the sweet blather around us

June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 ~ carin ~ 2 Comments

“So did Japan bomb Pearl Harbour… or Halifax Harbour??”

Discussion among three teenaged schoolgirls, studying together
—Pickering Library (11:35 a.m. to noon):

I was going to buy a notebook [laughs], obvious, like, all this stuff we’ve learned, like, like, Imperialism, tests are easy, I don’t, oh, FaceBook without WiFi, nothing’s working??? click on something, I’m on a profile, wow I can’t go on mine, search, no internet connection, quiet revolution or whatever it is, civil rights, on TV, all I know, page 246, looking over my stuff, didn’t study hard, so nice not having to study, after science, history tomorrow, so simple, whatever, no WiFi, there is WiFi, here, don’t know anything about Nellie McClung, wasn’t she, speaker, fought for women in the kitchen, right to vote, go on page 40, like she was, women’s christian temperance movement, in french, oh, whatever, I thought it was WTCU, or women’s temperance christian union, or is that just the same? Halifax explosion, bombed harbour, only know from going to Halifax, and time of Germany, Hitler came out of nowhere, sided with Japan, U.S. got cheesed off, Japan decided to bomb Pearl Harbour, Canada got mad or whatever, Japanese people being treated bad, Pearl Harbour so close to Canada and so are they going to bomb Canada also? No, Halifax Harbour, oh. I think it was an accident, I got confused when she said Pearl Harbour, I kept thinking of Halifax, so Japan bombed Pearl Harbour or Halifax harbour? bombs in water, remember in Finding Nemo they had those chairs? have to know about bombing, I lost a whole section, who were the Bolsheviks? wanted higher salary, revolution in Russia, communism, I found prohibition, WCTU during war, proposed factories, used wheat for food for soldiers and ammunition, 1918, WWI or II? What time period??

why are we here?

April 7, 2015April 8, 2015 ~ carin ~ 1 Comment

In the parking lot at the beach, I mean.

Because there are never no cars here.

But not everyone gets out, not everyone walks, not even along the pier. Most people don’t, in fact. They choose, instead, to sit in their cars. Most are alone, some eat, some read, others might be listening to music. (Surprisingly few appear to being staring at devices.) I suppose some talk, on the phone, to themselves. There’s a kind of unwritten code that you don’t look at someone in their car, that they’re here not to be seen, but for some other purpose, something private, if only to contemplate the universe in the shape of a seagull.

I try to follow the code but notice the man to my left smiles as he stares out his window. It’s a grey day, nowhere near sunrise or sunset and I wonder what he’s watching, thinking.

I wonder why he’s in this parking lot at almost noon on a Sunday. Is he a widower, a bachelor, recently tiffed and needing to get out of the house to cool off or is there a happy partner at home glazing a ham?

An Asian man walks past toward the pier. Grey hair, slightly stooped; something about the way he grimaces against an only slight and not very cold breeze, pleasure mixed with something else, reminds me of my dad who was at no time Asian.

But then our looks are always the least of things, and yet…

Maybe it’s this: maybe we’re simply here to watch each other, to catch a glimpse of something that’s real, to be reminded.

what we talk about when we talk about restaurants

April 3, 2015April 9, 2015 ~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Dear Restaurant with a Cute and Unusual Name:

I was thinking of writing you a letter to say what I thought of my experience at lunch but I got side-tracked into wondering what your cute and unusual name might mean…

Perhaps it means… “An attractive establishment with plenty of staff and at least one server who does not know what beans are in the Sweet Italian Soup with Beans but who will check because it’s No Problem and returns with a proud declaration of ‘white’ and when I say ‘navy?’ he says yes even though when the soup comes they are not navy, they are possibly lima…. although, like the server, I am not a connoisseur of all and sundry beans.”

Or could it by chance mean “tepid soup that arrives many many minutes after ordering, with only an asthmatic whisper of cheese (pecorino) and too little Sweet Italian Sausage.”

Or a reference to this, “how when I ask the server if he’s found out about the pizza he forgets to find out and (many many minutes later) tells me he will do so now because until now the kitchen has been too busy but it’s No Problem and perhaps things have slowed down.”

Maybe it means “a cook that cannot be asked about pizza while s/he is ladelling soup.”

It might of course be meant to describe “how only after my not-even-close-to-being-warm, indeterminately bean’d soup is eaten, does my server deliver the glass of water I was offered when I first sat down.”

Or does it mean this: “three water glasses mysteriously left on my table after the hostess cleared the excess cutlery and plates. Or a reference to the hostess herself , a young woman who, on my arrival, said I could sit anywhere I like, and when I said Oh how lovely, a window would be great! she led me to the end of the room and pointed to a tiny table tucked into a windowless corner and which almost touched the table of the only other people in the room and when I made a face she said You don’t like this table? and I said well another would be better and so I chose a table by a window where I would not be touching neighbouring diners and when I asked the hostess if she knew what the soup of the day was she said she did not and reminded me that she was a hostess.”

Then again, perhaps your cute name simply refers to “how when the bill comes, long long minutes (too many long minutes) after I ask for it, and a passing bartender asks if she can help and I say well I’d like to pay my bill and she says No Problem, she says she’ll take care of it and when ten minutes later I am now pacing in front of my table as I have a class starting in mere moments no one can find my server or the bartender and so I explain the situation to the hostess and when the server finally shows up he casually places the change from my twenty-dollar bill on the table and says sorry for the wait.”

On the other hand it wouldn’t surprise me if the name is meant to describe “the tone in which he says this, like he’s been ‘told’ I’m annoyed rather than any kind of sincere apology.”

Also, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that it refers to“the way that I, for the first time in a very very long time, possibly ever, scoop all of the change, bills and coins, into my pocket and leave the bill folder empty and wide open.”

Or “the look on the server’s face when I do it.”

If the restaurant’s cute and unusual name means any of the above, then it is a well suited name indeed. And things are going perfectly to plan.

Sincerely,

The single at the window seat who will bring a sandwich next time she has a class in your vicinity.

Photo by: wikicommons

the art of nothing

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015 ~ carin ~ 23 Comments

I was googling the title to see if there were already a hundred things called this and it seems there are not. In the process I found a short film made by an actor posing as one Hans Freeberling, an artist installing a show about nothing. The gallery is empty. People come. They think it’s real, that the artist is real, and so they try not to scratch their wee wannabecultured noggins until, eventually, they make up Their Own Point for the point of the nothingness. Because there must be one, right??

As a satire, it’s gorgeous. Says so much about us. Most of which is questionable, but there’s this too: that faced with a blank canvas, real or metaphoric, we can choose to impose our own thoughts. This is a kind of art form in itself. Getting People To Think From Ground Zero, we might call it.

The lack of ‘something’ might also be compared to a one word poem. Or a single toilet cemented to a wall. I mean, we can have real discussions about these things. (I recently had a strangely satisfying time discussing the ‘poem’ balloon. One word. Discussion went along the lines of who says it has to have only two L’s and where’s the law about the emphasis remaining on the second syllable… and so on.)

There’s always the chance these chats will lead to… oh, something interesting or important even. Possibilities are always endless where conversation is concerned and, really, anything at all can be a prompt.

But because something serves as a prompt, or because it causes us to think in possibly new ways… is it art? And who gets to say?

And what isn’t art?

And who gets to say?

I’m not looking for a definition. Or even an answer. Is there even an answer? Tons of opinions. And all manner of conversation and argument and (most sadly of all) very little light-heartedness about things, including toilets, so I’ve decided to stop asking. In fact this whole ramble is a digression.

What I meant to write about is nothing, the art of it.

Which leads me directly to my dad, a chap who would not have called himself an artist though he played with paint, on both canvas and walls. He built our first house then spent decades renovating the second. The garden too. Rockeries and rose beds. Our hedge was almost a topiary. If he wanted a fence, he’d go down to the beach, find some driftwood and make one. Then he’d make a driftwood coffee table, an end table, a floor lamp. He made bookshelves. A fireplace, a BBQ and a bird bath out of stone and in the rec room he painted a wall to wall, floor to ceiling mural of a favourite spot under a tree on a beach in Barbados. He included my mother’s striped beach bag hanging from a branch. (The people who bought the house after my parents died, said the mural was a selling point.) He built two patios and a car port, refashioned our front door, and the back one too, to look more Spanish, a style he liked. And then he began making the inside look more Spanish too. To his mind anyway.

He did all this after his day job, and on weekends. Mostly in Hawaiian shirts, paint splattered pants and shoes with no laces.

This was his thing, this making.

I used to wonder how he thought up all this stuff. How could a wall that looked perfectly fine to me in its bareness or with a few holiday pennants hammered on, to him scream: paint a beach scene!!! don’t forget the bag.

He did a lot of sitting in-between the making. This was all before busy-ness was invented, when people really were busy, doing real things without an abundance of appliances and before nannies and dog-walkers. These ancient busy people, it seems, made time to sit, have a coffee, light a pipe, and if you were to join them, say, at the picnic table on the handmade patio, they wouldn’t talk about being busy, they would say something about squirrels or sedimentary rocks or have you noticed how many buds are on the apricot tree this year? You might be wearing pedal pushers and drinking Koolaid when you ask if there’s such as thing as UFOs and they might draw a few times on their pipe, think for a minute, let the smoke out nice and slow as they say could be, who the hell knows…

My dad would be surprised to learn that the most important thing he taught me was not to make sure the vice on my workbench was closed at night or how properly to wash a car, but how to love what you do, to do it as well as you can and, most importantly, to take time for the nothing. In fact, he’d be surprised to know he even did it.

Some of my favourite moments, those nothing ones. Still are. I realize in my own nothings that that’s where we re-fuel, where we find our next mural.

A whole different kind of art.

story of a recipe

January 9, 2015January 14, 2015 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

Once upon a time there was a folk dance group that required its female dancers to wear a dirdnl’ish costume with a corset over a cotton blouse and sometimes real, sometimes fake, carnations stuffed down the front of said corset. This effectively rendered the girls dancing flower pots. Boy dancers were encouraged to ‘smell’ the carnations while the girl dancers twirled coquettishly from one to the other. When they weren’t sniffing carnations, the boys danced ‘figure’ dances, pretending to chop wood or other acts of physical prowess meant to attract the hapless flower pots.

I was a member of such a folk dance group.

For the record, it wasn’t my idea to join. I was fourteen and shy and my parents thought it would be just the ticket to bring me out of my shell.

I suppose in a way it did. It was also where I learned to drink beer.

And it’s where I met Laura, from whom I received the recipe mentioned in the title. Laura wisely left both the dance group and town at the first opportunity, stuffing everything she owned into a small car and driving west until she got to Calgary.

A few years later I followed. Not to Calgary, but to Edmonton. Close enough. Only 300 km away, it made Alberta a place where I knew someone. We’d visit each other on occasional weekends, mostly me going to her place, the main floor of a big old ramshackle house with no yard but access to a back stoop, room enough for a Hibachi.

The kitchen smelled of meatloaf, coffee and Joy dishwashing liquid.

Laura was the first person I knew (my age) who not only liked to cook but talked about food, grew herbs on windowsills, owned actual cookbooks and shopped for food with all kinds of serious enthusiasm. Even more amazingly to me, almost ten out ten times she preferred inviting people to her place for a meal over meeting at a restaurant. She was interesting in different ways (she once moved into an apartment with a bright red fridge and spaghetti on the ceiling; beyond enviable when the rest of us were still living in bungalows) but this cooking thing struck me as a little over-the-top… remember, this was eons ago, when food as a ‘thing’ hadn’t been invented yet. When only five people in the whole world read Gourmet.

In that ramshackle Calgary kitchen Laura served me my first Caesar salad, and I remember thinking it was pretty groovy that she made the dressing by throwing ingredients into a jar and shaking it like maracas.

I came across the recipe recently—the original paper version I wrote out while she dictated precise instructuions all those decades ago. More than slightly splattered and used (though not for some time now as I’ve since discovered other recipes. Julia Child’s and Ina Garten’s, for two).

But they don’t come with a story.

(Actually, the Julia Child one does… it can be found in the book From Julia Child’s Kitchen — a tradition in this house is to have someone read the passage while someone else makes the salad…)

But that’s another story entirely.

(All recipes with stories welcome. In fact that would be exceedingly groovy…)

five frivolous minutes over cheese al fresco, with ‘mo’ — age 65

December 8, 2014August 13, 2016 ~ carin ~ 1 Comment

I’ve known ‘mo’ since the 80’s when we were both working in various ends of marketing at a big ugly corporation. More importantly, we used to have lunch together. She with the perfectly made sandwiches carried in properly sized Tupperware made for exactly that purpose; beautifully wrapped and sliced fruit; an exquisite wedge of cheese. My lunch, on the other hand, amounted to a few slices of salami and unbuttered rye bread crammed into an old sour cream container as I flew out the door in the morning… to be unfolded and assembled later. Sometimes a going black banana. She found all this amusing.

I lived in Toronto then, the magnificent centre of the universe, and she didn’t, which I found both odd and amusing. She lived in a town, you see. A town with county carnivals and music in the park on Wednesday evenings. Bring a chair and bug spray, that kind of thing. Or so I gathered from the stories she told. I’d never been there. I lived in Toronto, remember… who needs to go anywhere else?

On Monday mornings I’d ask about village parades and swatting flies on the porch. I was young and cheeky. (And—because it can never be stated often enough—I lived in Toronto.) Eventually, we went our separate ways, she to work in publishing and me, I moved around a lot… jobs, apartments, cities, continents. But we never lost touch. And this was well before the internets made keeping in touch easy as pie.

Eventually the small town got too big for ‘mo’ and she moved to an even smaller place. And me, well, as it turned out, I eventually moved to the very same hicksville town ‘mo’ used to live in, the one with the flies and the porches and the parades.

Tell me that’s not amusing.

—A few things I know about ‘mo’: she doesn’t like to go barefoot, she’s been a vegetarian since childhood, and I’m pretty sure she still makes a precisely sliced lunch.

How long could you go without talking? All day.

Do you prefer silence or noise? Silence.

How many pairs of shoes do you own? Five.

If you won the lottery? Help those who need it, but without adversely changing their lives.

One law you’d make? Disrespect would be illegal.

Unusual talent? Pitman Shorthand. (which is properly done with a pencil, not a pen)

What do you like to cook? I don’t.

Have you or would you ever bungee jump? No. And no.

What’s the most dare-devilish thing you’ve done? Crossing a rope bridge in British Columbia. No idea why I did it. And the worst part was I had to come back the same way.

Do you like surprise parties, practical jokes? Somewhat.

Favourite time of day? Early morning. No. Mid-afternoon.

What tree would you be? A weeping willow; they’re quiet and I love those swaying branches.

Best present ever received? A brand new Remington Rand typewriter when I was sixteen.

What do you like on your toast? Butter.

The last thing you drew a picture of? I doodle all the time but I don’t draw. So, a doodle.

Last thing written in ink? Shopping list.

Favourite childhood meal? Egg and chips.

What [past] age is your favourite? My twenties.

Would you go back if you could? Yes.

Best invention? The wheel.

Describe your childhood bedroom. It was small, a box room they were called, with a bed against the wall. My dad made a side cupboard for toys and a corner cupboard. I begged him for a drawer in the corner cupboard, which I realize now would have been tricky to make, but he did it.

Describe your childhood kitchen. It had a bay window; the sink and small work space overlooked the large garden. There was a tiled window ledge all around the inside of the bay window. There sat the soap dish, metal and in two parts, the water from the soap would drain into the bottom half. I loved giving it a good clean!

We had fitted cupboards–Dad made those. He also installed extra work surfaces where he could. The stove was in a corner all on its own, bit of a pain really because there wasn’t a work surface nearby.

The back door off the kitchen led to the side of the house, it was always open when cooking cabbage or chips, and made the house very cold. The pantry led off the kitchen and had a cold stone, Dad fitted a lovely glass door on it.

There was a little barrel with a lid tucked away into a corner, I loved that as a child, sitting on it, or putting things inside.

We had a washing machine.

I don’t remember the colour of the walls, but the floor was a rusty mottled linoleum.

The cookies were kept in a biscuit barrel on the bay window ledge in the living/dining room. All the windows in our house were bay. Made for much bigger feeling rooms.

Afraid of spiders? Not afraid, but don’t like them. Wouldn’t kill one though.

Phobias? Heights.

Least favourite teacher and why? Mrs. Jenshaw, she taught English and was very strict and I was scared of her more than anything. As a teacher she was actually very good; I learned a lot from her.

Favourite children’s story? The Famous Five series, by Enid Blyton.

Ideal picnic ingredients? Soft rolls, egg salad, grapes, fresh fruit, potato chips, juice.

Is Barbie a negative role model? Yes.

Best thing about Canada? Standard of living.

Best thing about people in general? I’ve got no time for people, give me animals.

What flavour would you be? Cherry.

What colour? White.

What would you come back as? A cat.

Favourite saying: Give over!

♦

—the frivolous five is a series of non-essential questions and answers

today…

December 5, 2014December 6, 2014 ~ carin ~ 12 Comments

I was going to Not Review a book today but then the guy that killed Eric Garner in Staten Island was not charged with killing him because, I suppose, he’s a policeman. And maybe because he’s white. And very possibly because Eric Garner isn’t.

The message is crystal clear: white policemen in America may kill whoever they damn well want, even if that person happens to be doing nothing more nefarious than selling untaxed cigarettes. And especially if they happen to be black. They may kill such persons by choking them on the street even while the dying person is informing them that they can’t breathe. I mean, he’s being killed right there on the street and what he does is inform the killer that he can’t breathe… as if, even in that moment he, Eric Garner, gave the policeman the benefit of the doubt that he, the policeman, would care to know that detail. It was a reasonable assumption… that if the policeman were aware that he was killing Eric Garner, he, the policeman would stop.

This is what I can’t breathe means.

It means Eric Garner was human and he made the mistake of thinking the policeman was too.

I can’t Not Review a book today when this comes on the heels of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

And the child that was shot for pointing a toy gun.

And. And.

Nor can I write about the beach or the moon or the sky or the amazing serendipity of life sometimes and the way so very much is beautiful, the way people can be beautiful. It’s all out there, it is… and mostly I’m drawn to finding it. It’s not that hard really. I think it’s important to share.

But today I’m thinking about injustice and hatred and the why of it all. Is there a why?? I’m thinking about the way it might feel to lose someone in this unspeakable way… the shock, sadness, frustration, fear, anger, despair, and how those emotions will add yet another ugly layer to society’s increasingly unattractive skin. I’m thinking why we allow the unattractiveness to grow, why it is we don’t improve, why we allow injustice, vote for it even. I’m thinking how tomorrow is the twenty fifth anniversary of the murder of fourteen women in Montreal and what we have learned in all that time… have we learned anything?

So, no, I can’t write about books today. Or even beauty…

Not today.

you say salon, i say pass the cheese ball

November 28, 2014January 5, 2015 ~ carin ~ 14 Comments

So I had a salon. In my living room. Which may be redundant.

Let’s just call it Writers in My Residence.
Bob Dylan came. He liked the samosas. I liked that I knew some people in six degrees of separation ways, but not really. It made for much to talk about. Sculptors and writers talking in the kitchen pleases me. Poets and painters talking in the front hall worries me. What are they plotting??? Here they are. Writers, artists of all stripes. Readers. Mostly readers. Word lovers. The best kinds of persons. Nestled in front of bright blue art by Rhonda Pearl.
Reading and listening. One reading is about Anne Wilkinson, a little known modernist poet who is now being more known through The Porcupine’s Quill ‘Essential Poet’s’ series and the good work of Ingrid Ruthig, editor of the The Essential Anne Wilkinson. Another reading is new fiction by Stuart Ross, followed by poetry from his new book Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press). Here, the omnipotent poet holds in his hand an errant firefly that had been terrorizing the living room for months. We laughed.
We were enraptured. (Enrapturized?)
We had food and drink and indoor sunshine.

Such is the power of words in enclosed spaces.

Big thanks to a beautiful bunch of participants for this beautiful night.

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what i saw

October 24, 2014February 11, 2019 ~ carin ~ 2 Comments

A young Bob Dylan, carrying a backpack and wearing winter boots on a summer day in October.

A girl in a Halloween costume though I don’t know what she was supposed to be.

A girl with purple hair, but that’s nothing.

I saw a guy in a yellow X’d, orange city-worker jacket driving a brand new silver Cougar convertible.

And a woman of about sixty wearing all lime green who sat herself down on the sidewalk of a downtown street, back against a brick wall, big smile as if she was about to open a picnic basket, and just along a bit, a young lad with lip piercings minding a baby in a stroller. He held his phone in one hand but was transfixed by the woman in green.

I saw a woman of thirty-something in a pink sweatshirt, and a beautiful girl child, maybe five or six years old, with curly yellow hair and a pink toy stroller that kept getting caught in the wind and being blown about whenever the girl let go, which she found so funny. “Look, mummy!” she yelled, laughing as the stroller kept moving by itself on the sidewalk. But the mummy was looking at her phone. For a good five minutes she stared at her phone while the beautiful girl child played with her stroller and the wind. Finally, mummy stopped looking at her phone and took a picture of the girl child before herding her into the car (minivan). That photo is probably up on FB or Twitter by now, looking for all the world like she spent even a moment with the kid.

A line of people waiting for the soup kitchen to open.

I saw a guy in a long fur coat like something out of the 60’s.

And a young woman with shaking hands and unfocussed eyes who asked politely for some change. I said yes. She said thank you.

And that was that.

**
More things I saw.

the hypnotic quality of squirrels

October 10, 2014April 7, 2015 ~ carin ~ 8 Comments

Driving from point A to point B… I pass a body of water that sparkles like a cliché in this autumnal way that can’t be ignored. I turn the car around, park, walk directly to it.

I’ve been here before but never noticed the ‘canoes only’ sign. I wonder if that means kayaks too. I would argue a kayak is a canoe made for people who would rather not tip over…

I’m immediately not sorry I allowed this diversion from point A to point B.

I meet a smiling man and woman with cameras and tripods, they ask if I saw him. Him who, I say and they tell me about an eagle, a baby bald eagle, swooping majestically… just there. They point. I point in the opposite direction and explain I was watching ducks and geese dunk their heads. They continue to smile, but I think a little less sincerely.

On the woodsy trail, a few children with parents. The kids squeal with pleasure at the squirrels, as if they’ve never seen one. A boy’s voice over the others: “These squirrels are mesmerizing…” and even though I agree (I’m a veteran squirrel watcher), I can’t help feel he’s just elevated their watchability cred even more.

I take the road less travelled that leads past open fields on one side and the forest on the other. About twenty or so metres ahead, a white-tailed deer leaps across, from field to woods.

There is no picture to document this, only milkweed and asters.

After that a gang of turkeys shows up.
Fortunately they shuffle off into the woods without incident.

This is tempting. I would only need to install bookshelves and a fridge.

Before I leave I run into a few more people: an older couple on a tricycle built for two. And a very young couple, she, chatty with long fire-hydrant-red hair and he, merely besotted, unassuming in his oh-so-thin-Goth look, walking beside her. They could be spending the day anywhere, but they chose here, and it pleases me when she cries out Oh, look, a chipmunk!

Another young couple, the dad in jeans and a top hat, the toddler being followed by a herd of ducks fresh out of the pond, the mum getting it all on film.

A swimming hole.

And then onward, to point B.