What's Going On

Fly on the Wall

From recently overheard conversations:

Seven-year old girl to eight-year old boy: Well ACTUALLY aliens really do exist, you know.

10-year old girl to sister, we'll call her Sophie, while standing on a very sandy beach: "Sophie! We need sand!"

Which puts me in mind of a report I got from school: "Merlin was a bit whiney in art today so he went outside to draw" because you wouldn't be drawing in art class, right?

Is it bisque?

There is a cream-coloured Volkswagon Beetle that lives on a street near my house. It looks like a kitchen appliance.

Is it safe to be happy now?

I was listening to the commentators yesterday jinxing the Democrats by predicting a big victory for them. How would that feel, I wondered, if they did win? Ecstatic jubilation, I decided. Jubilation. Now, what would that feel like? Lots of happy jumping around and shouting woooo, I guess. Giddiness, laughter, joyous cursing. But no, I thought. That's not an experience Democrats get to have. That's only for Republicans in this dark America we inhabit.

Of course, in a two party system the odds are going to eventually break for one party or the other, eventually. Not like where I come from where you reliably have at least 3 major parties, plus a collection of others. For a while, one of the major parties split itself into 2, so then it got really complicated.

In my early youth, my first blush of politicization, I was on the side of the winners as I was a rabid Trudeaumanic. That's going back a bit, when Canada was all groovy with national parties, like our Centennial Year "100 years of Con-fed-er-ation, everybody sing together!" and Expo '67, and a prime minister who was a international media star with a bold rebellious streak, dazzling intellect , long hair, and fast cars.

Then, the bloom off the rose, I settled into a life-long pattern of voting for the New Democratic Party or the NDP. To explain the NDP: if people in San Francisco could vote in Canada, they would vote NDP. The NDP occasionally win provincially, but don't hold power for long, and federally they are pretty dismal. Years of voting for these perennial losers left me bleak and hardened about elections.

I'm not used to my side winning. I feel...numb.

Surely in a day or two the gloating will set in. We have the House. A woman is Speaker. Bush and Rove are humbled. Ahhh, I feel it creeping in already. It feels...good.

Too Fast

Bob Dylan looks up at me from the floor of my friend’s bathroom. He’s on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and he’s looking old. His eyes are deep inside folds of wrinkly flesh, his lips are thin, and his cheeks sunken. A fine mesh of lines patterns his face. He doesn’t look bad for a 65-year-old man, but I am so confused. Isn’t Bob only in his forties? Still hale and robust and firm of flesh?

When did Bob Dylan get old? You look away and you look back and suddenly everyone is looking old. My mother, who is now 85, looks decrepit. I keep thinking of her, how she looked as we drove away to the airport, how she looks smiling tremulously out from a picture I took before we left. Someone, somehow, replaced my vigorous, strong-willed parent with a frail, confused, passive old lady.

I have lots of issues with my mother, issues which have faded some, in tandem with her vibrancy, from raging hatred to pronounced irritation. I can still barely stand to be in the same room as her, never mind the same country. But there were things I always admired about her, like her strength, both physical and mental.

My mother kept our family going through the decades of my father’s drunken binges, perhaps not all that successfully in the long term, but at least we always had a place to live and food on the table and festivities at the proper calendar moments. She worked for many years as a nurse and was careful with her money, so we were able to live a reasonable lower-middle class existence in a small, uncomplicated town in Northwestern Ontario. She maintained a large vegetable garden, hauling water by hand from a cistern through the long dry summers, keeping it going through sheer force of will when the well was running low and rain was months away. All winter she determinedly shoveled mountains of snow out of the long driveway and filled dozens of rigged-up receptacles with suet and peanut butter to keep the hardy northern birds coming to visit her. I never grew up with the sense that women were passive or helpless or dependent.

I grew up with a role model of a woman who was capable and competent in the real world. That was the good part. The less stellar aspect of her performance as woman was that she brought that same endurance and competence to her role as a codependent enabler of a raging alcoholic. Between the two of them, my parents completely messed up my brother and left me wrapped up in tangles of fear. But I never saw my mother as weak or confused, for which I am glad.

So how odd to see her now, teetering around clinging to a walker, unable to hear or make sense of much of what she does register. Time is taking her in agonizing slow motion along an inevitable trajectory from youth and health to infirmity and death. I think of my friend and her mother’s shockingly fast descent along that same path over just a few months. She took the trip in weeks that my mother is making over decades. Life made a time lapse movie of my mother’s descent and played it back for my friend’s mother at fast speed, the jerking choppy images flying past, a woman in motion, shriveling up and finally disappearing.

The same speed of time passing seems to be happening in my house as well, as I realize that the pants I bought my eight-year-old son two weeks ago are already too short for him. He looks at times like a miniature teenager, the baby-round softness melting away before my eyes. It is all going too fast. I want it all to stop, just for a day or two, so I can catch my breath and try to believe it is true.

Winnipeg weather

The weather report. You need to convert the temperatures to Farenheit. This is why the city is also known as Winterpeg.

An unpublished letter

It's a bit ranty, and out of date by now, but still, people...

On the editorial pages the reliably liberal commentators are being reliably liberal, this time flagellating the Democrats for milking the Mark Foley scandal for everything it's worth. The horror! It's so rude, and isn't poor form to use Americans' homophobia to win an election? Is this the liberal thing to do? Well, I say yes. It's time for liberals to step up to the plate and get their hands dirty. The reason this scandal is a legitimate partisan target is that Representative Foley was a prominent Republican party member who campaigned vigorously and effectively for the party whose Presidential candidate won largely because of its gay bashing over same-sex marriages. This is also the same party who won't let you see naked people on TV or let you hear naughty words, for the sake of the children, but thinks it's just peachy if its members solicit sex from children over the Internet. The party also allowed Mr. Foley to continue as chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children even though they knew that he was seeking to exploit children himself for his own sexual pleasure. Yes, it's time for the Democrats to sully their honor and deliver us, and our children, from the GOP.

Are We Not Sheep?

Listening to my Mozart CD this morning on the am drive to my son's school. It is some sort of choral piece, lots of tripping up the stairs vocalizations that are reminiscent of Handel: "And the government shall be upon his sho-ho-ho-ho-ho-houl-der."

It is overcast and the streets are still wet with last night's rain. The air smells of damp earth and vegetation and makes me want to go to Hawaii. It is beginning to feel like what passes for winter in Northern California. We are beginning the long, slow, inevitable slide into the red, green, and gold Holiday Season. First a stop at the orange and black of Hallowe'en, then keeping the orange going into autumnal earth tones and strange oddity of American Thanksgiving, and then the descent into madness with blood sacrifice celebrations of trees and light and all manner of sensory abandonment.

A dim craving for the sharp ache of cold prickles at the base of my skull.

Knock Knock

Hallowe'en is now less than a month away.

Deadwood City, as is its wont, is already reving up for a decorative extravaganza, and some houses have been sporting the ghoulish and the orange since last weekend.

At our house, there will be no Hallowe'en displays until my birthday is safely out of the way.

Then my son and I will string the porch with fake cobwebs, pipe cleaner spiders, a sheeted ghost, and other sundry items that suggest spooky otherworldness.

It's really my favourite holiday of the year, a celebration of sugar and anonymity, two of the things I enjoy most in life.

Mozart in the Morning

I have unexpectedly and recently become a Mozart fan. I listen to my new free Mozart sampler CD and think, why did anyone in the West bother writing music for the next 200 years until they invented the electric guitar?

The CD came in the mail. If I subscribed to the CD-of-the-month club, I would get A Free Gift, plus more CD's in the mail that I would have to pay for. I immediately threw out all the paperwork, but kept the CD. It's not bad, and came with a nifty little booklet that put Mozart into better perspective for me. Did you know Mozart was around at the time of the American War of Independence? That he was born a few years before Handel died? The booklet had a brief biography and a painting of Salz burg at the time Mozart lived there.

I enjoy listening to our free CD in the mornings as I drive my son to school. We hit a few traffic backups every day, but with my Mozart filling up the car, I remain placid and unconcerned.  A friend told me that there have been studies that show that Mozart music is directly wired into the lizard brain. You can Google this even, although you need to type in "Mozart" and "limbic" to get anything helpful. This makes me wonder, how this could be. How could a brain come into existence that so perfectly mapped our most primal mind? How could his music be so intricate, and complex, and cerebrally stimulating, yet so sweet it makes you want to weep while you wait for the light to change? It's like his whole brain was some sort of metabrain that came into existence in a human skull, in a miracle of mystery on a rival with animals that change colour with the seasons and antimatter.

I was also wondering why Mozart, why now? I normally hate classical music, with its turgid sawing violins, choppy rhythms, claustrophobic wall of sound, and irritating melodrama. My friend reminded me that I had once told her I hate classical music because that's all my mother played when I was growing up. That and Broadway show music, which I perversely don't mind at all. I speculated that perhaps my mother didn't play that much Mozart.

Thinking about it now as I write this, I wonder if maybe its because I have grown old enough to forget the things that made my childhood so bleak even as I remember more and more specific events about it. Not the dramatic moments, which are seared in there, but all the boring everyday things that will crowd my conversation as I grow older and older. You know, the stories about the walk to the corner to catch the bus in the 40 below zero blizzard conditions kinds of stories.

Somehow, it seems the emotional content of those other memories has started to fade away. Not just the merciful blur phenomenon, where the painful things are hidden safely in the dark, but in a calm and distanced sort of way. I find myself thinking absently along these lines more often: Yes, it was traumatic and all fucked up, but oh well, I mustn't forget to buy cat food today.

Anyway, I recommend a nice Mozart CD for the morning drive, if you are so unfortunate as to have to endure such a thing. You may even want to sing along.

Grrrrr part 2

A minor incident at my son's school, subsequently resolved, left me wanting to kill everyone involved and sue their estate.