pick a word, any word…

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

 

I do writing workshops with women who are currently living in shelters. They teach me extraordinary things.

Most recently, the meaning of prehensile.

It came up in one of the exercises where we give each other a word and the word T. gave me was prehensile.

It had a vague ring about it, I was sure I’d heard it before… maybe… but I couldn’t put it into context. “Pre what?”  I said. And T. smiled, said a monkey’s tail was prehensile. “Anything like that,”  she said. “I watch a lot of nature shows.”

Hmm. Okay.

So the exercise was to use the word as a prompt to write fast and without thinking for a couple of minutes. And this is what I wrote:

Pre tail? Do I assume hensile  means tail? Before tail? Where’s the monkey part fit in? I mean in terms of word origins—I’ll be figuring this out for a long time—I’ll be discussing it with friends: do you know what prehensile means, I’ll say, and I can guarantee you several will say… pre what?? And so it will go. And this is the beauty of not knowing because we’re never the only one who doesn’t. What somebody knows, another is clueless about and so on. None of us knows it all, which is a fine thing to remember. In fact I honestly consider it a good day when I bump into a word I don’t know or one I’ve heard but can’t actually say I know the meaning of, like when you read a book and don’t quite get the meaning, you can’t actually say   what it means, but you get the gist of it, enough to keep reading. About monkey tails though—I wonder when we lost ours.
I wonder what direct descendant of mine was the last to have a tail and where he or she lived and what was their favourite colour…

~

(Please don’t look for a lot of meaning here. Notice I’ve filed this post under Blather and ShillyShally. Am partial to a regular dollop of both. Essential at times. Also, it’s Friday. Also, if you happen to play the pick a word game and want to share the spoils… I’ll welcome that with pleasure and a pot of tea.)

Photos taken at Story Book Primate Sanctuary, in Sunderland.

Important to say THIS IS NOT A ZOO. The animals here are rescued from horrible circumstances and given a chance to live in a safe environment. (The guy in the pic is Rudy… found in a storage locker with a lot of other ‘exotic’ animals… People, eh? Prehensile is better.)

More info here…    and a fabulous place to send loose change.

 

not-wordless wednesday (seasonal notes)

~ carin ~ 11 Comments

This isn’t the way the beach looks today. Not even a tiny bit. No hint of snow in the air. A couple of days ago I harvested the last of the salad greens. I say ‘the last’… there could be more to come if the tropical temps continue. Tropical being 7-ish. Tropical enough for Birks. What I’m trying to say is that while I like fresh garden produce in December, I’m craving my snowshoes.

 

♦

Other (not always) wordless friends:

Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman

 

so a guy walks at the beach…

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 
 
…and I’m at the beach and I see the guy walking there.

And I watch, hoping he’ll walk right past the gulls, disrupting them for a minute so I can get a shot of that feathery disruption.

And he does. 

But I’ve been watching him for a while, waiting, and in the watching a story idea has hatched.

Unexpected.

So I walk away, along the beach, alone, where I don’t watch anything.

 

I mutter out loud, unraveling this idea, repeating and layering and repeating the layers.

I make a few notes but mostly walk and mutter until the idea is pretty solid in my mind.

And then I go home and write it all down.

Turns out it’s a good story… that in itself a small miracle.

…sometimes that’s how they come.

 

 

edmonton couch – 1980’s

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

 
Black vinyl with slanted armrests, homemade by my dad and sent in a cube van after I moved to Edmonton (as a surprise) along with a grey trunk containing, among other surprises, a huge Canadian flag I bought for $10 from I can’t remember where; two chairs that fold out for sleeping, which I sleep on for months until I buy a bed; and a stuffed poodle named Bandit I thought I was too old to care about. (I was wrong.)

I could probably have bought seven couches for the price of this one delivery but none would have had its particular brand of vinyl charm (I crotchet an afghan for it while watching MASH) in an apartment with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe posters taped above a small unpainted table and bamboo blinds that keep the night out but to my astonishment allow everyone to see in. The flag comes in handy.

The trunk becomes a coffee table and it all feels quite luxurious and one night while eating Old Dutch chips it occurs to me that this is the first place I have ever lived where I don’t have to share a bathroom, the first time in my life where a toilet is entirely mine.

The couch is under a window that faces a parking lot and garbage bins where one night I see someone hanging out with a knife. Are they throwing it away I wonder… or finding it or waiting for someone… or running away from someone. Questions, things forgotten, details.

About that couch:  it’s possible I never even sat on it (the chairs were comfier).

And yet…

image courtesy of wikicommons

♦

Edmonton Couch, 1980’s,  the result of memories inspired by Bruce Rice’s  ‘Winnipeg Couch’,  (from ‘The Trouble with Beauty’, Coteau Books)

Also, I have a thing for couches.

everything i know about football in a nutshell

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 

I know that I don’t like the game. It strikes me as only slightly more boring than golf or baseball but in a different, more intolerable way.

I also know that I loved sitting in the bleachers in Edmonton sometime in the eighties, wrapped in a wool blanket, sipping from a thermos. I LOVED that this boring game brought people together in frigid temps, and not a soul complaining. I have no idea who was playing. The Edmonton team and somebody else I suppose. Who cares? The blanket, the thermos, the frosty-air-happy-vibe is what I remember.

I know that in high school I made the mistake of attending a pep rally and was hit in the head by a football.

And I know what an excellent plan was hatched when I used to hang out with semi-athletic friends who liked to play frisbee and soccer and who one afternoon decided on an impromtu game of football and used me as a decoy to score a touchdown (all I had to do was stand beside the goal post, receive the ball and take one step to my left—the theory being that the other team wouldn’t be watching me because by then they’d figured out I was useless). Brilliant strategy except for the part where I didn’t understand my role and stood there with the ball wondering what do I do with it again??

I know (or at least have heard) that a typical football game lasts about three hours, during which time there are only about 11 minutes of actual play.

I know that in England football is called American football because in England football is soccer.

And I know that if I was forced to watch football it would be CFL games only. (I know about the difference in downs but I don’t understand or care.) I’m a sucker for the cold, and hearty souls. (It occurs to me that part of what I don’t like about certain sports is that they’re played in warm weather and who wants to run around in the heat? That and the fact that I just don’t like sports.)

But who didn’t love seeing that snow last night?? And the no-whinging attitude of players and fans. Took me straight back to those Edmonton bleachers. Oh, sure, it might have been freezing and unpleasant at the time but that’s the stuff sweet Canadian memories are made of.

Also… that the Argos won doesn’t hurt.

(sorry, Calgary, you know I’ve always loved you… and I promise to stop saying the word Edmonton in your presence… and of course Toronto)

♥

 

 

evening air

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

The kind of night where red sky darkens under slice of moon as you walk, a hand-knitted scarf around your neck, just the right size to tuck into a pocket once the walking warms you up, and gloves, too, come off… and over there a cat sitting on its driveway staring at another cat across the road on a driveway of its own, each sniffing the air—territory is a scent; and from an-open-window-who-knows-where, in one of these already-lighted-for-xmas houses, someone’s dinner is cooking… and you think: sloppy joes and onions.

 


You know that kind of night?

 

this is not a review: ‘the utility of boredom’, by andrew forbes

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

 
Here is my entire lifelong experience of baseball:

In gym class, being the last person to be chosen for the team, always.

Nieces and nephew who played baseball.  (Oh, did they? I only recall attending one game and being totally confused by everything including why all the parents were yelling.)

Children of nieces and nephew who currently play baseball.  (If they’re happy I’m happy for them… yawn.. It’s still not my favourite outing but I bring my camera these days and that makes it better. Here’s a pic I took at a recent game. I call it: things I’d rather be doing than watching baseball.)

The World Series, 1992.  (Even I contributed to that decibel level.)

The one Jays’ game I’ve attended.  (We had excellent seats apparently but it didn’t help the tedium. Have blocked out the details. Nothing to report.)

Two friends and one house painter who rhapsodize about the religion of baseball. (The earnestness of their comments has stayed with me for years and keeps me oddly curious about the WHY of whatever is the game’s draw.)

—

And then into my life falls The Utility of Boredom, a collection of essays, which (to my complete surprise), explain so much, not the least being that boredom is integral  to the game—it’s an actual thing,  like the space between notes played on a piano, that part of the beauty of baseball is that there is time for climbing trees. The theory is Forbes’… the analogies, mine.

Forbes’ style is casual, anecdotal, written with a wide knowledge and deep passion for the game yet readable on different levels, depending where you are on the baseball knowledge continuum. For neophyte me, it was all pleasure of discovery and details that will forever stick, like how baseball is made for radio in a way that doesn’t work as perfectly for other sports, how the rhythm of it allows you to have a game on in the background as you go about your day and you don’t miss a thing.

I like that image.

It’s an oddly comforting book. And I’m not even sure why I’m choosing this word, but it’s the right word. I enjoyed the reading, enjoyed having my eyes opened to the ‘comforts’ this game seems to offer its fans.

In ‘Sanctuary’, the opening essay, Andrew Forbes explains his own introduction to baseball and that feeling of safety and the-world-suddenly-makes-sense  vibe inside a ballpark. ‘Jim Eisenreich’s Eyes’ is about finding a morality trigger from a baseball card. ‘Ballparks of America’ is a surprisingly beautiful tribute not to the stadiums and their legends but to the towns and the people that define them, delivered in bite-sized morsels.

 

“In Sanford, Maine, a woman tells you what the mill closures have done to the town and how there are no tourist dollars because Sanford is so far inland. Orchard Beach catches all the tourists. But Sanford has its little ballpark proudly bearing a ‘Babe Ruth was here’ plaque…”

“In Seattle, from your seat high up in the Safeco Field stands, you can see Mt. Rainier as well as Felix Hernandez. Both are astonishing…”

“In Los Angeles they beat a man into a coma for wearing a Giants jersey…”

I very much doubt I’ll ever be a seamhead (baseball fan) or even enjoy watching a game, but neither will I ever again doubt the sincerity with which those who love the game love it. Also, I believe it’s important to understand The Other… and though sports remains a weird thing to me, The Utility of Boredom has gone a long way to explaining its appeal on a deeper level.

“Boredom, in the baseball sense, is a synonym for lackadaisical; it’s the only proper response to all that green grass and blue sky. Slouchy in the Viera stands, the beery patrons were in no hurry to shake the peanut shells from their hair and return to real life. They wanted to sprawl over those sticky plastic seats for which they’d paid. And the players—the unknown pitcher on the mound palming the ball mindlessly, the batter stepping in, stepping out, stepping back in, adjusting his cup, a batting glove, his helmet—were happy to oblige.

“This is where good radio announcers truly shine: filling the space. I once heard Vin Scully…. describing a cloud over Dodger Stadium and it was the most riveting and moving 30 seconds of the the entire broadcast. It’s for this reason too that baseball became a game of such minute statistical detail: that folks at microphones should have something to say when there was nothing to discuss and nothing happening on the field.”

So glad I stumbled upon this.

I wasn’t disappointed in the least.

Nor bored for even a moment.

(&, honestly, no one could be more surprised about that than me.)