cooking and patisserie and the old general store beautifully renovated with floors and walls restored to their former glory. The owner and her husband are currently living upstairs but plan to eventually transform this space into an art gallery for her work.

She owns one of the inns in the area and in chatting it turned out she was looking for an accountant.

Well, duh, bingo. I have a new client. A most fortuitous misreading of tickets. All is not lost and Grandma is not destined for the home or a minder. Just yet.

Ferries & Irenes Don't Mix?

2011-08-28T23:29:00.005-02:30

Photo by Grandgirl who raced out in stockinged feet to get this wondrous shot the other night.

Grandgirl and I are packing up the house and sorting out the car and assuring Ansa, that yes, she is coming with us even though we are washing her bed and packing all her stuff in her own little bag. She looks stunningly lovely actually, as she was groomed only a few days ago. But she walks around the house with that worried look that dogs get. Comical. But we try and keep straight faces around her as she goes from bag to bag and the place where her bed used to be. And licks our legs as she walks by reminding us that "Lookeehere, yes, you do have a dog!"

So far the ferry is leaving on time. Even though this morning's was moved to an earlier time because of Irene. We are sailing on the Atlantic Vision, which I sailed on before and raved about.

They have changed the hours of operation to be more people friendly. We are leaving at 6.30pm and arriving in the morning at 9.00 a.m. A huge improvement. Before it was appalling, arriving in the middle of the night in Cape Breton with long, long hours of mountainous, often foggy, driving in darkness in order to hit the Nova Scotia mainland.

It is well over a year since I was in Ontario so I am looking forward to catching up with everyone. Reportage from the road may be sporadic.

So far Irene is avoiding us. Let's hope she stays that way. My sympathies to all and their dear ones who have suffered.

Long Lost Words

2011-08-27T12:23:00.004-02:30

I remarked to Grandgirl the other day, on spotting a girl of about twelve passing us by in those plain white tennis shoes beloved of my own adolescence when I was the same age:

"My goodness, I haven't seen a pair of plimsolls in years!"

"What?" she said, "What word was that?"

"Plimsolls," I said, noting the strangeness of the word in my mouth, a word I haven't used in maybe forty years, "That's what we called those kind of shoes then."

"Weird," she responded.

And then playing Scrabble, I used the word "Unman". I remember my father using it.

"The cancer was so bad it just about unmanned him."

And wondering about it at the time.

About a catastrophe so awful it degendered one:

1.To deprive of the distinctive qualities of a human being, as reason, or the like.
2.To emasculate; to deprive of virility.
3.To deprive of the courage and fortitude of a man; to break or subdue the manly spirit in; to cause to despond; to dishearten; to make womanish.
4.To deprive of men.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition1.To cause to give up manly courage or spirit.
2.To take away virility from; emasculate.
Wiktionary1.To castrate; to remove one's manhood.
2.To sap the strength, whether physical or emotional, required to deal with a situation.

And then I thought, is there the equivalent "unwoman"? And sure enough there is:

1.To deprive of the qualities of a woman; to unsex.
Other (1)
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia1.To deprive of the qualities of a woman; unsex. Sandys, tr. of Ovid's Metamorph., ii.

Apparently not as cataclysmic to be unwomanned as it is to be unmanned.

Words. I love them.

There are shoes and then there are Shoez

2011-08-25T18:55:00.004-02:30

Sometimes you're out and about and something catches your eye, not necessarily big or expensive or modish or fashionable and you say: "We have to have it".

That was yesterday. And we said it together.

There is something about these Converse-Type shoes. The ridiculous pink, the grey polka dots, but most of all the satin ribbons for laces.

There is a world of possibility in these magical shoes. As if one could fly over rooftops, skim over stages, bring the heels together and say: "Home now, adventures are over for another day."

She is hopelessly in love with them. As am I. So I had to take a picture before they got scuffed up.

It's All Been Said

2011-08-23T15:19:00.003-02:30

A true Canadian hero, Jack Layton, has left us.

I just want to add:

Thank you, Jack.

The Last Iris of Cape St. Mary's

2011-08-22T21:35:00.005-02:30

We hiked out to Cape St. Mary's today. I have to admit I was nervous going out there after the Gulf of Mexico spill. The Gulf of Mexico is where the gannets winter and then fly all the way back up to Newfoundland in the spring to breed. I wrote about my concern for the birds here.
I am delighted to report that not only are the millions of birds back here this year but that they have spread their nesting grounds to another promontory in the same area.

The weather has been magnificent since Grandgirl arrived. We were lucky to catch one of the last few irises on the cape, a late bloomer because of the weather (above). Photo above taken by Grandgirl.

I also took one of her staring in awe at the gannets. I've been out there many times but still stop in my tracks at the number and sound of them all.

And a closeup of a pair, again taken by Grandgirl.

Saturday Review

2011-08-20T20:42:00.009-02:30

Ramana gave me this idea of having a summary of my week here. So I am trying it on for size.

And by the way, click to enbiggen any of the photos.

Grandgirl and I are just back from a few days in the Trinity Bight area and today were going to move on and stay further north but changed our minds. Our stay in Doran House was so perfect ("awesome!") that we knew anything else would be a let down so home we came and are planning a pyjama day tomorrow (reading, pizza, movies, games, making another Ipod playlist of a mash of our favourites).

First off is a picture through one of the windows of Doran House:

Then one of my favourites, a picture of Ansa on the cliff with Grandgirl below on the beach, embracing the water. She said she felt like she could take wing along with the birds at any moment and fly over it, it was all so beautiful.

Then we hiked up to the lighthouse at Trinity Bay, the view from there was astonishing, there are still remnants of the ramparts and the cannons used to defend this important harbour 400 years ago. And I bring you a picture of the lighthouse:

And this is a photo of the view from the lighthouse, doesn't it look like a magical town? (it is).

The weather was amazing for the time we were away and we drove back to more and more RFD and now, ha, that we're home, full RFD is upon us.

We ate last night at the Twine Loft (a special treat), the second sitting at 7.45 (how European of us!) and got dressed up to match the auspicious occasion. The food was amazing, a four course meal, she had the coq-a-vin entree and pronounced it a winner, I had the hazelnut encrusted salmon with scallopped potatoes (seriously scallopped in swiss cheese AND whipping cream, there should be a law against such offerings - how can one ever go back to plain?). A magnificent salad was served after the mains which enchanted Grandgirl, never having been introduced to this particular prandial routine before. The dessert was also crime laden. Barren Berries Pudding floating in rum sauce topped with whipped cream laced through with a reduction of raspberries. And oh yeah, carrot-orange soup as starter with just-out-of-the-oven bread. I don't know how we rolled ourselves to the car afterwards. And on top of that, our marvellous waitress and I became friends and exchanged contact info. She is heading off to Ireland soon on a life-dream project involving a spa (she's in her late fifties and now or never is upon her.) I told her my life dreams were happening rather late too, so she found it very encouraging.

I managed to finish a Richard B. Wright book which I loved, he's an author that I greatly admire. And I started a short story involving a guy just released from prison.

All in all a wonderful week. Grandgirl and I are having a glorious time, singing in the car to Lady Gaga AND Nina Simone, walking with the dog, getting caught up on all the doings of each others' lives. I feel so very lucky to have this gorgeous and intelligent young woman in my life.

Cartoon of the Week

2011-08-19T23:05:00.003-02:30

Travelling

2011-08-18T21:10:00.007-02:30

Thank you all so much for the lovely wishes and compliments on my birthday. So appreciated. I was a little overwhelmed on this birthday. Grandgirl wrote me a poem which I will frame and hang, wishes and cards and phonecalls kept coming in all day. My cup runneth over mightily, many times. I will treasure each and every single wish. Thank you, fellow bloggers!

We are currently in Trinity Bight staying in a house that is over 100 years old (see picture above but it is now painted dory yellow)and is one of the most beautiful places I have ever stayed in, in my life. I can't find the words. Seriously. I did take pictures but forgot to pack the camera downloady thingamajiggey but hope to share when we get back. The place has got books everywhere. Every corner seems to feature a chaise and throw and there is a wood fireplace in the middle of the parlour surrounded by comfy chairs and a huge sofa. And all the old wood has been exposed. Soft linens and lace blow in the windows, duvets float on the high queen beds, mounded with pillows and soft cotton sheets. Grandgirl has the bedroom with the two windows overlooking the whale (minke and humpback)infested ocean. I just have the one window overlooking the sea, poor Grams.

Grandgirl did a sundance yesterday on a wild windswept beach and swear-ta-gawd didn't the sun come out and it hasn't left us since. Seriously.

The house is on a ledge with a panoramic view. Grandgirl did cartwheels on the meadow on the cliff today in celebration of the weather and our good fortune to be in such a breathtaking spot, surrounded by magnificence, a folk festival, theatre, some possible icebergs approaching and also multi-star restaurants that we are salivating to try!!

RFD*

2011-08-16T13:51:00.005-02:30

*RainFogDrizzle

It's my birthday today and you'd think Gaia might take a chance on me and drop a bit of sunshine my way? Not a hope.

The best birthday gift I get every year is another year of this precious life. The next is the Grandgirl who never misses it. She arrived late last night and between the RFD and the moose (we counted four on the roads) it took us till nearly 2 in the morning before we got home.

And this year daughter sent me a birthday gift of a GPS for the car. Something I have coveted for a long time as I have a problem I label geographical dyslexia. I can never tell you what direction I'm facing in unless it's a well known landmark like Lake Ontario and I always knew how to get there from just about any point in Ontario. Here in Newfoundland, St. John's is confusing as it's not laid out like a grid and streets and roads keep changing names just to laugh at me. And though I've learned a pile of these name changes there's still the odd one thrown out of the blue which in turn throws me.

Directionally challenged, that's me. I come by it well. My father hadn't a clue and when we would travel together we would pore over maps pretending we had inbuilt navigational skills, hardy-har. I remember one spectacular night in Quebec City where we (I) drove down cul-de-sacs that were an armslength apart in width and then I would have to reverse back again, confounded and baffled. At around three in the morning, after hours of this maze-like meandering seeking our hotel which neither of us could remember whether it was in Lower Town or Upper Town or even the name of it, Gawd help our simple Irish souls, when the Da looked at me and said, "OK. Next time we will tie a long string to the back of the car and the front of the hotel before we go anywhere." I remember us laughing ourselves silly at the thought, just before finding a gendarme who spoke English and drew a map on a page of his notebook for us.

The Da would have dearly loved my GPS.

What's That Golden Ball in the Sky?

2011-08-14T15:04:00.005-02:30

Have I talked about the weather here this summer? No? Well joke is it is the mildest winter we've had in years.

We are now celebrating our second day of sunshine in 7 weeks. A dicey thing this day of sunshine as it changes its mind now and again and shyly ducks behind something that is nearby and handy. A bit of fog, a sudden low flying cloud, the trees. As if it isn't used to any kind of attention. Which it isn't. We'd forgotten about it.

So here it is, back, the brazen thing. I check out the forecast for the week - see above. The Grandgirl is coming tomorrow for a whole two weeks. Two weeks!!! And it would be nice to show her another colour besides grey. And cold. And endless RFD*.

What should I pack? she emails me. Grandmothers are supposed to be wise and all-knowing, right? A mix of stuff, I respond, covering all grandma bases, I've now probably jinxed everything and it will be a 2 week scorcher.

*RFD=rain,fog,drizzle.

Deadlines

2011-08-13T11:26:00.004-02:30

I had a couple of deadlines in the last 12 hours. One was for a tax client who was in an awful mess and needed refilings of incorrectly filed tax returns by another accountant. I hate that taking apart of another's work and finding all the differences and anomalies. I put it off as long as I could and then sorted everything properly into new files and new headings and it all felt a little cleaner and I was able to tackle it with a fresh perspective over this past week.

The other was much more enjoyable in that it was for two stories, one I had to finish and one I had to expand a little and fine tune and then file both by a deadline. I love the process of re-write, though it is always a little nerve-wracking too, reading stuff aloud - I do this as I wander around my house, pages in hand, if anyone barges in (and they frequently do, it is the Newfoundland way after all), I am sure they think me certifiable judging by the slightly raised eyebrows and the pattings of my arm as I try and explain what I'm doing. "There, there honey, you'll be alright once you have this soup I broughtcha!"

One story I was particularly pleased with, as it has taken me a few years to refine it and I have good hopes for it. But then again, I'm never sure. Is any writer ever sure?

Stuff I Miss

2011-08-12T10:57:00.005-02:30

About once a week I have a hearty breakfast: sausage, perogies, eggs, toast. I peruse the paper at leisure, soak in the weekend's activities listings, reviews, etc. Part of the ritual of this breakfast is HP Sauce - a first cousin to YR Sauce (anyone remember that?)

This morning, I was holding the bottle of HP Sauce in my hand and felt saddened that something so redolent of my childhood could be so substantially changed, and by a plastic squeeze bottle. It was sacrilegious, this squirting onto my plate rather than feeling the heft of the glass bottle in my hand and thumping its bottom, always in such a way that the amount seemed to be just the right size when it finally plopped onto the plate.

It tasted differently then too, better, sharper. Glass is obviously more hospitable than plastic. The same applies to pop/soda/minerals. Glass all the way. The cans and the plastic alter the taste. I recently had a bottle, a real glass bottle, of Coke. And I was startled when it put me in mind of the Coke bottling plant in Cork where on race days (there was nearly always a race on the Straight Road in Cork) we would get a bottle (or maybe 2?) of Coke for a shilling directly from vendors outside the plant. And here it was - the taste was exactly the same, over 50 years later.

Something has been lost (or gained) in packing foodstuffs in plastic and tin, losing flavour and gaining an overriding plastication in all our basic condiments.

And I haven't even talked about Hellmann's Mayo, have I?

Don't get me started.

And totally symptomatic of our sad old world isn't it?

Terrorists, hooligans, vandals, blackguards.

2011-08-11T16:14:00.005-02:30

These were the epithets flung at my people - even by their own - when the few struck out for Irish liberation back in the day. They were young and idealistic too. And could no longer bear the poverty and hardships and hopelessness with which they were surrounded.

A poverty I saw up close and personal. And I'm not talking just material – even though my ancestral lands were seized and my ancestors, including the infants, massacred (I've written about it here). I'm talking poverty of education and opportunity, of advancement and enlightenment.

My grandparents were tenant farmers on a couple of acres' holdings when I was a child. Things were beginning to change. But never fast enough for them. My grandfather would hunt our supper in the fields and speak of his rage against our terrorists, the English landlords. He carried the memories of shock and horror with him, passed down through the generations. I never knew what missions he carried out for the IRA before I was born - when Irish freedom was being fought for on the crossroads and hidden valleys of Ireland. He would be a terrorist/vandal/criminal in today's world.

Today's heroes were yesterday's terrorists. To the victors go the re-writing of history.

It is easy to say: yeah, we can understand what is happening in England and now in the U.S. – six generations of population explosion and living on welfare in the UK and nearly 50 million on foodstamps in U.S.: it must kill the spirit, the hunger for the “better” life they see on their televisions and the fact that their peaceful protests against injustice are ignored and not even mentioned in the media, their voices unheard. And then in the next breath condemn their criminality. Does it have to be this violent and destructive? Like the examples they see on their Teevees of invasions and annihilations of the innocents and conflagrations of property in Iraq and Afghanistan et al?

Well, the peaceful protests gained nothing – and this has gotten the attention of the world.

Just saying.

Coming Soon to a Country Near You

2011-08-09T13:45:00.003-02:30

{Photo courtesy of Guardian}
Daughter sent me a link today, a blogpost from the trenches of the urban warfare that has broken out in England.

Here are extracts:

The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

and more

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

And more:

Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

Read all of it here.

Sorry, My Head is Exploding

2011-08-08T00:23:00.005-02:30

Per capita government debt in 2010 in descending order, thank you Irish Times. Big changes in 2011?

I wrote here quite a while ago that I would only touch upon this crazy world of ours and all its ills if I felt my head exploding.

My head is exploding with the confluence of all that is happening. I have many questions. And very few answers.

Why is everyone so shocked that the global economic meltdown is happening?

Did everyone seriously think that this unsustainable way of life would continue forever?

Didn't the serious imbalance of food, water, housing amongst the wealthiest and the poorest (of which there are far, far too many) weigh on those who are so privileged?

Why on earth was the population of the world allowed to explode (and continue to explode) to a completely unsustainable level while the majority of the Woo practitioners and their worshippers condemn birth control and abortion? And allow thousands upon thousands of birthed children to die each and every single day?

When and why did we allow psychopathic corporations to dictate who gets into the highest offices of government and then allow them to pull the puppet strings of their patsies?

How on this tiny planet did one country spend one trillion dollars illegally invading another (not to mention all of the others) and not expect it to come back and haunt them. For generations yet to come.

How can we be so flip as to say “technology will solve everything” whenever the subject of finite oil (peaked and gone in my humble estimation) is mentioned. And people run out and buy these great gas guzzling rigs to get their weekly groceries? Using decades worth of gas and oil that would supply tiny cars like mine for another 50 years if we all drove environmentally responsible vehicles?

Do those in charge (Demz Wot Rulez) not give one single shyte about their own grandchildren?

Whatever happened to making the way we run our little portions of the world smaller – i.e. Locally supplied power, etc., community gardens, etc. Instead we are planning multi-billion dollar hydro developments here in Newfoundland. I won't get into the destruction of tribal lands and environmental degradation this will entail. Mortgaging our great-grandchildren's lives (if they survive) and doubling our utility rates. All this in a province where wind and waves can be harnessed at a fraction of the cost. And locally.

Gaia is beginning to shrug us off like the pesky bunch of fleas we are, is there anything we won't destroy for money?

But, of course, the ICH* will save the repentant and the prayerful, like Rick Perry.

*Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper