wordless wednesday? hardly

~ carin ~ 13 Comments

 
It occurs to me that the best of my friends feel like family. And the best of my family feel like friends. That while some of my friendships are decades deep and that counts for so much, others exist between people who’ve never met, and yet… they, too, are an invaluable piece of the precious whole.

Well hell’s bells. Aren’t I lucky…

So it’s hardly enough, these few words on this wordless day, but it’s my own small tribute to each of you… and all of you.

DSC04547

To you who inspires me.

DSC04611

To you who reminds me to trust myself.

DSC04610

To you who feeds the birds in your nightgown.

DSC04609

To you whose favourite day of the week is garbage day.

DSC04608

To you who will discuss the blue painting in a way that opens up its possibilities (not everyone can do this) and not flinch when the ribs are cooked in saran wrap.

DSC04603

To you who has lost so much yet continues to give (please, please… receive also… this, at least).

DSC04562

To you who appears like a gift on my porch.

DSC04555

To you who never fails to make me laugh. Until I can barely breathe.

DSC04556

To you with whom I make pickled string beans.

To you with whom I have occasionally been pickled.

DSC04552

To you who I only see a few times a year but surely have known since before forever and with whom conversations never end but merely resume.

DSC04550

To you who was first to run away and who showed me how, and who never really left.

DSC04544

To you who is going through the worst of times and yet you smile that beautiful smile, all eyes and cheeks and teeth, so sincere, and as real as your tears.

DSC04541

To you who loves dogs.

To you who loves cats.

DSC04531

To you who makes places for the bees to land and drink water from tiny pebbles in a dish.

DSC04519

To you who likes happy endings.

DSC04518

To you who has no idea how much you’ve taught me by being vulnerable and open and a mess. Because you never were. Look at you. Heroic.

DSC04515

To you who makes art that hangs on my walls.

To you who makes art that lives on my bookshelves.

To you who finds such peace in your music.

DSC04539

To you who has nothing in your fridge because your world has turned upside down and because you have no appetite and when I come to sit and chat at your table over tea, which is already more than enough, you place a bowl of pickled onions and boiled eggs in front of me and say eat.

DSC04533

To you who lives with impossibly beautiful views.

To you who lives three feet from a brick wall.

DSC04523

To you who I drive three days to see and then don’t. Because because. But I so look forward to seeing you. Again.

To you who do the best you can.

DSC04602

To you who walk and dance and sing with me, for real or in my imagination matters not… because I know you would if I asked.

To you. Especially.

Ten thousand thanks.

♥

May the season be merry and bright… and bring you laughter

love

and light.

 

♦

Other wordless friends:

Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman

 

 

the (anti) shopping list

~ carin ~ 20 Comments

 

Here is my not-quite-but-almost annual list for them wot don’t especially like ‘stuff’… Also, coincidentally, it’s a list of my favourite things to both give and receive… (note for those intent on giving:  the asterisked books? got ’em.
But I’m wide open for all the food items… leave baskets on the porch).

1.   Food. Any form. You can’t go wrong with cheese. If you live in the vicinity of Country Cheese… fill my stocking with the goat brie (coated in ash). It’s absolutely heaven sent, this stuff. Appropriate for the time of year, no?

2.   A book about  food. I’m mad for anything Laurie Colwin, also *The CanLit Foodbook  and most recently, *a Taste of Haida Gwaii,  by Susan Musgrave. And… Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus.  I can’t believe I don’t own this.

3.   Music by Laura Smith.

4.   Gift certificate to a garden centre. My choice would be Richter’s Herbs for the following reasons: the staff know things and are pleasant (this is no longer the case at all garden centres). The selection is amazing and mostly edible. They play classical music to the seedlings. (Also, and not insignificant, the route home goes right by my favourite place for pizza.)

5.   Gift certificate to my favourite place for pizza. (This is an excellent gift and comes with a good chance of being invited to share a slice.)

6.   If you have made anything pickled, I would welcome a jar. (FYI, I’m not much for jam.)

7.  Honey. Unpasteurized of course. Local please. Or a kombucha mother. And who would say no to a bag of Atlantic dulse???

8.  And because we can’t ever have enough… books, books and more books from across this literary land. One from each province/territory — mostly published this year:

YUKON — Ivan Coyote’s *Gender Failure (Arsenal Pulp Press) actually came out in 2014. So sue me.

NWT — Ramshackle: a Yellowknife Story,  by Alison McCreesh (Conundrum Press)  (this review by John Mutford sold me)

NUNAVUT — Made in Nunavut,  by Jack Hicks and Graham White (UBCPress) Because we could stand to know more about this part of the country.

BC — Please don’t think Amber Dawn’s *Where the Words End and My Body Begins  (Arsenal Pulp Press) is only for those in love with poetry. It’s for anyone who loves words. Trust me.

ALBERTA — Rumi and the Red Handbag  (Palimset Press), by Shawna Lemay.

SASKATCHEWAN — *The Education of Augie Merasty  (University of Regina Press), by Augie Merasty and David Carpenter.

MANITOBA — A writer new to me, Katherena Vermette. I want very much to read her North End Love Songs.  Also the more recent The Seven Teachings  (Portage & Main Press, 2014/15).

ONTARIO — A Rewording Life,  a fabulous project by Sheryl Gordon to raise funds for the Alzheimers Society of Canada. 1,000 writers from across the country were each given a ‘word’, which they then returned in a sentence. Essentially, it’s an anthology of a thousand sentences. I’m proud to have been invited to join the fun. My word was ‘nettles’.

QUEBEC — Okay. This came out in 2013, not 2105, but I haven’t read it and have always meant to and now it’s long listed for Canada Reads. So it’s time. Bread and Bone  (House of Anansi), by Saleema Nawaz.

NEW BRUNSWICK — *Beatitudes  (Goose Lane Editions),  by Hermenegilde Chiasson. This was published years ago (2007) but I include it because it’s truly one of my favourite books ever and I don’t get to talk about it enough.

NOVA SCOTIA — *These Good Hands  (Cormorant), by Carol Bruneau.

PEI — *Our Lady of Steerage  (Nimbus Publishing), by Steven Mayoff.

NEWFOUNDLAND & LABRADOR — Ditto the Canada Reads argument for Michael Crummey’s 2014 *Sweetland   from Doubleday.

9.  Donations to any number of good causes. And a few more ideas (some repetition, but also not). And this, recently discovered: The Native Women’s Association of Canada.

10.  The gift of art.

11.  The gift of lunch, or a walk, a phone call, an hour to really listen to someone who needs to be heard. A visit to a nursing home. A poem tucked into a card. An invitation, a freshly baked pie for the neighbour who could do with some cheering. The gift of letting someone give to us too. Margaret Visser wrote a wonderful book on that… The Gift of Thanks.

12. The gift of a promise kept.

13.  And never to be overlooked or forgotten: the gift of massage.

You’re welcome.

And thank you.

visitors

~ carin ~ 12 Comments

 

When people come to visit, I never know where to take them.

DSC04471

Inevitably, we find ourselves at this diner or that café or the restaurant that does the excellent veggie naan even though the server is a pill.

Almost always we walk. Through the ravine, downtown, around the ‘hood, the beach. I point out the tree with windfall apples I use to make a crumble each October. And the place where once the kids and I ate pistachios and played Daniel Boone eating pistachios. It’s not a high end tour but there are almost always stories that spring from it… mine, the visiting people’s.

DSC04470

We’ll go to the galleries of course. There are a lovely abundance of them here. The market. The bookstore. The emu farm.

A concert maybe. A slice of local theatre.

There’s a junk store I might think of taking them, depending on mood and whim and inclination, where you can barely move for the amount of crap and treasure and the owner’s hoarding instinct, which prevents him from ever wanting to sell anything. The only store where when you ask how much this is, you’re told it’s not for sale. You don’t go there to buy, you go there to do anthropological studies.

DSC04472

If it’s summer we’ll paddle a rented kayak and have fries from the best chip truck in these parts or sit on a patio in a trailer park luncheonette and drink iced tea with some not too bad grilled cheese sarnies.

If it’s winter we might stay home and light a fire. I might make a feasty meal or maybe just keep it simple, make an omelette… I’ll mention that final scene in the movie Big Night and I’ll put on the CD and we’ll talk about first times… first omelettes, whatever…

We might drive. To see the xmas lights or the country lights.

DSC04469

This is what I do… and sometimes I wonder: is it enough, these emus and sunsets? And then I wonder why I feel that way because when I visit someone this is exactly what I want. NOT the Eiffel Tower, not a string of organized entertainments, but the experience of actually living in a place… the small slices of everydayness.

(Although I will not decline a quick dash into the Louvre.)

So tell me… when visiting, what is it we want?

And by we I mean you.
  

 

 

 

this is not a review: ‘fishbowl’, by bradley somer

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 
I can’t always say how it is that a book comes to my attention but with Fishbowl  I do remember that ‘must read!’ moment. Mind you, I use the word ‘remember’ loosely… it’s more like I have this vague idea that someone whose book sense I value posted somewhere how she was giving this book to everyone she knows for xmas… I could list a few possibles of who that might have been but then everyone’s friends would be living in hope of receiving a copy.9781250057808

Because to get Fishbowl  as a gift would indeed be a happy day.

What we have here is an exceedingly readable, well-written book whose story takes place over the course of thirty minutes. We begin with the knowledge that Ian (resident of the fishbowl) will (only at the end of the book) fall off the balcony of his twenty-seventh floor apartment and will pass all twenty-seven floors in the process.

Not only an interesting set-up but in just a few pages Somer has managed to make Ian the goldfish someone we care about… with aquatic information such as the length of a goldfish’s memory (what memory?) and bits of fishbowl zen: “Less thinking, more doing” is the goldfish’s philosophy. “Having a plan is the first step toward failure,” he would say if he could speak.

After we learn that Ian *will* fall… the book, essentially, is our introduction to a few people living in the apartments that Ian will pass on the way down.

By the time he falls, we’re hooked. We want to know about Petunia Delilah and her impending baby, her future; about Herman, home schooled, weird, wonderfully naive and easy to swoon; Connor the bastard who dates far too many women (and on whose balcony Ian lives so that he doesn’t stare at the doings in Connor’s bedroom); a construction worker who likes to dress up; a lonely building superintendent; an agoraphobic phone sex worker.

The characters, despite their tics, are represented as fairly ordinary. It’s not about the tics. The point, instead, is that we all have peculiar elements to our lives. Their stories, not their quirks, are what keep us reading… (that and the dry humour, and sentences that consistently offer up happy surprises…)

“The elderly couple, with no pressing engagements after the funeral service, even visited her in the hospital. They brought her flowers and chatted with her for an hour, their manners as impeccable as any hero’s in an old science fiction book.”

The bigger story is how we feel at the end of the book and how we might understand the wider world just a titch better. For a moment anyway.

A credit to the author that a single fish could do so much.

And even if our vision of the whole wider world isn’t altered, then maybe this:
I dare you to look at an apartment building quite the same way again.

Peixe010eue(my vision of Ian; courtesy of wikicommons)

 

simon says

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 
A boy in his driveway the other day shouts hello as I pass. He says his name is Simon, what’s mine? I say Carin and he tells me he has a Batman tee shirt. He opens his coat. I say that’s some great tee shirt and he says yeah, then tells me he’s seven. Not that I asked. He continues talking, about being seven maybe, or the tee shirt, just chattering away… all of this in only seconds; I’ve barely slowed my stride. His mum is raking leaves, smiling. And in all the chattering somewhere the boy asks… in a way he might ask a chum at school, or anyone… “How old are you?”  His mother’s smile immediately turns into a nervous laugh, she puts down her rake, edges Simon toward the house and tells him that isn’t the sort of question he’s supposed to ask. Meanwhile I’ve answered by saying “Well, I’m not seven!”, as I continue on my way. Also laughing nervously.

And for the rest of my walk all I can think about is why.

Why is that not the sort of question Simon should ask? And is it only not the sort of question Simon should not ask people of certain ages? And how should Simon know which ages those are? And who decides that anyway? And doesn’t the whole way his mother reacted give off a vibe that suggests to Simon, if only subliminally, that there’s something *wrong* about certain ages and THAT’S why we don’t ask.

And if there’s something wrong with certain ages… what, exactly  is that wrongness? I mean if Simon were to ask his mother Why can’t I ask?  what would she say? Something about politeness probably. But why is it polite NOT to ask someone their age when you are seven and you ask everyone ? (And everyone asks you.)

Of course I was taught the same lesson as a kid. (But we’re back to the why… Is it to spare people the embarrassment of admitting they aren’t seven, or twenty-seven or thirty-seven or whatever decade + seven it suddenly becomes an embarrassment to *be*?)

North America’s twisted version of age aside, what really bothered me was my own response, that weird bit of laughter I threw out in order to make Simon’s mother feel okay about the whole thing. By laughing it off, by saying “Well, I’m not seven,” I condoned her discomfort and was party to the stupid lesson Simon was being taught.

Why didn’t I just answer the question?

Conditioning, that’s why. (And, mostly, conditioning almost always sucks.)

The thing is I happen to be a non-ageist kind of person. Even as a kid (just like Simon) I barely noticed someone’s vintage. I still can’t see how it matters. It’s their energy that registers with me. One of my favourite people to hang out with lived to be 101 and it never struck me as an unusual match.

I also have friendships where *I’m* the 101 year old.

And a few in between.

The thing is this: dullness and negativity, ego and bullshit appear at every mile marker. So do joie de vivre, curiosity, kindness, engagement with life, humour, a creative spark and the balls to be yourself. A tedious schmuck at sixty was probably a tedious schmuck at thirty.

Only with better abs.

My walk takes me on a loop and eventually I’m heading back toward Simon’s house. I resolve to tell him my age as I pass. I’ll throw it out, casually, maybe mention that I have a fondness for the colours green and orange and yellow and that I do not  know how to tap dance. Not that anyone asked.

But the leaves in front of Simon’s house are raked and no one’s there.

Too bad. Because I think Simon would have found that particular line of chat quite normal. And that would have been so much better a lesson than the last.

DSC04297