Truth #13

Sometimes it’s enough just to wake up and look out the window.

Truth #10: I’d like to listen to more music than I do. But when??

Here’s the situation:

During the day, if I listen to anything, it’s CBC Radio One. In the car I either talk to myself, working out some irritating plot point, or it’s CBC again. Sometimes at night I’ll put on the jazz station if Peter and I are chatting, or we’ll listen to CDs while we make dinner, but if I’m reading I don’t want music. Also not if I’m writing. And if I’m ironing it’s probably a rainy Sunday afternoon, which means I’m listening to Eleanor Wachtel. If I have a project, say painting, I like to listen to a book on tape (I once did a whole fake brick motif wall—I know, I know, but it was cute at the time—while listening to a documentary on Bob Dylan). I sometimes listen to music in the bath, but mostly prefer silence in watery environments. Which of course rules out Mozart while swimming. I’ve often thought of hauling out a CD player when I work in the garden but I mutter too much and there’s all that moving around from one end to the other and I hate it when I can hear the neighbour’s Achy Breaky Hearty stuff so wouldn’t want to be like them, aka: one of those people who inflicts their idea of a good time on others. I suppose I could listen to an iPod or something, if I had one, while sitting on the patio on a summer evening—but I’m usually writing or reading again, or listening to birds, or rattling away on the phone. Or sometimes a train goes by, it’s a very nice sound…

Hmmmm. Spelling it all out like this I see it’s worse than I thought. Could be I need a serious action plan: finding ways to inject more music into my days…

Okay. I’m on it.

Suggestions welcome. Probably essential.

Today is my birthday. This was my gift to myself.

And chocolate.

Shall I drive…?
—Or will you?

Am pleased to be included in the Monday’s Poem series over at Leaf Press.

Here are my shady words.

I have too much stuff. I want less. In fact I want what Alix Kates Shulman describes in Drinking the Rain—to find out “how little I need in order to have everything.”

And so as I get rid, I thought I’d commemorate the debris that has no real meaning but is mysteriously difficult to part with—like a peculiar little boy doll in navy breeches that I bought during the 80’s. Can’t remember from where or even why, yet every time I try to pitch this unnamed thing that I have no special fondness for, I can’t. (The best I’ve done is getting him into a bag for the Sally Ann once. I dropped it off, drove away, then a kilometre or two later I turned around, went back, opened the bag, fetched him out and drove us back home.) Not sure what this means. But it’s very bloody weird, no?

Happily, I’m old enough to be more curious now about the why of hanging on to these things than to actually keep hanging on to it. Curious also about what there is to learn from the process of disentangling myself.

—And whether or not I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to breeches boy.

~

Viva los 33!  And miracles generally.

“Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have  a friend takes time.” 

—Georgia O’Keefe

Coming along just swimmingly, thanks…

~