The scapes have started.
They look like tiny swans’ heads.
You snap them off, then trim the long chivey ends, leaving the pale green tip and about six inches of stem. Toss them in olive oil, salt and pepper; wrap in tin foil and leave on the grill for fifteen minutes or so. (Bonus: removing the scapes means fatter garlic bulbs.)
Mmmm. Swan head. Sounds tasty.
C’mon swan. Wake up.
Still finding funny old titles as I slooowwlly clean up my shelves. No idea where I got half of them, like this one—Reflections on a Gift of 
Watermelon Pickle (Scholastic, 1966). On the inside cover is written, not in my handwriting: English 311, Mrs. Hart. This is always a bonus; I like having an idea what a book’s been up to, imagining who might have read it and why and whether or not it made a difference.
But then every book makes some, even-if-only-so-small-it-seems-insignificant, difference, does it not?
~
How to Eat a Poem
Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
—Eve Merriam
Currently in mourning that a local bookstore, in a beautiful location, is now closed. What is wrong with people? Why are they not shopping at beautiful local bookstores??
Still sad at the memory of cows passed on the 401 being transported in the dark of night.
Amazed at how the sky does this.
Currently reading Open by Lisa Moore. Listening to Tinariwen. Eating radishes and butter. Radishes and bread. Radishes and salt and butter and bread. Radishes and salad. Radishes on salad, radish salad. Baby radishes sauteed with greens still attached. Radishes and cheese and olives. Radishes and radishes. No spam.
Oh my god. Where did it go??
~
I probably spent just a little too much time reading on the weekend under this umbrella (no, I take that back; actually, I didn’t spend nearly enough time).
I’ve been thinning out my bookshelves recently, and coming up with some odd and interesting titles in the process—things I’ve either not read or can’t remember reading. (Which makes me think of the old Born Loser comic strip where the husband is increasingly frustrated by his middle-aged forgetfulness, can’t find his glasses, etc., and his pragmatic wife, who says:
“Think of the positives—soon you’ll be able to hide your own Easter eggs.”)
But the point is…
Oh yes. The books.
One of the more unusual titles I’ve unearthed is
Just Add Water and Stir, a collection of essays by Pierre Berton, most of which appeared in the 50’s in what was then The Toronto Daily Star. The book is described by the publisher (McClelland & Stewart) as… “Being a random collection of satirical essays, rude remarks,used anecdotes, thumbnail sketches, ancient wheezes, old nostalgias, wry comments, limp doggerel, intemperate recipes, vagrant opinions, and crude drawings…“
What often strikes me about writing from this era is the intelligent humour, that black and white Gable and Lombard rat-a-tat pace that’s clever without the need for cynicism or the homogenous drum rolls in which much of today’s humour is packaged. People then, it seems, weren’t afraid to be subtle.
I’m also struck by the whole Hey-Honey-Get-Me-a-Coffee-Willya mentality and the (shudder) girdles-riding-up image that conjures.
For example, there’s a section titled “Seven Men and a Girl”. Not a ‘woman’— a girl. Not boys, men. Seven of them. Some of whom include Glenn Gould, Charles Templeton, Russ Baker (“last of the world’s great bush pilots”), Robert Service, Milton Berle. Then there’s the girl—the sole representative of half the population—a prostitute named Jacqueline.
These happen to be among the few serious sketches about lifestyle, achievement and personality, based on interviews Berton conducted. The one about Jacqueline is meant to dispel the theory that all call girls are unhappy. Unlike so many others, Jacqueline, evidently, “has it made”, mostly because—
“…she’s met a man who has given her his name and expects nothing from her but her love. One may well ask why, under this odd arrangement, he too is happy. And again the answer must be that happiness is not an absolute. Jacqueline’s husband spent ten years in prison. Now he has a steady job and a wife who looks after him. For him, this is enough.”
Berton writes that when Jacqueline was asked about quitting “her profession”, she said she’d quit tomorrow if her husband told her to.
“But he hasn’t told her, though perhaps some day he may. And I don’t think Jacqueline really wants to quit, anyway.”
In addition to the ‘serious’ stuff, there are parodies and take-offs of society, of education, the press, bureaucracy, smoking, marketing. Smart satirical re-tellings of fables and fairy tales and recipes. Opinions on Dick and Jane, racial origins, thought control.
More than anything, it’s a fascinating romp through a not really that long ago—yet in another lifetime—era.
~
At the other end of the spectrum, I read a poetry collection recently
purchased for my niece—Think Again, by JonArno Lawson, (Kids Can Press, 2010). Beautifully illustrated by Julie Morstad, with simple pen and ink line drawings that just so perfectly capture the essence of emerging adolesence—all beauty and innocense mixed with tension and confusion mixed with childlike joy and what’s left of that fleeting childlike wisdom that they are perfect just as they are.
The poems, written as quatrains, may be a little too angsty or introspective on their own, but complemented by the drawings, the book reflects something pure about the young teenage mind that, as grownups, we’d do well to be reminded of now and then.
What I Want
I’ve objected and complained/But it hasn’t done any good—/I don’t want to be explained/I want to be understood. (from Think Again)
Only after they’ve stopped being gorgeous just as they are—
—a tinted drink gives them a whole wacky new life.
And I do believe they will thank you for it.
Smells like Hubba Bubba.
Smells like wisteria.
So the woman down the street says this damn rabbit, have you got rabbit problems too, it’s a complete nuisance, look what it did to the bark of this tiny sapling over winter, it was just planted in the Fall, can you imagine?
I ask does she mean can I imagine being clever enough to fend off starvation by finding a tender sapling to eat amongst all the concrete…
She doesn’t answer, continues, tells me that’s not all, now it’s after the just planted snapdragons.
I say aren’t you supposed to wait until the 24th?
She says, her lovely display of varying heights and colours, all planned and perfectly arranged, which would have filled out to become a striking focal point beside the goldfish pond, is ruined. She points at holes where clumps should be, makes fists and says this can’t go on, something must be done! She looks around the yard, helplessly, hopefully (yearning for a rabbit sheriff to stroll by with bunny handcuffs?).
I suggest we stop building subdivisions where woodland used to be, we’re confusing the wildlife, we’re in their backyard not the other way around. In fact, I say, they’re pretty reasonable about sharing it with us, wouldn’t you agree—notice how they don’t eat all the snapdragons…
A lovely clump of sorrel mysteriously disappears in April—probably makes a good lunch for someone.
(Excuse me, is that a bit of sorrel in your teeth?)
By May—before I even have a chance to die of starvation—it grows back.
And so becomes another good lunch.
Plenty to go round. No need for pawcuffs.
My love of cheese occasionally takes me to odd (albeit merry) places; witness this piece I discovered about the word, or concept of, “cheesiness“, as in Las Vegas Elvis, Celine Dion and tropical themed weddings in the Poconos—far too long to read in any one sitting, but so weird it’s brilliant and I find myself returning now and then to nibble off yet another, and another, mad bit.
From Sailing the Seas of Cheese, by Erik Anderson:
“On the one hand, there is no food product cheesier than Cheese Whiz. On the other hand, there is nothing about Cheese Whiz itself that is cheesy in the aesthetic sense. Of course it might be strikingly cheesy to serve Cheese Whiz at a cocktail party or something like that, in which case, Cheese Whiz would be cheesy in both senses of the term.”
I just may have that Artexed on my best cocktail party tray.
Matilda Magtree 
