Category Archives: Reading

Becoming intimate with carnations and truth

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In mid-December, I bought a green glass jug in a second-hand store, half price. My aspiration was to make a beautiful winter bouquet for my friend, Lillian. I bought a bunch of silver dollar eucalyptus and two dozen white carnations. I envisioned white wintry bursts among the silvery green, but the more I trimmed and mixed the carnations with the stems of eucalyptus, the sillier and more incoherent it looked. I took basic Ikebana but still haven’t a clue how to make flowers and plants look good. 

Finally, I used only the eucalyptus, splayed out in a free-fall arrangement. I attached a few small, red shiny balls to the stems, and the effect, I hope, was Christmassy and charming, if a bit messy. Lillian said she loved it. (But what could she say, really?) I was going to throw out the unused carnations, but it seemed such a waste, so I put them in a white and blue vase and placed it in my study on a low stool covered with a blue-green cloth. 

I don’t like carnations, or I didn’t think that I did. I’ve seen too many sad, slender bunches wrapped in cellophane at the mini-mart next to the hospital. They make me think of last-minute purchases for the death bed, cheap flowers that outlive the person you visited. They seem so tight, orthodox, banal. Whorls of perfect, serrated petals, every bloom the same.

But they’ve grown on me. As I spend hours in their presence, they’ve become real. You could say I’ve become intimate with them. I sit here now, the last day of the year, gazing at their fresh ordinariness. The carnation is the sturdy, faithful flower that will see you through. Perhaps they are flower of the year: commonplace as canned milk. Carnations are one-foot-in-front-of-the-other flowers. Quotidian flowers. Bread-and-butter blooms. See you through the hardest times. Last for weeks. Nothing special. 

Although 2024 was my first year of so-called retirement, and thus I was given twenty additional hours each week, I wrote less, and I sewed less. (A few felt birds for family and other little felt creations, an apron, a crib quilt start, a fur-lined bag.) I did finish an editing certificate I started in 2020, which is a relief. And I made a lovely new friend and deepened existing friendships. I started a volunteer gig at a non-profit arts and crafts shop in August that has led to meeting many interesting people. Bonus: I get to surround myself with a messy profusion of materials that inspire me. 

Kathryn’s robin
Allison’s pigeon
Evan’s heron
Nancy’s reversible purple apron
Nancy’s reversible purple apron
Sarah’s swan
I made felt hearts for friends at Christmas.
Nat’s puffin
Nat’s puffin
I started a quilt for Lillian’s great grandson, Fox
Wilson the owl, a gift for Michael
Magic bag lined with fake fur for Nat’s 30th birthday
Women in Need’s Upcycle and Craft store on North Park Avenue. I work there on Thursday afternoons.

This year, I listened to probably one hundred dharma talks on Dharma Seed, with a broad aspiration of becoming more intimate with life—accepting whatever’s happening in my heart, whatever’s happening in the world. Making friends with wild mind. Accepting the truth of the way things are.

I read so many books this year. A couple that stick with me are Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence and The Age of Loneliness, a book of essays about life during the sixth extinction by Laura Marris. 

Solnit writes a lot about being a woman. That’s what her title gestures toward—the peculiar “nonexistence” of being female in a patriarchy (remember mansplaining? She is behind that neologism[i]). She draws on John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing, which I’ve known about for years and now am determined to read. She quotes words from him that jibe with my experience: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.” 

Perhaps that sounds dramatic in the Global North in 2024, but that has been my experience. Perhaps it’s different for lesbians. Perhaps it is different for women of subsequent generations, but Solnit and I were born three years apart (1961/1958), so we grew up at roughly the same time. Berger goes on, 

“A woman must continually watch herself. … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as yourself by another.”

Solnit calls Berger brilliant and generous, to be able to imagine a woman’s experience, and I agree. What he writes here feels just as real as the carnations in front of me. Reading the passage and feeling its truth is freeing. No action needed, just awareness.

Similarly, truth pinged through me when I read Laura Marris writing about the age of loneliness. We become lonelier as we bear witness to the drastic reduction, or “great thinning,” of ordinary animals. Marris draws on the work of naturalist, Michael McCarthy, who writes of our baby boomer age group, “As we come to the end of our time, a different way of categorising us is beginning to manifest itself: we were the generation who, over the long course of our lives, saw the shadow fall across the face of the earth.” 

Reading this series of essays, elegies to Earth as the shadow descends and animals disappear, I was gripped by a grief so deep I sat for a time and just cried. Again, the truth is freeing. Let’s not deny that this is happening. It’s really happening. We can still enjoy the beauty that is here. 

In keeping with my mood of asceticism, I recently deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Unlike the birds who used to sing outside my window, FB and IG will not be mourned. I feel light as I step through life with a new red pedometer safety-pinned to my leggings (the pedometer frees me from carrying a “smart” phone to count steps). Michael, Marvin, and I amble down to the beach at Thetis Cove to watch the sky change. Rippled water reflects a bank of pink clouds. 

Thank you for reading. In the coming year, may you experience moments of lightness in a shadowy world. 

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Penguin.
Marris, Laura. 2024. The Age of Loneliness: Essays. Greywolf Press.
McCarthy, Michael. 2015. The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. New York Review Books.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. Recollections of My Nonexistence. Viking.

[i] From Wikipedia: The term mansplaining was inspired by an essay, “Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”, written by author Rebecca Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008. In the essay, Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had “heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year”—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit’s book. Solnit did not use the word mansplaining in the essay, but she described the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”.

A love to which there is no reply

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We recently spent three days in New York City.

As I read the last line of Mary Oliver’s poem “Heavy”—”a love to which there is no reply”—it occurred to me that this describes my love for NYC. You can love NYC, but NYC doesn’t love you back. NYC doesn’t actually give a shit about you; the city is completely self-absorbed, and that’s just fine. It’s all part of the city’s mystique, its swirling, pigeon-flocked, neon-lit-glass-and-steel, rapid-fire, whirling-dervish, creative vibration. 

We stayed at a sweet hotel in the Flatiron district, saw wonderful exhibits at the Whitney and the Met, watched Kenneth Branagh as King Lear, went to a comedy show where five hilarious stand-up comedians made me laugh for ninety minutes. I loved all of it, every minute. But a few small vignettes stay with me and keep breaking the surface of my thoughts.  

One dollar for an original print

In the Whitney Museum gift shop there’s a vending machine at one end where you can slide four quarters into the slots, push, and out pops an original print of some NYC iconic object or scene by Ana Inciardi. We put our quarters in, and now we own two tiny prints (2.5 inches by 3.5 inches): a black and white cookie and a NYC water tower. Inciardi is kind of genius, isn’t she? I don’t know if she profits from this—surely a print for a dollar is not netting her much money. But it is such a delightful thing to encounter: a vending machine dispensing original art. I want art vending machines to be installed everywhere, machines where you insert coins and receive poems, collages, small clay sculptures, watercolours, flash fiction, holograms, fabric art, tarot cards… Can you see it? 

The women’s washroom at Barnes and Noble 

To use the washroom at the Fifth Avenue location of Barnes and Noble, you must first purchase something. At the bottom of your receipt is the bathroom code. I bought The Temporary, a novel by Rachel Cusk, an author I have been wanting to read (the novel is wonderfully written, but very depressing). I then used the code to enter the women’s washroom, where there was a line up for the two working stalls (there always seems to be one stall with a scrawled “out of order” sign). A woman of colour (#1) exited one of the stalls, but the next person in line (white woman) looked in, then withdrew with a look of disgust on her face. Woman #1, was busy washing her hands. I said to woman #2, “what’s the problem? You’re not going in?” Woman #2, not making eye contact with me, said cooly, “they got stuff all over the seat.” I went into the stall and saw a fine spray of water droplets on the seat, likely created by the toilet’s back spray. Quickly removed with a wipe of toilet paper. The venomous way woman #2 said “they got stuff all over the seat” implied something terrible, perhaps excrement smeared everywhere. Her contemptuous reaction was so overblown and ridiculous—it felt symbolic of a rising wave of incivility and prejudice in (American) society. Ugh.

Four girls draw a statue

I loved the two exhibits we spent time with at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mandalas, Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet and Mexican Prints at the Vanguard. As we left the museum, passing through the Leon Levy and Shelby White court filled with ancient Greek and Roman statues, I saw four teen girls sitting on the marble floor in front of a bench, absorbed in drawing a statue of a nude man. This is what I will remember from the trip… their bowed heads, their silent engagement with the statue and with each other. A refreshing palate cleanser after bathroom woman #2’s remark.  Oh, and the Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1879): her face had me swooning.

Docent at the Met

We got a bit lost after the Mandala exhibit and asked a docent for help locate the gallery where the Mexican prints were on display. She led us rapidly through throngs of people, and I told her my mother had been a docent for years at the Art Gallery of Ontario (I had many moments of thinking of my mom in NYC—we visited the city together in my early twenties and saw, among other things, Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof). The docent explained she had to do highlights tours for two years before they let her specialize in anything. I asked her what she specializes in now. Arms and armour, she answered. And I get to have another speciality, she said, but I am taking a break. Evidently, it’s exhausting to learn all there is to learn about the arms and armour in the Met’s extensive collection. 

Pumpkin Pie at the Malibu Diner 

Before the show at Gotham Comedy Club, West 23rd and 7th Avenue, we ate dinner at the Malibu Diner across the street. An old-fashioned American diner with a huge, laminated menu, plenty of booths with red vinyl benches, low chrome stools facing the long counter. All of the waiters spoke Spanish among themselves. When our waiter brought my twice-baked potato, I said Gracias Señor, and then he started to speak to me in Spanish, and I had to explain that I only know a few words. He laughed. 

We paid for our meals and went to the club, but we were early. The woman said come back in half an hour; they were running late. Where to go? The cold wind bit our cheeks that night. So, we returned to the diner, where the waiters welcomed us like old friends. Come, come to the back, sit in this booth, where you won’t feel the wind that sneaks in whenever somebody opens the door. It’s warm back here. Our same waiter from before brought pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Sometimes eating dessert is the perfect way to pass time.

Shakespeare groupies

We took our excellent seats at the Griffin Theatre (at the Shed), where we had tickets to see King Lear. In front of us, two women about my age were taking off their coats and chatting. They started to engage us in conversation—where were we from? Did we go to a lot of Shakespeare plays? They had both lived in Atlanta and belonged to a Shakespeare reading group. When one of them moved to Baltimore, Maryland, they figured that was it—they wouldn’t see each other again. But then the Maryland woman saw an advertisement for King Lear with Kenneth Branagh and called her Atlanta friend. Why don’t I buy tickets? You can fly here. We’ll go together. So, Atlanta woman got a flight to Baltimore, and that morning they’d taken the train from Baltimore to Manhattan. We’re Shakespeare groupies, the blonde woman from Atlanta said. In April, we’re going to see Denzel Washington in Othello, said the Baltimore woman. Shakespeare groupies. I love it. 

Window shopping

NYC is the best place to window shop. No need to buy a thing; just absorb the kaleidoscope of artifacts and moods rippling through glass. Mannequins wearing weird t-shirts, everything Harry Potter, bolts of cloth, soaps, sculpture, ceramics, sexy candles, life messages, and rainbow bagels.

Until next time…

We walked through Chelsea along a sidewalk that bordered a basketball court. Kids were shooting baskets on the first day of December, laughing, talking. A flock of grey pigeons passed overhead while the sun winked from behind a fringe of clouds. A bubble of pure joy passed through my body and into my head, exploding into a private smile. I love you, New York City; no reply necessary. 

Gift Horse

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I was peeling off my wet swimsuit after a sauna. A woman sat on the bench near me, her girth spread wide, a walker placed next to her. She was holding forth to two other women, telling a tale of animals visiting people in hospital. First, it was about the little dog she’d take regularly to visit her mother, who, after many months of illness, had died. Stroking the soft fur gave her mother solace. And she’d heard somewhere that there was a horse. No, really, she insisted, there was this horse who visited hospitals. She’d heard that an orderly led the animal down a hallway, and the horse stopped at one room and wouldn’t budge until he’d visited the man lying there. The man was dying of cancer. 

One of the women was trying to get away from this monologue. You know how people stand at the ready, waiting for a small break in a stream of words so they can politely exit? She stood at the edge of the lockers, fully dressed, body ready to spring. The other woman, still in her swimsuit and sitting beside her large friend, seemed rapt. The rapt woman commented softly, “Oh, the horse could smell the cancer.” This remark seemed to be the thing that released the one who wanted to flee. She took off with a wave of her hand. 

So apparently, the horse spent a long time visiting the man. As I rolled my suit down over my damp breasts and belly, I imagined liquid brown eyes the size of dessert bowls, a fringe of moist, black lashes, the equine head leaning over the bed as the man’s transparent hand stroked the muzzle. The hospital bed would be high, high enough so they could have skin-to-skin contact, the chemo-ravaged man tilting forward to connect with the curling lip. A horse’s kiss. 

As I left the change room, the large woman was still talking about animals in hospitals. I think she’d moved on to other kinds of animals, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind: the image of an auburn horse with a white blaze on its forehead, a huge animal, perhaps 16 hands, rough mane flipped to one side, his bulging legs so close the dying man could run aching hands over those velvety pillars. I could see the horse nuzzling the man, and then standing patiently, quietly by the bedside. The clock ticks, the nurses click by, machines gurgle and beep. The horse stands, a living mountain, a witness to the man sleeping.

I thought of horses. We’d loved the horse books, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka. My aunt had a farm in Sacramento we visited as children; the horses were so tall, they scared me. The horses and ponies at the Children’s Farm in Tilden Park seemed more benign, gentle. And then, much later, at my father’s farm, Poco (tall and dark red) and Blackie (small, black of course, unpredictable) lived for a time. We visited them in the barn and the fields, our pockets filled with apples.

The image of the horse in the hospital stayed with me. How did he fit in the elevator? Is the story true? I didn’t want to look it up, to Google “horses in hospitals.” I wanted it to be just what it was, a tale overheard in a women’s change room, a scene in my mind I could replay over and over. 

The horses were gentle at the Children’s Farm, Tilden Park , Berkeley
My cousin and mother riding horses at Aunt Fran’s farm, early 1960s

I had a sauna because it’s something that delights me, being held in intense heat, my body melting against cedar boards. I’d opened a little piece of folded paper earlier in the day, and on it I had printed “sauna and hot tub.” On my dresser is a white ramekin filled with little pieces of paper. And on each piece, I’d written something I love to do, something that delights me, gives me pleasure, makes me happy. Swim, visit a thrift store, sing, coffee with a friend, sit on the beach, write, buy flowers, visit a library, ride my bike. I’d responded to an exercise in a self-help book by Richard Wiseman, Rip It Up. The book is about the “As If” principle (based on the work of psychologist William James), and the premise is that behaviour determines outcome: if you smile, you’ll feel happier. If you do things you enjoy, you’ll enjoy life more.

Self-help books usually over-promise and under-deliver. There’s no shortcut to living a good life. Meditate, work on being aware, practice gratitude and compassion. Exercise, eat well, connect with people and nature, right speech, life of purpose. All that. But there is something of value here, in this book that I took from a shelf at the Spiral Café. This exercise has you doing things you love to do more often—your behaviour determines an outcome of feeling good, appreciating your life. 

A couple of days after I heard the story in the change room, horses were still on my mind. I thought of the saying, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I never liked this adage . . . it seemed like a trap. Wasn’t it okay to politely decline an offering? Must you take everything people give you? Could you say, “I’m sorry, I don’t have room in my house for the [fill in the blank].” And then there’s the Trojan Horse. Had the Trojans examined that wooden horse before accepting it, they would have discovered the Greeks, their enemies, hiding inside. So surely, we should be looking gift horses in the mouth?  

But I started to see the aphorism another way, not about material gifts at all. Disappointment might hold a gift if you tilt it a little in the sun. Struggling to let go of a disappointment, I wrote to a friend about it. In her wisdom, she encouraged me to “let go, let go” and “just enjoy what comes your way.” I like the simplicity of that: “Just enjoy what comes your way.” The man in the hospital bed, whether real or fictional, enjoyed what came his way. He welcomed the gift of a horse, as rare as a unicorn, visiting him on his deathbed. He welcomed the horse as naturally as you welcome the visit of a beloved relative, which of course the horse was—a beloved relative. With pure gratitude, pure love. 

Poco, my dad, Brownie, my sister Kathryn, my son Nathaniel, and me: summer of 1995 at the farm

The Word Shed

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Sometimes a word rolls around in my mind for weeks. Lately, it’s “shed,” both noun and verb. I started to make notes about “shed” and its associations. When I saw the document file that I’d titled “The Word Shed,” I recognized a new meaning: my mind is a word shed. A space where I collect words, play with them, combine them, examine their denotations and connotations, milk their honey.

Shed the noun is a simple roofed structure, typically made of wood or metal, used as a storage space, a shelter for animals, or a workshop: a bicycle shed | a garden shed | a woodshed. Or a place to work. Last summer we met a couple at their yard sale, and they showed us the woman’s “She Shed” in the backyard. They’d built the small one-room shed during the pandemic: it was a place for her to work at home in peace and quiet. I’d never heard the term “She Shed” before. I like it better than “Man Cave.”

Michael’s drawing of an old shed located in my father and Marion’s sugar bush near Markdale, Ontario. We called it the “sugar shack.”

The Shed is a restaurant in Tofino where, two years ago on my sister’s birthday, I had a delicious salmon bowl that I recreated at home later. I knew the ingredients: salmon, quinoa, raisins, almonds, chopped apple, kale, white cheddar. I intuited a dressing of tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, honey, and yogurt. I discovered the recipe, handwritten on blue paper, in my recipe binder and realized that I’d somehow cared enough to reverse engineer the recipe, though I can’t remember writing it down.

I made the Salmon-Kale-Quinoa Bowl again the other night and it was delicious. I didn’t have white cheddar or puffed rice, so I used shaved parmesan and skipped the puffed rice.

The Shed restaurant invokes a homey feel. I remember being there with Jude and Michael, tucked into a cozy booth while rain spattered the windows and wind whistled outside. Like sitting in a warm shed on a stormy day. We walked on the beach after lunch in our rain gear. 

Over the years, we’ve had two sheds built on our property for storage, bicycles, and garden stuff. Now we’re moving and clearing out the sheds. I’d forgotten about the stuff I stored there. Out of sight, out of mind were boxes of old letters, some going back forty years; kids’ artwork, writings, and report cards; notes from university courses; my old journals. Sorting and shedding and shredding old papers over the last few months has been part pain, part joy, and sometimes so funny I laughed out loud.

Another shed: On December 1, we’ll be in New York City to see Kenneth Branagh in the role of King Lear at the Shed, “a new cultural institution of and for the 21st century.” Their website explains: “We produce and welcome innovative art and ideas, across all forms of creativity, to build a shared understanding of our rapidly changing world and a more equitable society.” After a run in London, England, Branagh is bringing the play to this exclusive U.S. engagement.

It’s months away, but of course we had to buy tickets early. It will be exciting to see Branagh play Lear in my favourite Shakespeare play. I am reading Helen Luke’s book Old Age, and the chapter on King Lear moved me, particularly when she refers to the two lines spoken by Lear to Cordelia in Act 5, Scene 3, “When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness.” Luke writes,

“If an old person does not feel his need to be forgiven by the young, he or she certainly has not grown into age, but merely fallen into it, and his or her ‘blessing’ would be worth nothing. The lines convey with the utmost brevity and power the truth that the blessing that the old may pass on to the young springs only out of that humility that is the fruit of wholeness, the humility that knows how to kneel, how to ask forgiveness” (p. 27). 

Lear’s story resonates because he shows us that shedding egotism and pride may be followed by an exquisite sense of humility. Many of us experience this as we grow older. Only after Lear is hollowed out by loss can he enjoin Cordelia to “live / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies.” Only after loss decimates us, do we feel an unusual lightness of being. So different from the lightness of youth, this lightness we purchase with grief. 

Shed your burden ~ watercolour by Madeline Walker

Then there’s the verb, “to shed.”

To rid oneself of superfluous or unwanted things or feelings…to give off, discharge, or expel, such as a cat shedding fur, a snake shedding skin, a tree shedding leaves. 

Shedding blood. Bloodshed. Viral shedding. We all shed tears. 

And don’t forget the intransitive verb, to woodshed: to practice a musical instrument, to work out jazz stylings, to go over difficult passages in a private place where you can’t be heard.

Isn’t it odd that the noun shed refers to a place where you store and keep and gather things, whereas the action word (transitive verb) means to let go of, release, slough off feelings, body parts, objects? These meanings are in tension with each other – one wants to keep, the other to release. 

But perhaps it isn’t so odd. The tension between the noun and the verb merely replicates the push and pull we feel in our lives between holding close and letting go. 

The Shed in Tofino: https://www.shedtofino.com

The Shed in Manhattan: https://www.theshed.org/program/302-kenneth-branagh-in-king-lear-by-william-shakespeare

Throttle down

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After my third accident, I decided throttles are my nemesis. First time was on my scooter, second and third times on my e-bike. Originally, my Marin Fairfax bike was not electric–just human powered. Last year, I had a Bafang motor installed to make commuting easier. But I didn’t expect to get a throttle with the install—it just “came with,” and I didn’t question it. After riding the bike for a while and experimenting with the throttle, I thought, this is too much and I don’t really need it. Five levels of assist are more than enough. Nonetheless, I started to depend on the throttle. It was like touching a magic wand to create delicious bursts of power that eased me into motion after a stop, pulled me up the steep hills, glided me along without pedalling.

On the day of the Pride Parade, I set out early for Douglas Street to capture a good spot to watch. Riding up and over the bridge, I slowed down to observe a great cloud of bright balloons approaching from the other side. After a few moments, I pressed my throttle to get a move on. What happened next was so fast and unexpected, I hardly know how to describe it. I hadn’t noticed that one of my handlebars had gotten tucked under a bridge railing. When I throttled, the bike jumped with a life of its own, and the seat swivelled, hitting me hard in the upper thigh. Suddenly, I was on the ground, the bike on top of me, with blood flowing from cuts on my hands. My thigh pulsed with pain. A couple stopped to help me up and righted my bike. Somehow, I got to the parade and watched for a while, but then realized I was in shock. Nothing an extra hot latté at Habit Coffee couldn’t cure. 

But seriously, the eggplant and banana bruise on my thigh was ugly and tender, and I limped for a few days. It took some time for the bruises to go away, the cuts to heal, and for my thinking to coalesce around throttles and what they mean. 

CHEK’s Tess van Straaten co-hosted the Pride Parade broadcast with local drag queen Gouda Gabor

In 2012, I bought a 50 cc scooter. So cute and fun! I loved it. But again, the throttle. I was on my way home from work in backed up traffic, daydreaming. Suddenly, I realized the car ahead of me had started moving a few moments before, and to catch up, I hit the throttle. But my wheel was turned, and the machine jumped. I was thrown to the ground, the scooter on top of me. I stopped traffic that day, ended up at the hospital, and received a sling and advice to keep my fractured arm quiet for several weeks. Shaken by the accident, I sold my scooter soon after that.

My beautiful scooter and me

Then there was the other e-bike incident when I throttled my bike on a gravel path. Big mistake. Again, I ended up flat out on the ground, bruised and shaky, with the bike on top of me. 

Throttle is a noun signifying the device controlling the flow of power to an engine. Also, it’s a verb: you throttle the throttle or (second meaning) you choke or strangle somebody. I started to think of how I might be using the throttle too much on my bike and in my life. I throttle to get the extra boost I think I need. Usually, I throttle without thinking, and then I run into trouble. But if I were to insert a pause, I might realize I don’t need the throttle. Throttling chokes my life. Increasingly, to throttle (act precipitously, riding a burst of power) leads me into discordant situations that I regret getting into. Doing the unnecessary thing, saying the wrong words.

Perhaps I’d be better off if my e-bike didn’t have a throttle at all. But still, I’d be throttling my life. I reflected on ways to stop doing this. Perhaps one of these will resonate with you: 

  • Don’t respond immediately to email or texts. Stop and think. What’s my responsibility here? Is what I am writing useful, timely, kind, necessary?
  • Don’t jump from one activity to another. You might like to pause for a moment and ask, “How do I feel now? What do I need?”
  • Stop manufacturing energy you don’t have. Don’t do that “one extra thing.” Just don’t.
  • Doing stuff is overrated. What about doing nothing? There is plummy goodness in sitting and observing life, engaging all senses.
  • And related to the last point, think about Rick Hanson’s “Taking in the Good” program in Hardwiring Happiness. (I recommend this book!) HEAL is an acronym for four steps: Have a positive experience. Enrich it by exploring all its crevices and beauties. Absorb it fully into your body and mind. Link it with negative experiences so when they arise, you rewire your negatives with positives.

This afternoon, I sat in the sun reading a wonderful book I got out of the library, Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland. He writes with candour about his experience of slowly going blind from Retinitus Pigmentosa. I am learning so much about blindness and disability in general. Marvin, our dog, lay near me on the browning grass, contentedly chewing a stick. I sipped from a glass of sparkling water, a lemon sliver among the bubbles. Leland’s prose struck me as honest and evocative; I absorbed his words with delight, laughing occasionally at the stories he told about his two-week experience at the Colorado Center for the Blind. The sun felt restorative. Sounds of the neighbourhood on a summer weekday floated over the yard. The occasional yelp from a dog, somebody’s car radio—the cheesy song “In the Summertime” by Mungo Jerry coming in and out of aural focus—the guy who lives behind us directing somebody in a high, bossy voice about how to find something. “It’s in the back of the cupboard—you really have to search for it.” I could smell the mint and basil in the garden box at my elbow, filling my head with spicy green. My whole body flushed with well-being and pleasure. Throttle down.

 

 

Summer reading | Summer music

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I’ve devoured most of Anne Tyler’s novels in the last two years. It was one of those felicitous discoveries—a wonderful, prolific novelist I hadn’t read yet. Yes, I’d heard the title The Accidental Tourist, but it wasn’t until I found Breathing Lessons in a little free library on Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, a couple of summers ago, that I became engaged, in love with her characters, the messy lives, flawed people and relationships, random and serendipitous comings-together, the tenderness, the realness, the love. I was hooked. I read all of the novels available from the library and bought a couple that weren’t, and then, just a few weeks ago, I found Ladder of Years in a box of free books across the street. What a find! Read this:

“When my first wife was dying, . . . I used to sit by her bed and I thought, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she’d been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she’d been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can’t tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people saw on the street looked so. . . temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn’t they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems.” 

From Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

I was disarmed by that paragraph. My perspective about my aging face swiveled to a fresh view: the temporary beauty of my youth was just a rough draft. This idea appeals to me not just because it helps me consider my face as closing in on the finished version, the real thing. It’s also because I work with writers, and I see lots of rough drafts, and I found the metaphor very appealing. Not only are our lives works-in-progress—our faces are also works-in-progress. The changes I see in mine are not to be read as signs of deterioration; they are signs of me becoming more me. 

Photo credit: Judith Walker

I am also reading Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Years ago, when Michael first used the verb “grok,” I asked him what it meant, and he told me about Heinlein’s science fiction classic. I’m finally reading it, discovering a new world, new words: grok (to fully understand, become one with), discorporate (to die), and water brother (someone you shared a drink of water with, which binds you together).

Valentine Michael Smith (the Martian in the novel) would have loved Vancouver Island Musicfest, teeming with water brothers. We were there last week-end, and still, I am digesting the banquet that it was. On Saturday morning, we found seats in the barn, one of the small stage venues. The place smelled of horses, and the was air thick with hay particles. On the stage, the musicians settled with their instruments—soundchecks, noodling. This was our first time hearing live music for a while—and I sat upright with anticipation. The workshop was well-titled “Great Guitars,” and soon I was swept into the greatness of a bunch of highly skilled and talented guitarists playing, singing, and sometimes jamming. 

Photo credit: Michael Carpenter

Meredith Axelrod, who blushed beet red when she got a name wrong, sang an old Carter Family song called “Hello Stranger”: “Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine/ Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine/ You are a stranger and you’re a pal of mine.” Her charming manner and amber voice were a tonic to start the show. Her second song featured the line, “I’m gon’ wash my face in the Gulf of Mexico.” She rose, raised her jean-clad leg, and set one foot on her chair, cradling her glowing Wyatt Wilkie guitar. I liked her old-timey manner and voice. I imagined her scooping salt-warm water from the Gulf and splashing it over her face between blonde wings of hair.

I liked everyone on the stage. Jeff Plankenhorn, wearing his special “Plank” cross between a lap steel guitar and an electric guitar, sang that even a blind man can tell if he’s walking in the sun. Jack Semple was there, showing off with his masterful classical gas. Dave Kelly reminded me of Clapton with his British accent and easy elegance. He played a Son House blues tune as a pigeon flew up into the rafters. Then there were the old guys at the back of the stage who—not needing to be seen or noticed—had tucked their egos into the back pockets of their jeans. They picked away, nodding and tapping, studying their instruments, heads down. Music has its own rewards. 

The star of the show was Melody Angel, guitarist and singer from the south side of Chicago. When she sang “Hey Joe,” Michael leaned over and said, “I think she’s channelling Jimi.” Her muscular voice growled up over the crowd, and we pulsed along with her guitar. She pushed notes up the ladder of sound, climbing, climbing, raising our energy. Michael’s lit-up face was plastered with a beautiful smile, and he wiped a tear from his eye. My throat was thick with emotion as I looked around at the performers and the audience, all of us gathering to grok this powerful medium of music, the great connector, the universal love potion. As we clapped and clapped some more, I was filled with sound, in love with the world

In the summer of 2011, Michael and I bought tickets to the Edmonton Folk Festival. We knew we were taking a chance—we’d met only two months earlier, and to spend so much time together was a quick, risky test of our compatibility. We drove through the mountains, stopping at cheap hotels and laughing a lot.

On the way, I got schooled in the songs of Stephen Fearing, and then we listened to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy—the whole album—loud. I’d never really heard Elton John until that day. At the festival, we swooned over Matt Anderson and Taj Mahal and got closer and closer to each other. Our love was just a rough draft then, and the music we shared on the way to Edmonton and at the festival was like the first version you write—filled with exploration. The discovery draft, we call it at the Writing Centre. More than a decade passed. And last week-end, at another music festival, we added some nice touches to the current draft. We shared music, and that’s like co-writing a paragraph. We move slowly, inexorably toward the final, finished version, becoming more ourselves each day. 

August 2011, Edmonton AB
July 2022, Courtenay BC

Daily sojourn

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I often despair of my monkey mind, the jumble of thoughts that keep me from noticing what’s present. At the same time, I appreciate my tangential mind. I love following its pathways through shadowy tunnels of white-flowering hawthorns. I seem to always turn a corner to find myself in an unexpected field of light. 

Today as I ate breakfast sitting at the kitchen table, I started to examine the ceramic trivet my father gave me years ago after a trip to Granada. The trivet is decorated with an Arabic design: a mandala in teal, navy, red, and cream. I love the waving flower petals that seem to be in motion, dancing in the wind. The Arabian design on the Spanish trivet took my mind to the poem I’d just been reading by St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), a mystic living in Spain after 700 years of Arab culture. St. Teresa was intimate with her God; you can feel it in her language. I re-read the lines,

A woman’s body, like the earth, has seasons;

when the mountain stream flows,

when the holy thaws,

when I am most fragile and in need,

it was then, it seems,

God came

closest.

God, like a medic on a field, is tending our souls

And then, a few lines down,

Why this great war between the countries—the countries—inside of us?

From “When the holy thaws” by St. Teresa of avila

My counsellor tells me that I aggress against myself—a pattern in my life. An ongoing war rages between the countries inside of me. I like to think of God as a medic tending to my wounds, lifting me off the battlefield, holding me close, bringing my countries to peace. I remembered the stage six mandala I drew recently, with a little girl and a dragon (my warring countries). I wrote tenderly to myself, “lay down your sword, little one.” Perhaps the holy is thawing. 

I’d snagged that wonderful book, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, from a cardboard box of free stuff. I love our neighbourhood. There is a little clearing across the street near the mail box where all of us take things we don’t want anymore. Neighbours and visitors from other parts of town come to adopt old things and bring them to their new homes—a brilliant system! 

This book caught my eye. What a great find. But boxes of free stuff and friendly dogs are not all that’s on offer here. The neighbourhood has other delights. Yesterday, I started work early in my home office in the basement, checking copy edits for a book. At 10, I took a break from the highly focused work. Michael, Marvin, and I walked down to the Gorge where a pop-up concert was in full swing. A local musician, Danielle Lebeau-Peterson, was playing her guitar and singing under a white tent. Danielle is the daughter of my eldest son’s first music teachers—Connie and Niels, and I marvelled at the “small world” (we’re all connected) feel of Victoria. Her mouth is like her mother’s.

The clouds in the sky threatened rain, but so far it was dry, and children and their parents gathered around Danielle as she sang and played, smiled and bantered. She knew songs from Disney movies, which delighted the younger crowd. The Tillicum-Gorge Association folks had set up a table with a big urn of Tim Horton’s coffee, cartons of donuts, and boxes of Timbits. There was a clipboard with paper and the question, “What do you love about our neighbourhood?” The cheerful woman behind the table filled my cup with coffee, and I took up the pen and wrote, “Everything.”

We sat on the grass listening, and when Danielle asked for requests, I called out “Blackbird,” that gem of a song written by Paul McCartney. It was one of my father’s favourites, and she played and sang it perfectly—her clear ringing voice floating up and over the Gorge: “You were only waiting for this moment to be free.” I smiled while my tears fell on the grass, and Marvin tugged at his leash, tried to smell the woman sitting next to us. This is the first Father’s Day I’ve lived without a father. But he was there in the high, truthful notes of the song. He is still with us. 

And now, I am still sitting here with the book of poems on one side of me and the trivet on the other, back from that pleasurable sojourn, ready to fill the hummingbird feeder with sugar water and play with the dog.  I love my mind and my heart. I love the rich stuff of daily life that produces all of these memories, feelings, and thoughts. The tangents take me unexpected places, but they always lead me back home to love and beauty.  

Acquainted with grief–and joy

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The other night, we watched the Bach Consort ensemble perform Handel’s Messiah (Knowledge Network). I’ve heard the Messiah hundreds of times, but this time one line resonated especially—Gaia Petrone, mezzosoprano singing, “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3) Yes, Jesus was acquainted with grief. And as we traverse our later years, don’t we all become well acquainted with grief? In the last six years the losses just keep on coming, so grief has become an intimate familiar to me. 

And yet, there’s joy! The chorus sings “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). My whole body is engulfed with joy tempered by grief; tears stream down my face. My intellect has no chance to do its fancy override of emotions, has no opportunity to ridicule me: You’re not Christian, Madeline, why so moved by this, you silly? The analytical brain successfully bypassed, I am immersed in the bittersweet joy­sadness of the words, bathed by a sense of the sacred: vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows and flowing frescoes of a Viennese cathedral. The possibility of God. The swell of triumphant sound fills both church and body. 

The past rolls in. I go way back and find myself sitting beside my mother who gifted me with her love for classical music. We sink into the wine-red velvet seats of a hushed concert hall.  It was 1983, and I had my first job after graduating with a BA in English: I was secretary to the head engineer at the newly built Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto. There was one marvelous perk that kept me showing up at the gloomy subterranean office: free concert tickets. When I got tickets for the Toronto Symphony performing Beethoven’s Ninth and invited my mother, she was thrilled. During the final movement, as the four soloists and choir sang the “Ode to Joy,” I turned to her and saw her cheek wet with tears, her dark eye sparkling with complicated joy. Just as my father retreated into jazz to feel his feelings, classical music was the vehicle for my mother’s deepest emotions. Many times, I caught a glimpse of her crying as she sat on the living room couch, listening to a moving passage from a symphony or quartet or aria. As I wept last night over the Messiah, I felt our tears intermix. We are connected. 

Papa playing his beloved bass; Mama in Berkeley with her acoustic

I noticed another sweet outcome from watching the Messiah: the opportunity to hug an old friend no longer with us. One of the second violinists resembled Hanna, who died in 2018. I went to sleep with that image of the violinist merging with the face of my dear friend: wide grin, glasses, brown bob laced with grey. When I met her in the dream, she felt real as anything, and I stayed for a while in her warm, familiar embrace. I love that I can still access my lost ones in the dream world. 

So, in a few weeks the year rolls to a close. Last December I wrote about all the things I had accomplished during the year—sewing and writing projects, starting my business. What did I accomplish this year? I put one foot in front of the other every day. This December it feels like more than enough to just write a few paragraphs and give thanks for the good things in my life. 

The Walker Sisters, circa 1963, Berkeley California

In August my eldest sister and niece moved from Yellowknife to Nanaimo. The three Walker sisters haven’t lived in such proximity since the 1980s in Toronto. Our closeness brings me comfort and happiness. 

Walking the dog day in, day out, has given order to our lives. Sky and earth, weather, sun, moon, trees, and birds break through my orbit of self-absorption, and I am grateful for them all. To stand in rain puddles and watch the fast scud of grey clouds, cormorants flying low over the steel-gray Gorge—is to feel alive. 

Although my writing group only met a few times this year, I appreciate each member. Late one recent afternoon, we sat in a beautiful room as the winter light slanted through the tall windows, Japanese oranges in a brown bowl, our faces rapt as we listened to one another read our work. We need stories now, more than ever. 

This was a year for intake rather than output. I didn’t sew or write much. I read voraciously and watched a lot of television. Grateful to the authors whose words I enjoyed this year, too many to list. But three memoirs stand out for me. I loved poet Elizabeth Alexander’s narrative The Light of the World about her marriage to artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, his sudden death and her grief. She writes with the poet’s delicacy and attention to detail, and her grief/joy is palpable on each page. 

Vivian Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, about her fraught relationship with her depressed mother, Bess Gornick, resonated with me. Vivian struggles for independence from Bess while loving her with the potent mix of passion/compassion limned with hatred and resentment that seems particular to some mother-daughter bonds. 

Perhaps you have to be a Margaret Drabble lover or a lover of puzzles to appreciate this one (I am the former). In The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, Drabble leads us through her lifelong fascination with puzzles, mixing in portraits of family members, tidbits of the history of puzzles, and asides about memory, writing, and life. A circuitous maze-like quality to the writing brings form and content into alignment.

And so many good stories streaming on television. I was grateful for a daily escape from reality through hours and hours of Grey’s Anatomy, No Offence, Pretty Hard Cases, Succession, Shetland, The Chair, Shtisel, Lupin, and many more. . .

I look forward to the shortest day of the year and the return of the light. Thank you for reading, dear people. One foot in front of the other.

Grief’s flat feet

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My dad, 1927-2021, looking over his land soon after they bought the farm.

We walked slowly Thursday morning because overnight, recycling boxes and bags heaped with cans, bottles, cardboard, and newspaper had appeared at the curb. Blue splashes up and down the street that Marvin had to investigate, and so our walk slowed to a shuffle. He snuffled like a pig rooting for truffles, straining at the leash to lick the pizza box, to reach the Friskies can with a smidgen of catfood left on the rim. The night before, during his last walk of the day, he’d let out a volley of piercing barks at a pile of recycling across the street. Perhaps to his eyes, in the dark, the mound of stuff piled high above the blue box was a threatening mammal.

Early September’s morning chill, high scudding clouds above, and a Northern Flicker playing hide and seek in a hawthorn tree, his red head popping in and out of sight. The street is quiet—just the distant thunder of the McKenzie interchange as a blur of cars crosses into town. I am grateful to work at home, no need to commute. Instead, I love these 7 a.m. walks. Something in a recycling box caught my eye. Neatly folded on top of a pile of newspapers was a section of Saturday’s Globe and Mail, folded to the crossword puzzle. Every clue solved; every box filled with a neatly penciled block letter. Perfection. Did my puzzle-solving compatriot struggle over it as much as I had? 

I felt connected to that person—their careful block letters different from my scribbled slanty ones, but we both finished the thing. Did they do it quickly, or did they stretch out the experience into Sunday or even farther down the week, relishing it? Did they approach the task methodically or fill in random clues? Did they ask for help or go it alone? Dictionary or no dictionary? Google or purely old school?  

Marvin ate half of my pencil.

Think of all of us across the nation who turn to the crossword first thing on Saturday. Sharp number 2 pencil. Or maybe a mechanical one. Do some confident people use pens? Fresh white eraser by Mars. Or a pink Dixon, perhaps? We sit in armchairs, on couches, sprawled on deck chairs, scrunched on buses and subways, drinking lattes in coffee shops. All of us, together in the challenge.

My mother did crosswords daily for the last 22 years of her life. They helped fill blocks of morning time after her mandatory retirement from her job as a lecturer in art history at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. I found a letter from her dated February 1997. She had just received a package I’d sent intended to cheer her up: 

“I didn’t realize my depression was so obvious. It isn’t a deep depression. It is simply that I no longer have an audience and no longer get paid for doing something I enjoy. The awful thing is that as soon as a person retires, he/she loses status. I notice it when I talk to people at Ryerson . . . They seem extra kind and sort of smile at me and ask me what I’m doing, etc. I smile back and try to talk glowingly of having time to read, etc. pretending that it’s absolutely great. And I know, as I’m doing it, that they know I’m putting on an act. . . So, I’m trying to develop a new lifestyle as a person with time to do those things I really enjoy. The difficulty is to distinguish what it is that I enjoy doing! Meanwhile, I do crossword puzzles, which is new for me and I’m getting pretty good at it (usually at breakfast), and it’s very nice to have the leisure not to have to rush.”

I started doing the Saturday crossword soon after my mother died in 2019. I thought they were too hard at first, and so I’d abandon them quickly. I have a healthy vocabulary, and I love language, but the crosswords seemed like something else. They’re filled with puns and tricks, and it seemed you had to be part of the in-crowd to get them: both hip to idiomatic English across the decades and savvy about current cultural trends. I’m just too literal, I thought, and what I know fills such a narrow groove. But then the challenge started to intrigue me. Now I look forward to the Saturday paper. After reading the headlines and the obituaries, I find the crossword, fold it into a nice rectangle, and begin.

All of this is a preface to say, I’ve had no will to write. Nothing seems worth writing about, these days. Life has a flat, fallow quality. Nothing’s important enough. Although there’s plenty of big bad news—pandemic, systemic racism, climate change—I don’t feel equipped to talk about any of it. 

So, I push myself to finish this rather silly piece, a blog post about something as quotidian as the crossword puzzle. I stop and pause often to ask, “Why bother?” Why bother indeed. But it’s just that writing something, anything, seems as if it might be the antidote to the flat way I feel. 

My thoughts return to my mother, sitting on the loveseat in her high-ceilinged living room, wrapped in a thick robe, blinds down, doing the crossword. Filling the hours. Her sleek black cat, Cicero, is curled up beside her. She is deep into it, puzzle dictionary next to her on the small rococo marble-topped table, Schubert’s Trout Quintet playing softly on the CD player. Missing the old nicotine rush, the sweet suck of smoke into her lungs, she holds the pencil like a cigarette for a moment. I miss her. In that old letter from ’97, she wrote, 

“I’m probably exaggerating, but I have been in their situation [those Ryerson people who acted extra kind toward her] when a colleague retired and made her appearance at the annual fashion show. She smiled too much and talked of having time to sew and do the things she enjoyed. I remember trying to avoid her because I think I was embarrassed and felt sorry for her because she was no longer part of those of us who were still doing important things—not just passing time.” 

Mama and me, back in the day.

Doing important things v. Just passing time. . . I flinch at my mother’s binary of “important” paid work and “just passing time.” But something in what she wrote resonates with me. I work part time as a self-employed editor, but lately, I often feel as if I’m just “passing time.”

Maybe this is just the flatness of grief. Flat-footed grief walks over me. After many losses, I am a fallow field—nothing growing here.  

I have been reading memoirs about aging parents. . . Elizabeth Berg writes in hers, “I think as long as a parent is alive, it’s easier to feel young.” After my father died at the end of June, I’ve felt old, flat, fat, tired, sad. Nothing feels important. Especially not the weekly crossword. And yet, musing over the word problems gets my brain churning slowly, raking over clues like a pitchfork turning organic matter in the compost heap. I feel connected to crossword puzzlers across Canada. I imagine, for example, an old guy in Mahone Bay—let’s say he’s 82, goes by Ernest Nickerson and sits in the kitchen nook with morning coffee, chewing the end of the pencil as he tries to remember what a 10-sided shape is (79 across, 7 letters). 

From our 2012 honeymoon in NYC

Remember geometry class in tenth grade? That’s where Ernest first noticed the girl who would be his wife, in geometry class at Mahone Bay School. As he digs deep for the name of a ten-sided shape, another thought is unearthed from that compost heap: Darlene’s thick red hair, held back with tortoiseshell barrettes. He couldn’t take his eyes off those red wings in front of him during class, couldn’t stop imagine pulling his fingers through that rough, dark crimson hair. He unclicks the delicate barrettes to let those wings loose to fly. If Darlene were alive now, Ernest thinks, she’d lean into my ear, her coarse grey hair tickling my nose, skinny shank up against mine, and whisper, “Decagon, Ernest. You knew that, honey.” 

I write to get momentum, to feel connected to people, to create worlds. To feel connected to you, and Ernest, and Darlene. So, if you are a maker, a creative person, (we all are, each in our own way) remember: The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made by you. Even if it doesn’t seem important. Believe me, it’s important. It connects you to life. The fallow field regenerates.

Memoirs about aging and dying parents that I recommend:

  • Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
  • Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story
  • Elizabeth Hay, All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir
  • Elizabeth Berg, I’ll Be Seeing You.
From a later trip to NYC, March 2019, after my mother died. Sugar skulls in a restaurant display.

For the love of books

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Five days ago, I woke with an exquisite feeling of all-body all-soul nourishment. A rare feeling. My vivid dream was that I was wandering through a used bookstore—a warren of small book-filled rooms bathed in soft amber light. Lots of burnished wood, small upholstered chairs at the end of each row of bookshelves to sit and pore over the pages of an illustrated Alice in Wonderland or Daumier’s lithographs. The dark orange spines of  Penguin editions beckon me, I walk dreamlike down corridors of books, taking volumes from shelves, paging through them, enjoying the quiet warmth of this place, just a clock ticking somewhere. It reminded me a bit of Bastion Books, one of the few remaining independent used bookstores in Victoria, with its welcoming nooks and crannies. In my dream, I wander to the far end of this bookstore to a small doorway then enter a compact room where my three sons sit on straight-backed chairs as if expecting me, all smiling as I approach. They rise to hug me. We embrace without words, and I feel their height and strength flow into me. And then I am awake, full to the brim.

The dream was significant to me now because I miss both hugging my sons and access to books (I haven’t explored the relationship between those two things…). Although I can talk to my sons on the phone, through text, or video-chat, their physical hugs are off limits. The libraries are shut, and the bookstores are too—they allow for online ordering, but the brick and mortar stores are locked, and I cannot materially browse, an activity that sustains me. In a synchronous turn of events, I came across The Booksellers, a documentary available online via Cinecenta, the movie theatre at the University where I work. Cinecenta is another small business suffering financially during this pandemic. Their theatre is dark and shuttered, the snack bar where I got so many coffees is now deserted. So they partnered with Kinosmith to offer this documentary. After clicking a link provided on their website and paying by credit card, I was able to watch a fascinating exploration of booksellers in New York City. This history of the rare and antiquarian book trade in that diverse city was peppered with interviews with some of the unusual and eccentric people that devote their lives to books as precious objects.

After watching the doc, I started to think about how my constrained access to books lately due to Covid-19 has actually enriched my life in an unforeseeable way. Because I didn’t have my usual broad choice of reading material, I started to forage a little more intently in the free little libraries in the neighbourhood. Some cautious neighbours had removed all of the books from the shelves of their little libraries and posted signs explaining that they would re-stock after the risk of virus contamination had decreased. Thankfully, others had kept their books on the shelves, and I found myself returning to these spots over and over and taking books I wouldn’t normally be interested in.

IMG_1608A few weeks ago, I picked up Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower from the cute little library on the front yard of a house around the corner. “Take a Book, Leave a Book” was painted in curlicued white letters across the blue cupboard doors. When I was a teenager, I decided I wasn’t interested in science fiction. Somehow, I only wanted to read things that were “real.” So I turned to 19th century British novels and early-mid 20th century American writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Of course I have cast my reading net much wider since then, but I still don’t tend to be drawn to science fiction or its sister genres, fantasy and horror.  Yet, as I dug into Butler’s novel, I became engrossed by the young female narrator/ protagonist Lauren who is bent on survival in a dystopian America of the future. Her warrior spirit drives her to escape from the murder of her family and razing of her home in a gated community in Southern California and form a motley tribe of people all searching for safety. Due to her mother’s drug abuse, Lauren was born with hyperempathy, a disability that has her feeling other people’s pain to a debilitating degree. She develops a religion called Earthseed, whose God is Change because the only thing we can be certain of is that everything changes. What felt eerie about this novel, written in 1993, was that Butler’s portrayal of a dystopian nation read as strongly resembling Trump’s America.

After finishing The Parable of the Sower, I felt I must read the sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998); however, only in a world of magic would I find that book in a free little library. So I borrowed Michael’s Kindle and splurged on the e-book, and I am devouring it now. I’m still in the early chapters, and I am curious what will happen to the tyrannical megalomaniac president whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.” I am not kidding—this president really is a character in a novel published in 1998.

IMG_0812I always prefer books as objects over digitized texts. I love the feel and look of books. I love to explore marginalia and marks, run my hands over bindings, examine tatters and pages folded over, text that has been underlined. The other day I picked up a well worn novel (The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli) from a free library that had written in the inside cover in elegant cursive, “Property of” followed by a rectangular stamp: The Cavern Hotel and Café, El Nido, Palawan. I Googled this mysterious place and discovered it is a hotel offering pod accommodations in the Philippines. So interesting. (The next day, Trip Advisor wondered if I would like to see the current rates for staying the Cavern.)

Even though I recycle books through free libraries and friends, I do keep a library at home of books that I love: poetry and feminism, how to write and teach writing, graphic novels and memoirs, and twentieth-century American novels I had the privilege of studying and teaching for a short while.  But lately I have appreciated how the e-book allows me to read while Michael sleeps. With the slim Kindle propped up under the covers as I curl around it in IMG_0788 2the dark, I enter into the world of Butler’s novel, where kindness is the last good thing, where people band together in tribes because love and human relationships are all that we have, and where impermanence is the only truth. Wait a minute, all of that is sounding familiar. Is it really the future, or is it now?

I wake up every morning in this dream-like world, and I say to myself, “I wonder what will happen today?”