This is a writing prompt. Ten minutes. Report back if you care to.
I’ll see you then.
~
(Or a memory prompt… in which case you don’t need ten minutes.)
Although in both scenarios, tea and/or chocolate are advisable.
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
A street.
A side street off a main street.
A gravel driveway that curves left.
A mailbox, red flag down.
Bucolic, ordinary.
I notice it as I drive past at main street speed.
And in that split second
I remember you and me,
rows of strawberries,
laughing red fingered,
picking baskets of fruit,
early, early, early,
before the heat of another summer morning found us.
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
♥
Happy seeing-with-heart day…
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
A lesson in the laws of this country:
It is, apparently, okay to fly into a rage when someone comes onto our property… perfectly okay to shout obscenities and smash the trespasser’s windshield with a hammer, kick in their tail lights while they are IN their vehicle and would very much like to be on their way at this point…
It is, apparently, okay to grab a gun, fire ‘warning’ shots (warnings of what? why warnings? whatever happened to that old chestnut: get off my lawn! )…
It is, apparently, okay to try to turn off the ignition of the trespasser’s car as they (once again) attempt to leave your property… and it is very okay, apparently, if the gun, still in your hand and now pointed at the trespasser’s head, goes off and kills them.
It’s okay because this is an accident. Because you said it was an accident.
Oops, you might say. You didn’t mean to kill them.
That, apparently, is enough for the courts in this land, enough to appease a jury of your peers (and by peers we obviously mean people as rage-filled and incompetent with a firearm as you are).
You didn’t mean to kill them.
What else is there to say? How to argue that point?
The laws of this country, apparently, condone hysteria, anger and violence toward trespassers. And errors where killing is concerned. Where pointing a loaded gun at someone’s head is concerned.
Oops.
But the laws of this country aren’t the people of this country and I hope the people of this country will stand up and make this travesty a catalyst for change.
Because none of this makes sense. That you, a man of 63, “didn’t mean to kill” but did kill a 22 year old boy who, like every other boy, every other child that grows up in a place where there’s diddly squat to do sometimes gets up to bad business. Like you yourself might have done once upon a time. Because I’m guessing this isn’t the first time a young person went joy-riding on the prairies and made some dumb decisions. (Those decisions by the way, dumb as they may have been, were not in any way life-threatening… well, not to you anyway.) And, oh, by the way, we have dumb-ass decision makers in cities and towns too, young people who for whatever reason are bored and get into trouble… Do I understand the laws of this land to be that we have a new way of handling these situations? Because this sure as hell feels like a precedent.
(By the way… may I infer that the next time someone, oh, let’s say an Indigenous man, accidentally kills a white boy, by shooting him in the head, the court will appoint a jury of twelve members of the Indigenous community and try him in a fair trial with a jury of his peers? )
Because that would at least be something.
~
What also would be something is if the man who killed the boy was required to go to anger management counselling.
And some kind of night school program where he could learn how to use a gun properly, maybe get a copy of Side Arm Ownership for Dummies.
And if this country changed its rules about jury selection… as was suggested in a report dated 2013, by Judge Frank Iacobucci. who at that time said there was a “crisis in the justice system”.
Or wouldn’t it be something if the court had deemed it worthwhile that the man who killed the boy make a statement to the Boushie family, to ask for forgiveness, and to spend a weekend hearing about who Colten Boushie was, what his life was… to, oh I don’t know, develop a smidgen of compassion for another human being.
That still wouldn’t be justice, but it would be something.
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
Kudos to Crabtree Publishing for their new ‘Leaving My Homeland’ series of picture book style books focusing on the refugee experience from the perspective of children. Each of the books covers one child’s story.
The series includes:
A Refugee’s Journey From Afghanistan
A Refugee’s Journey From Iraq
A Refugee’s Journey from Syria
(Also Myanmar, Colombia, Guatemala, Somalia, South Sudan, Congo, and Yemen)
Ten books in all.
Brilliantly done with photos and drawings and sidebars with bite-sized summaries of the country’s history, and current political situation, the children’s voices speaking about how they used to live before violence and fear took over, about what they loved and what they’ll miss. (The info is truly bite-sized, yet enough to come away with some basic knowledge of each country. Perfectly done for kids… and many adults could benefit from it too.)
Simple things explained, like the difference between refugees, immigrants and IDP’s (internationally displaced persons).
There are stories of journeys by boat, by air, and those on foot and how each of these journeys feels, the refugee camps they live in, sometimes for years, the people that help along the way and those who betray.
I especially love that these books for children don’t shy away from talk about Islamaphobia and why some people might be afraid of Muslims. They straighten out misconceptions and show children from these countries as simply children.
All of the stories are extraordinary to imagine, but despite the subject matter there is, amazingly, no drama. The books are not intended to shock or create sympathy, but merely to create a level of understanding of The Other.
For example, in A Refugee’s Journey from Myanmar, by Ellen Rodger, the complicated history and present situation facing the Rohingyas is explained in simple and clear language that not only informs but will, hopefully, lead to questions and conversation.
There are stories about what happens when children go to their new schools, how they don’t fit in, don’t speak the language, but the focus is never on how that makes the child feel sad, or of being bullied or teased, though we know that happens, but instead, the mandate of the books seems to be… now that we know something of the situation these individuals have come from, the things they’re dealing with…. what can we do to help?
Imagine living in a country where fear is normal. You fear government soldiers, the police, and maybe even your next-door neighbour. You might be scared of being attacked if you leave your home. That is what life is like for some people….
Each book also includes a glossary and lists of websites and other excellent reading along the same lines, like Margriet Ruurs’ Stepping Stones and many others. This is really such brilliant, welcome and necessary reading for kids, and families together.
Books that matter. Can’t have too much of this.
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
Middle aged woman runs away, writes letters home daily to husband whom she has no intention of leaving. She just needs a break. She’s happy with him, now she wants to be happy with herself.
“…the pull of the moon will be shared by you and the ocean and the minds of wild things.”
I love a good yarn about a woman who runs away.
In Elizabeth Berg’s Pull of the Moon, Nan, the protagonist, is fifty. (They’re always fifty.) She buys a turquoise journal and leaves home. She tells her husband Martin (in a letter) not to worry, that she’s not crazy or even unhappy, that she loves him. “I needed all of a sudden to go, without saying where, because I don’t know where.”
In the turquoise journal she writes to a ‘you’… as Anne Frank wrote to her journal ‘Kitty’. “I bought this black pen for you. I feel shy saying this, as though we are friends too new to exchange anything without it being too important.” There’s a sense she’s also writing to a new and still unformed side of herself.
She also writes almost daily letters to husband Martin, wonderful letters, conversational, about things she sees and wonders, things she can’t say to him in person, or has gotten out of the habit of saying.
One of her goals is to ‘talk to women’ and she meets a few in her rather ordinary travels (a quite perfect ordinariness, I should say, that gives her story its power).
“It seems to me that the working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, so full of colour and life. And one of the most tragic things I’ve seen is the way that’s been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard-pressed to find out. Why? I want to say to you that we are not silly, that what we think about and what drives us to talk, talk, talk, this is vital.”
And from the floozy looking woman at the trailer park hanging laundry in silver heels:
“I said what type did I look like and she said I looked like the type that went down and volunteered at some suicide prevention centre in order to save my own life.”
There’s a woman shelling peas. And another being screamed at in grocery store. There are, in fact, women everywhere. And they are living lives that are never mentioned, anywhere.
“I feel a kind of strength happening that is wholly legitimate, that is not some trapping I wear until it falls off. It is as though the thing has roots, and seeks the sun with its face turned toward it. And I know I never would have found it without leaving.”
At one point in her travels she writes:
“Today I woke up and felt the old pull of sadness back… This was disappointing. I thought I’d escaped something.”
But the journey continues nonetheless. And I’m pleased that it doesn’t end with either epiphany and monumental change, or defeat.
“Let it be this way: Let me be eighty-eight. Let me have just returned from the hair-dresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn chair beside my garden, a large-print book of poetry in my hands. Let me hear the whistle of a cardinal and look up to find him and feel a sudden flutter in my chest and then—nothing. And, as long as I’m asking, let me rise up over my own self, saying, Oh. Ah.”
♥
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
The other morning the sunrise was all thin layers of acid tangerine and atomic yellow, like some psychedelic celestial torte.
Today, sunrise is invisible. The sky, stone grey. Nothing edible.
I read somewhere that the colours are an optical, not exactly illusion, but an effect created by various molecules in the atmosphere and their length and/or density and/or how they line up and/or etc. on any given day.
The point being that everything, it turns out — this rising and setting, the spinning and movements of planets — all goes on in exactly the same way every day, which means that—
—it’s only our vantage point
and therefore our perceptions—
that change.
Matilda Magtree 