I woke this morning with
a yen to swim
in the Indian Ocean, to lick
the tile walls of Morocco, sunbathe
nude on the side of a grassy hill overlooking
the coast of Africa. I wanted to tear
silk underwear to shreds
and tie the rags to the tail
of a kite—
sing to purring elephants at dawn
and ride caterpillars to the tops
of mossy trees. I woke this morning,
then stepped outside
—never happier to be home.
♥
Installing the couch photos I learned four things.
1– I’m no Meg Ruffman with a power drill.
2– It’s an exhibit in a museum, an exhibition in a gallery.
3– I thought you only needed a bag of nails and a hammer to properly hang photos. Apparently, a magic formula is also handy, which has something to do with math and therefore will constantly be just out of my reach.
4– Gallery walls only look like ordinary walls. They’re actually lined floor to ceiling, side to side, with plywood, which means you can hang anything you want anywhere you want anytime you want and as often as you want without the whole thing falling down.
**
Which brings me to the idea of a possible mystery thriller, which I may as well write since I’ve been making notes about the comings and goings of people that visit the upholSTORIES show… and I have all those spare minutes between people (i.e. future characters) wandering in.
So here’s the outline, the who, what, when, where, why and how of my soft furnishings potboiler in progress… (SFPIP)
**
Who— The guy on a downtown heritage walk who takes a wrong turn and accidentally finds himself in a gallery surrounded by couch photos and couch memories and when asked if he has a couch memory of his own he chuckles like Errol Flynn and says oh, yes, he has, but it’s not something he can tell me. Har har. He does tell me he’s 86 and that his wife has Alzheimers and it’s hard for him, he doesn’t know how long he can continue taking care of her. I sit on the edge of a coffee table as he talks. He sits back comfortably against the cushions on a striped couch.
—The two women who hold glasses of white wine as they tour the exhibition and say what a great place it would be to have a dinner party.
—Three grey-haired women with walkers who, by the time I get there, have been sitting on the couches a while. They eventually totter off, having established it’s already 3 o’clock. They leave the cushions alarmingly askew.
—A man who tells me that after he left the chaos of the former Yugoslavia and moved here, the first thing he did was buy a couch from Leon’s.
—And the woman with the long white blonde hair, visiting from Manchester, who doesn’t say or do anything particularly memorable… she’s just so lovely.
What— A dinner party during which it’s suspected that the soup course has been tampered with. There is what looks suspiciously like a trace of gesso, a dollop of resin and a practically-impossible-to-see splash of Castilian brown in the otherwise scrumptious vichyssoise. The party is held on the eve of an 86 year old heritage walker’s birthday, in his honour. But will he make it to midnight? (Therein lies the mystery.) And I don’t mean will he stay awake that long… (therein lies the thriller).
When— The dinner party takes place in June. The weather is unseasonably warm, torrid even. The night is young. There is a full moon. Love is in the air. Or not. There is soup. There is definitely soup.
Where— A swanky gallery in a swanky town.
Why— Why a mystery thriller? (Because the world can never have enough mystery thrillers. Obviously.) Or why did someone tamper with the vichyssoise… in which case I’m hardly likely to tell you now am I…
How— Who knows. But based on the title you can guess it will have something to do with those genius gallery walls.
Look for it at better book stores everywhere.
I love this post over at Commatology so I’m stealing the idea and I hope you do too.
It took me about seven seconds to decide on the music for this game because whether I realize it or not, Laura Smith’s words travel with me. And if not always the words, then the sentiments of land and sea and nature and our responsibility to the world and to each other and the idea of dreams and following them and having the courage to know you are all you need to be.
Also, there are references in her songs to things like goat skin drums and pennywhistles. Who would NOT want that living in their head??
In a nutshell, I like her music.
So the game is this: to answer the questions with the title of a song.
The titles can be from any albums belonging to one musician.
♥
I was once invited to a costume party I didn’t want to go to but under pressure grudgingly agreed and at the last minute—literally minutes before we went out the door—I cut a hole in a white sheet and wore it like a poncho. No one at the party seemed to know I was supposed to be an angel. Where’s your halo, they said? Where’s your wings??
Details.
I don’t like costume parties. I find them uncomfortable for many reasons, not the least of which is that the whole point of the dressing up is to attract attention, which is counter to what I usually aim for at gatherings, i.e. to quietly blend in with the cheese table. It’s not that I’m anti-social. I’ll meet you for lunch in a heartbeat; it’s crowds of people not talking about anything that cheeses me off.
A scenario only made worse in togas and sailor suits.
But it’s not just that, there’s something else weird. Like clown-weirdness.
That said, here I am, invited to another costume thing. One where I will know almost no one. Theme: western. At least there’s that… I can wear jeans. And a simple shirt. And, lest anyone say I don’t have the right spirit for these things (which of course I don’t), I’d like the record to show that I went to Value Village and found a hat with a string under the chin and a black and white neckerchief.
I draw the line at boots.
I think this one’s pretty obvious right?
I’m the Birkenstock Cowboy.
[cue the music]
The five year old whose dad says “Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute,” and leaves his kid kneeling on a bench surrounded by backpacks and bags and the kid stares in the direction of the washrooms like a puppy until he comes back.
The teenage boys who fist pump goodbye like it’s nothing. The face on the one that stays.
The lads that take pictures with real cameras with real lenses.
The three young women whose minds explode when they see each other. Their smiles.
Although I haven’t worked in an office for years I still work office-ish hours.
So Fridays are very TGIF for me and this one in particular seemed in need of some goodness. A distraction, a need to play hookey, to get away from it all. Bird seed seemed the logical answer. So off I took myself to a nearby town where a source told me I could score some excellent Ethiopian nyger at the local feed shop.
I got twenty five pounds.
It was noon by then so I stayed for lunch. The first place I stopped didn’t want me to sit at a table by the window as I was just one person and that’s primo seating. So could I please move to another table at the back? No, as a matter of fact, no thank you… I do not care to sit at the worst table in a half filled room as penance for being a single diner.
Ta ta, said I.
And wandered down the street feeling oddly buoyant.
The next place I landed reminded me why things happen the way they do. Had the other folks been nicer I may have never have discovered this place, which not only said sit where you like — it was ten times busier, had a merry vibe, a shelf of books for reading not for decor, people actually seemed happy to see you and the food was out of this world delicious.
AND they had mussels… so………..
I read a cookbook about seasonal food.
And had PEI for lunch.
Moral of the story — How being faced with the unkind or unjust can still have a good outcome if you put your heart into it, trust your gut, stand for what you believe in, and other bodily metaphors… and how fete-ing myself on Fridays might just become a thing.
Also moral of the story — It’s one way to remain sane.
Me on George the tawny horse with a butterscotch mane at the trail ride stables. I say to the trail guide, “Take one of just me and George… I want to put it in my office to look at every day.” George is magnificent and uninspired to moving too quickly. His whole raison d’etre being to follow the lead horse at a reasonable pace and sneak the occasional bit of greenery, which is often as I have no ability to use the reins and George knows this. We are happy together.
Kayla the trail guide. All blonde hair and freckles, a country lass unaware of her sweetness and the charm of her stories about being home-schooled and how she lives for horses, has five part-time jobs to keep one horse and how a horse will tell you what’s wrong with you, emotionally or physically, because if you spend enough time with it the horse takes on your problems and you can see yourself in them like a mirror.
Children in my house eating watermelon and jumping on a mini trampoline. Occasionally at the same time. To which I say: “No choking please… because
I am not in the mood today for children choking in my house.”
Tiny hands shoveling spoonfuls of peaches and ice cream.
Tiny hands picking fat blackberries. Also argument over how there isn’t an equal number of ripe ones for all three sets of hands.
Three orders of poutine at the beach. Most of which is eaten. None of which is mine. Mine is an order of fries.
Seagulls awaiting poutine.
Flip-flops flopping in the water. Until they’re nearly stolen by the lake and the better idea by the wearer of the flip-flops is that I carry them.
Skinny legged beach cartwheels. Dozens it seems, one sweeter than the next. Not mine, by the way. I have neither skinny legs nor ever been able to master the sweet cartwheel… only the kind that goes by a different description. After that, some other gymnastic moves that need only ribbons to make them an Olympic event. (Now there we have something I’m good at: ribbon dancing.)
Lad skipping stones. Correction. Lad trying to skip stones. Lads, I discover, aren’t especially amused when aunties come along and say Want me to show you how it’s done? And then do.
And other stones. Especially those as described in the wonderful Pinny in Summer, which is read aloud to the soundtrack of Lake Ontario waves. (Smiles all around when we find JUST THE PERFECT ONE.)
Cloud shaped like the skeleton of a rabbit. Sad but true.
A radiant palm holding five colours of beach glass: white, green, dark blue, brown and possibly yellow, or just pale pale brown. Either way, ridiculously exciting haul.
♦
A girl of maybe eight, dark blonde hair, almost wavy, almost thick, in a loose pony tail with strands unbound around her face. Red and black leggings in geometric pattern and a grey tee shirt that reads: LOVE. She twirls in the hallway, in the basement of the gallery, outside the room where I sit reading and writing, outside the room where her art class is going on. For just a few moments she dances oblivious and alone in the hallway between these two rooms, dances and twirls and twirls, to music that doesn’t play…
And then just like that, she’s gone.
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.” — William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life (1899)
“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the mind.” — Einstein
“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” — William Blake
“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.” — Yutang Lin
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.” — Iris Murdoch 
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.“ — Rainer Maria Rilke
“I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as [ten minutes]; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.” —Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
Now go eat some chocolate. (see Iris Murdoch instruction above)
Wind today.
So I go to the lake.
Cloud then sun, then cloud again.
This is good.
This is balance—the reason I like rain and snow, sunshine, warmth and sleet.
And the reason I could never live in Los Angeles.
Matilda Magtree 
