Author: carin

knee deep in coffee cups

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Most days I take a walk through a ravine near my house. I go there with the intention of breathing deeply, letting my shoulders drop a little while I focus on the birds, the sometime deer or fox. More and more often, however, I find myself focussing instead on the ever increasing amount of debris along the way. Always a puzzling sight. Makes me wonder what sort of person, having decided to spend some time in the beauty and peace of nature, then decides to bung their garbage at it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I’ve come to anticipate it; I keep my coat pockets stuffed with bags, hardly notice the birds some days.

And before anyone shrugs and says Ah, kids! What can you do? it’s not kids that are responsible for the majority of it. Most of the traffic is adults, lots of dog-walkers especially, and most of the debris these days, I’ve noticed, is take-out coffee cups.

Not that I’m saying anything.

Except this:

1) What is wrong with you People Who Can’t Take a Walk Without Coffee and Then Decide You Can’t Be Bothered Hanging on to the GD Empty Cup Until You Get to a Bin/Car/Home?

and,

2) Tim Horton’s, Coffee Time, Second Cup, Starbucks (for starters): here’s an idea—how about spending a few cents on an anti-littering campaign or two? Not that the disgusting habits of the population are your fault, but much of the dreck all over our streets, peering at us from ditches, advertising the next sale—does have your name on it.

Surely you feel at least some responsibility to clean it up…

As must our governments.  Surely.

Maybe they’d all welcome letters chock full of ideas? Here’s one: maybe run a nationwide contest for ideas.

Whatever. The point is we can’t just keep throwing this stuff around. And no, it’s not a small thing in the face of larger problems. It’s about respect: for the earth, animals, neighbours, strangers. And that’s not insignificant because if we can’t respect what’s in our own tiny space, no wonder we have larger problems elsewhere.

So, short of putting garbage bins on every corner (though not a bad idea), we need to get creative in changing the way we think.

One of the best anti-litter campaigns I’ve heard of hails from Texas where it seemed impossible to get the locals to stop littering until they were persuaded that it was not themselves, but the no-good, low-down, tourists and other out-of-state varmints (I may or may not be paraphrasing), that were the problem. The move not only convinced many locals to stop littering (not wanting to be put on the same level as tourists) but also increased a sense of ownership and pride in their surroundings. And it’s still going strong.

Doesn’t it just warm the heart to see the power of marketing—the power of anything—put to good use?  There is hope.

grownups from the inside and the outside

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A boy draws a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant (from the outside). He proudly displays it to the adults, but they see only a hat.  

So he draws another picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. This time from the inside.

The adults advise him to give up drawing boa constrictors of any kind and to devote himself to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar instead.

“Thus it was that I gave up a magnificent career as a painter at the age of six.”

The boy becomes a pilot and throughout his career spends much time with grownups.

“I have seen them at very close quarters which I’m afraid has not greatly enhanced my opinion of them. Whenever I met one who seemed reasonably clear-sighted to me, I showed them my drawing No 1, which I had kept, as an experiment. I wanted to find out whether he or she was truly understanding. But the answer was always: ‘It is a hat.’ So I gave up mentioning boa constrictors or primeval forests or stars. I would bring myself down to his or her level and talk about bridge, golf, politics and neckties. And the grown-ups would be very pleased to have met such a sensible person.”

So begins Antoine de St.-Expury’s, 1943 classic, The Little Prince, about a pilot who crashes his plane in the desert and meets a prince who tells him he has travelled from another planet. The prince recounts his adventures, the strange people he met on his journey, the flower he loves and the baobab trees that threaten it.

The story, read as a children’s book is simple.

The real joy, however, is to read it as an adult book, taking pleasure in the satire, the layers of meaning in every sentence, and the revelations about the human condition, all best appreciated through the prism of age.

Children will miss the point entirely.

And that, of course, is the point.

Adults and children see the world differently. But who can say which is the ‘true’ perspective? Bottom line: we have much to learn from each other.

This is the kind of book that ought to be read regularly, and at different ages, as a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously and to hang on to some of that magical childlike wisdom we all once had, ensuring that we can at least entertain the possibility that what appears in every way to be a hat, may very well be a boa constrictor—from the outside.

for miep and judy

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

 

A small tribute to two women who were born a month apart, who each lived more than a hundred years, and died a month apart.

Miep, the person who aided Anne Frank and her family, and who died on January 11, a month short of her 101st birthday.

And Judy, my one hundred year old friend in Naples, Florida, who spent a big chunk of her life as a journalist—managing the trick of being both a lady and a ‘dame’ at a time when most women were trying to manage the trick of being  June Cleaver.

After a heart attack in her nineties, Judy moved herself into a seniors’ residence and when, eventually, she found it too hard to walk, she accepted a wheelchair with a smile and a shrug, saying that if you lived long enough, chances were you’d eventually lose it “from either the neck up or the neck down.”

“I got lucky,” she said, like not walking was a gift.

She kept her eyesight and every one of her marbles right to the end and never lost her love of reading or telling a good story.

She didn’t have much to give, but always found something to send you home with: a stuffed toy she’d won at bingo, tic tacs, a lemon drop.

Eventually, she moved to a nursing home and practically ran her floor, keeping tabs on people, making sure others, younger but less able than she, got what they needed—the glass of water, the magazine, a hand to the loo—when they needed it. No doubt the staff thought she was a pain in the ass at times, but one they’d want around if it was their mother in the room next door.

Judy loved a dinner invitation and never said no to a couple fingers of bourbon.

She believed that people were essentially decent, that life, despite its madness, was good—and in Judy’s orbit, it was, and people were.

She died in her sleep last month, the day after her 101st birthday.

                *

“I want to get on; I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. Van Daan and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!  I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.”
(From—The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank)

things to do (and not do) with ice

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At lunchtime I passed a group of children in fat snowsuits who were noisily, happily, sliding on patches of ice in a schoolyard until someone (a schoolyard lunchtime ice monitor?) came out and shouted:

“Stop sliding on the ice! Sliding is NOT ALLOWED.”

As I walked by, I wondered how old you had to be in order to slide on ice without someone yelling at you. I kicked a block of ice down the street as I went, which eventually attracted some strange looks. And then I wondered: how young do have to be in order to kick a block of ice down the street without people looking at you strangely…

(For those with an excess of ice, try this.)

c’est us, n’est pas?

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

 
Heremenegilde Chiasson’s marvellous book,
—Beatitudes, begins like this:

“those who raise their heads in astonishment at the raucous cry of birds,

those who await the end of twilight,

those who ceaselessly leaf through catalogues and order nothing from life,”

—and continues, in  incomplete single sentences of a few, or few hundred, words, leading us on and on to an (incomplete) image of ourselves: funny, sad, beautiful, unsettling, always true.

“those who are euphoric about the mystery of snow crystals, delicately carrying home their unique fragility on woollen mittens,”

“those who scribble graffiti on their bodies with lead pencils, engraving their story in the secret depths of their skin, scratching themselves until they bleed, making a lie of pen and paper,”

“those who pull off their gloves with their teeth,”

118 pages of ‘those’…

Who would have thought the universe was big enough, that there were so many nuances…needs…differences…samenesses…things that unite us, tell us who we think we are, who we don’t want to become, who we may already be.

This book is a celebration of what it is to be human, a meditation, and a mirror.

new books

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Am writing from somewhere under a stack of books received over the holidays and enjoying a moment’s pause with each as I (no rush) make my way to the top where I’ll choose a place to begin reading for real.

The stack:

The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth (translated by Michael Hofman); I’ve been slightly nuts about Joseph Roth since reading What I Saw so was extremely excited about cracking this open. In fact when I happened to wake up at one something a.m. (last night) I decided to turn on the light and read the first three stories.

What I Saw, by Joseph Roth. My introduction to him came via a library copy. Now I have my very own, thanks to P. 

The Bedside Book of Birds, by Graeme Gibson. I’d forgotten that this was on my list of Books to Get and for some reason the starlings’ twilight dance last month brought it back to mind so I trotted right out and bought myself a copy. Have only flipped through the pages and read a few entries so far but even doing that is a joy—the book is a work of art: the drawings, prints and photographs, the combination of poetry, fiction, facts and folklore, the feel of the paper…. I look forward to spending much much time with it.

The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon. (Ever since Oxygen I’ve been eager to read anything Annabel Lyon writes.)

Here is the opening sentence:

“The rain falls in black cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey.”

“Canada and Other Matters of Opinion”, a collection of essays by Rex Murphy.

The Spare Room, by Helen Garner.

David, by Ray Robertson.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Help me, Jacques Cousteau, by Gil Adamson

Beatitudes, by Hermenegilde Chiasson (translated by Jo-Anne Elder)

Dowsing: A Journey Beyond our Five Senses, by Hamish Miller

A Certain je ne Sai Quoi: Words we Pinched from Other Languages, by Chloe Rhodes

Nonsense Botany and Nonsense Alphabets, by Edward Lear

Cat Naps: The Key to Contentment (a tiny square book of quotes and pictures of napping cats, intended to remind us not to take ourselves too seriously…)

Excerpts:  Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. (Lao Tzu)

Yawn and the world yawns with you. Snore and you sleep alone. (Anonymous)

Alligator Pie, by Dennis Lee. From me to me. Because it was high time.

message in a bottle — received

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Oh, this is fun…

It seems Karen Shenfeld, Writer in Residence over at Open Book Toronto this month, has been conducting a blogosphere experiment in which I’m one of the lab rats. (And I’m completely flattered and delighted with my role!)

Here’s the background: Last week sometime I wrote a post about Karen’s film, Il Giardino. A few days later it came to her attention and she left a comment saying how surprised she was.

She was surprised??

I was gob smacked that so quickly (or even at all) she’d see the post, much less respond. Well, I wrote back, we had a virtual chuckle over the wonders of the wild, wacky world of blogs and that was—I thought—that.

Then, a few days ago (though I just opened my emails today), I received a Google Alert taking me to Open Book Toronto where I discovered that Karen (a poet as well as a filmmaker) was the Open Book writer in residence for December and had written a post about the Il Giardino ‘encounter’.

And she’d done it as a kind of experiment.

In her words:

“Sending something off into cyberspace is, I have realized, a little like putting a message in a bottle and casting it into the sea. We know that the odds are that the cork will leak and the bottle will fill with water and sink down to the sandy depths, forever lost. But we hope secretly that, against all odds, it will float and drift to a far, far shore, where it will be picked up by a passing stranger who will find our message and be forever transformed.

“When I wrote to Matilda, I didn’t let her know that I, myself, was writing a blog this month, and that I had decided to blog about her blog. Should I tell her, or just wait to see if she scoops the bottle from the water and discovers it by herself?”

Well, I’ve scooped the bottle! (And, for the record, it would have been sooner had I opened my emails.) I feel like bells should be going off, confetti flying, people appearing from the closet with champagne, a trophy maybe, a small tiara…

As Karen says, I think we all hope that our messages, whatever they are, are being received and heard—what’s communication if not a way of connecting with others by (bravely) sharing something of who we are, some tiny unique thing we have to offer…  

Aside from its (mind-bending) ability to practically embrace the whole earth in a single moment, cyberspace also has a kind of zen influence, allowing us to stand back and ‘see’ just how amorphous communication has become, maybe always was, how really we’re all so connected in these indirect, invisible, ways.

Unsettling as all that connection may seem at times,  it’s nice to remember that a lot of good—and very entertaining!—things can come of it…

(So, to continue the experiment, I’m sending the bottle back out—while keeping my eye on the OBT author blog  to see if it makes land…)

not just another bookstore

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The Toronto Women’s Bookstore is in danger of closing.  If that happens, the whole city loses. Not just women, not just the people who buy books or attend workshops and readings or are served by the TWB outreach programs. We all lose. In Toronto, outside Toronto, across the country. Because every institution, every facility and service, wherever it happens to be, creates a ripple effect—positive or negative—on both the immediate community and society in general. 

If the TWB closes we don’t just lose another book store, we lose one of society’s positive ripples and risk making (yet more) room for the less valuable, the innocuous, the downright toxic…

It’s up to us which way things go.

If, one by one, we let these tiny positive influences on our society disappear in favour of giant homogenized nothings that cajole us by slick marketing to fill our lives with indigestible dreck that only dulls our minds with the addiction of wanting more, we’ll have—if not what we need—certainly what we deserve.

And their pockets will be full.  Because that, of course, is their bottom—their only—line. 

The choices we make, where we choose to spend our money is what determines what stays and what goes. It’s we that build our neighbourhoods, cities and societies.

This isn’t just about a bookstore, it’s about creating the kind of world we want to live in and the power of individuals to influence that world. The TWB is simply the latest canary in the coal mine.

HOW TO HELP.