Where does Individuality End and Community Begin?

 As I get older and join the melting pot of somewhat invisible middle aged women, I think a lot about the concept of individuality. When I was younger I strived to stand out in the crowd. I dressed differently than most of my peers (I favoured a button down shirt and slim leather neck tie for example), and I listened to the alternative music of my generation. I didn't want anyone to put me in a box with a label. That would have been the end of the world in my view back then. Being the youngest of six may have had something to do with that. I was greeted at the beginning of the school year by teachers who said things like: "Not another Lamb kid", or  "are you as good at math as your brother, Stephen?" Ha. No. But pretty good at English Literature, for which I received an award in Grade 12. I had a great group of friends and got along with most people in my school, probably also a result of being the youngest of six widely varying personalities. 

My mother used to say, "Sometimes you just have to join the Human Race." I think she meant that sometimes we had to do things in a normal, accepted way. I struggled with that over the years. While considering myself somewhat of a rebel, I also wanted elderly ladies to like me, and I had a secret passion for ballet and all things Victorian/Edwardian. I was also desperate for my family to be proud of me. As the youngest I had received the teasing label by my siblings as 'spoiled baby' and I wanted to live that down. I worked hard in college and was accepted to all three of the big universities in British Columbia, my home province. I ended up going to the University of British Columbia, mainly because my parents had gone there and spoke so fondly of their time there, but also due to the fact that my sister and her husband lived in Vancouver and I could board with them. First Year mandatory housing at university was not a thing in the late 1980's and it was hard to get a place in the dorms. UBC was an eye-opening experience for me. My first day on campus I looked out on a sea of black leather jackets. The alternative uniform was Roots sweatpants, chunky wool sweaters, and wool socks with Birkenstock sandals. Both looks said 'money', and coming from a large, poor family, I fit neither. For the first time in my life I felt awkward in my individuality. A couple of professors complimented me on my look, but that was hardly satisfying to me. Clothing was not the only way I felt like a fish out of water at UBC. I was a small town girl, used to knowing everyone and feeling free to go everywhere. I felt lost. I did find a home in the arts lounge and began to make friends there through conversation with people with whom I shared classes, but I didn't socialize with them much outside of school. I was afraid to take the bus from my home in East Vancouver to meet them anywhere at night. Small town girl problems.

After I was done with post-secondary education, I got married. I soon joined the ranks of wife and mother and dressed a lot like other wives and moms: comfortably. Energy and money spent on expressions of individuality took a back seat to the daily grind of parenting, and I loved it. I felt free from trying to find my 'self'. I had a built-in purpose each and every day. Raising kids and being a team with my husband was the best part of my life so far. I made friends with other moms and felt a real sense of belonging.  As my kids grew older I was able to work and volunteer, and there also, I found my purpose as an individual outside my family. To my surprise, my purpose seemed to be about being part of, and giving my time and my heart to, a community, whether that be the local arts council or festival society, other families through providing day care at my home, or helping out at my church. Life was so, so busy, but it was good.

After twenty-eight years of raising children, suddenly, they were gone finding their own lives outside our family. Like so many other mothers I really struggled with finding my purpose beyond those twenty-eight years. My kids are, by and large, very independent people, so I suppose we did our job well enough. After all those years of living in the ultimate community (my family) I found myself having to, well, find my 'self'' once again. Over the past couple of years I have spent much time alone, most of it recovering from a head injury. While I enjoy my own company in general, I don't believe the solitary life is the life for me. Ironically, while spending so much of my youth trying to be an individual, what I really desire is community. Back then, I realize now, I was secure in my quest for individuality because I had a community.  

I think, as a human race, we all crave a sense of belonging, no matter how much we want to be known for our uniqueness. Finding community can be hard work and involve much trial and error, and there have been a few dead ends on my journey. I also spend my time going back and forth between the mountain resort where my husband works and lives most of the time, and our home (and my seasonal work) in a medium sized city an hour and a half's drive away, so committing to a community is a challenge. I am fortunate to have little pockets of community in my extended family, the friendships I have made in the various places I have lived over the years, and within the work environments I have been a part of. That being said, I am still looking for something bigger, wider, and more encompassing. Will I ever get it? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, I will continue to put my heart and time into my little pockets of community in hopes that one of them grows into something more full. 

Until next time, 

Rebecca

Things I Wrote as a Kid, Part 2

Our local Arts Festival just ended on Sunday night with a wonderful concert with Ricardo Tesi and Banditaliano from Italy. Our festival is a bit of an endurance test. Ten days of music and art bookended by jam-packed weekends of the same makes for an exhilirated yet exausted family and a messy, neglected house. Never mind, after a day of recovery I spent this morning cleaning and doing laundry, while this evening I will enjoy attending my regular yoga class. Ahhhh...it almost makes me appreciate returning to regular life.

As I said in my previous post, Things I Wrote as a Kid, I have been reading my teenage diaries. One day last week it occured to me to share my entries regarding the Winnipeg Folk Festival which I attended the summer of 1987 with my sisters, Monica and Clare and Clare's husband, Brent, along with some of their many friends. I had taken the train to Winnipeg after graduating from high school (I was seventeen) and was staying with Monica and her husband Matthew and their little daughter Anna. When rereading my diary entries I felt so blessed to have such close relationships with my sisters and brothers who were so generous and kind to me, their youngest sister. We had so much fun! I will include some highlights of my trip and time spent eating and cycling my way around Winnipeg. I hope my readers enjoy them.


Travelling to Revelstoke
I'm a little tired from the goodbye party Toni and the girls gave me last night. (They made posters of sheep for me; they made popcorn balls with Nibs as feet and eyes (sheep, a theme due to their nickname for me, 'Baa') and raspberry punch and pretzels. They made me a hilarious collage and an Ann Taylor portfolio with all my favourite pictures from magazines. Val gave me some fake Lauren perfume - cheap but a pretty fair copy. It was a really nice night). 
We started the morning with cantaloupe and me crying on Stephen's shoulder. I will miss him and Pauline (my brother and sister closest in age to me) Pauline and Steve gave me a bit more money for the trip, too. Then we packed up the Beluga (our fond name for the car). We had to use bungee cords to keep the lid of the trunk down because of my bike box. Chaos!
We rambled through the Slocan Valley (I don't know the sequence of towns) and through Silverton. We stopped at the Silverton Lookout. It was so quiet. You turn your back on the highway and look down into the lake below and across to the mountains. Nobody lives anywhere below but if I had the choice I would live right down on the cliffs. We had coffee in Silverton too and Mom madly (well not quite madly) ran around putting up museum and arts council posters. Then we stopped and ate at Nakusp on the beach. Bagels and cream cheese and pickles, tomatoes, cukes and sprouts! We didn't swim, though. We crossed the Ferry to Blanket Creek to swim. It is a small lake off the river and is quite warm. It's almost like a large bowl in that it becomes very deep in the middle. So, I couldn't stay out of the water. We got to Revelstoke and napped until 5:30 at our motel, The Swiss Chalet (tacky but clean). We ate in the motel restaurant and I had Weiner Schnitzel, which is breaded pork. It's not too exciting but with a squeeze of lemon it becomes quite good. We also had homemade chocolate cake which was excellent. We went for a long walk in the 105 degree air! The sun went down, though, as we headed back to first pack my bike in its box and then go to bed. I fell asleep around 11:45 I think. Mom had to watch the Journal Art and Music News. 
I woke up at 3:15 and had an invigorating shower and washed my hair! I felt so much better. We drove to the station and waited one hour for the late train. Eventually its whistle was finally heard. I boarded and got ready mentally for the trip. I had to sit in the smoking section until Calgary! But! Behind and across from me were two lovely Kiwis - very quiet but sweet. Right across from me was a really great Aussie named Tom. We met quickly and from then on we talked and talked! He bought me a coffee but a little while later I bought him a tea. He told me about all the food he'd eaten in all the places he'd been. His favourite, I gather, is Asia. We discussed art and everything else (Cabbages and Kings!) It was really neat to meet someone who could talk my ear off. He even seemed to enjoy talking to me. He's a dentist and is 29 but handsome (I like the 'but') and someone I could respect highly. 
The stops have been short until now. We didn't even get to walk around Lake Louise or Banff where Tom got off. The Rockies weren't as impressive as I'd imagined. They looked so old and grey. There were, however, a few majestic mountains yet even these looked ready to crumble...(I feel differently about the Rocky Mountains now.)

Monica, Clare, Matthew and Anna met me at the station. We got back to (Monica and Matthew's) funky apartment and I had a bath. Beautiful! I felt revived and sat down and had some breky (scrambled eggs and some banana bread). Then, I went to sleep for 5 and a half hours. When I got up Clare French-braided my hair...

June 29th
Got up about 8 a.m. because Anna was making a bit of noise. Matt made me breakfast and then I played with Anna who was really cute with me. Monica went to work and so Matthew and I took a drive. We brought Mon's lunch to her work and she introduced me for about 2 seconds to everyone _ I really like Alam. He is a tall, black man from Eritria who talks like, "Oh, so thees ees Moneeca's sistah."...we went to the Provincial Museum and saw the 'Non-Such'. It was neat but there is no way I would cross the Atlantic Ocean in it! We came home and relaxed and then Monica bugged me about being spoiled at home so I rebelliously did the dishes to prove her wrong. I may not do anything at home but I am able to. Clare and Brent came and got me after supper. It was really good to see Brent. He brought me a huge bag of tacky souvenirs (and some very useful ones such as a bicycle road map, a hat, and some postcards) One thing he stapled on tied with many other things such as buttons, matches, and pins was a really ugly and heavy bottle opener. Attached to it was a note, "Also good for beating off men." It was really funny...We then drove all around the city and went to a place called Osborne Village where the trendies hang out and had ice cream. I had one scoop of pistacio and one of fudge torte. Yummy! 

June 30th (Actually July 1st 3:40 a.m.) 
I am hyped on coffee! Tonight I went to the Bluenote (a dark cafe that has good music and long-haired waiters) with Matthew, John Cook and Alan Cox. They had the best coffee I've ever had and I must have had 4 cups! Ack!!!...Clare and I went to see 'Roxanne' again and generally let everyone around us know that Nelson was our hometown and that I 'appeared' in the movie. Then we walked home with Monica and my feet got sore from my new sandals and I had to be carried across the railroad tracks because I had taken the sandals off!

July 8th
Clare, Jen and Brent came to pick me up and we headed out to Bird's Hill Park for the first installment of the four day Winnipeg Folk Festival. When we got there this gospel blues band with four rather heavy-set black women singing such favourites as 'Amazing Grace' and 'Lord lift us up where we belong'. Mmmm. Then we heard a Montreal-based band called Latin-something-or-other. We danced to them and had fun. Then! Ladysmith Black Mombazo came on! They are about a 10 piece singing group from South Africa. They sing in Zulu and English and have wonderful choreography! They were a marvel to watch - so happy and bouncy. I really enjoyed them. It rained hard, though. Then it was off to Robin's Doughnuts and then Cousin's cafe for coffee and Sleepytime Tea respectively. Mom is sending me money! Yeah!

July 12th
We went to the Folk Festival yesterday - in fact CBC is broadcasting live at the Folk Fest. It was incredible! I was very impressed. We heard real folk, rock, Celtic rock, everything! We went from workshop to workshop, food stand to food stand! The best part I think was the night concert. Maria Muldaur, a Celtic rock band (Capercaillie), and David Lindley provoked us to dance crazily and sing along to songs such as 'You-oo--oo--oo send me" and "I love freedom" (we slyly added 'maxi pads' after each 'I love freedom') We ached from all our dancing. We got cold and put on sweaters, pants, anoraks - only to take them off again when we jumped and flailed our arms and yelled and hollered. It was such a high. At one workshop - the Afro-Calypso one, we imitated everyone we knew. It was hilarious - one can only get away with such craziness at Folk Fests! At the end we decided to stand at the back - way behind the thousands so we could leave a bit early to avoid traffic. Back there the music was bouncing off every food stand and fence and coming back to us in a very strange rhythm. 

July 13th
I got up at 11 and started a bath about 12 but Monica and Clare came home for lunch so I postponed my hot, peaceful solitude to dine with my beloved siblings. We ate cream of mushroom soup after dessert, of course! (brown sugar cake with whipped cream) I was still tired so I sat down to watch TV, but I looked around and the house was a mess so I cleaned the kitchen, put out laundry, and cleaned my room. I have discovered that when I do things in the house Matthew buys me a cold pop when he goes out to get the paper. Silent and sweet - that's our Matt - well, not too silent. When he gets going about history he can tell you lots of interesting things not at all silently! I danced with Anna while Monica started a letter. I then gave Anna a bath and dressed her, shirt coordinating with socks, of course! 

July 16th
I got up at 9:00 so I wouldn't waste the day...I was going to go downtown with Cathy but Pat Pyrz dropped by. We had a huge talk session which lasted until supper, through supper, all the way (while riding our bikes) to Assiniboine Park where it ceased for 1 and 1/2 hours because we watched Shakespeare in the Park. Pat's brother Gene was in it - Two Gentlemen from Verona. It was hilarious! The talk session lasted on the bike ride to the Impressions Cafe where all the wanna-be-folkies and some actually real folkies hang out, and it sustained until 12:30 p.m. between Pat, Monica, me, and neighbour Robin. Then Pat took me to a little eatery where we talked until about 2! Ack! Every subject from travel to glue-on bikinis was covered. What a day! I'm worn out!

Little Anna and me - taken by Brent at my parents' house

And that is where the diary of my summer in Winnipeg ends. After considering many options for the fall of 1987 including attending Lakehead University with Clare and Brent I decided I was homesick for my mountains and went back home to attend my local college. And so began another series of adventures, and another diary.

Note: all of this may seem shallow and silly considering all the sad and sobering things that are happening in the world these days, but I do find that when I am feeling weighed down by sadness a good antidote is to write about something that made or makes me happy. Something innocent, something free.

Art Projects

I never considered myself an artist. I had dabbled all my life in drawing and painting because, rather than an Easy Bake Oven and Barbie's Dream House, the children in my family were often given art supplies as gifts and my mother supplied an endless stack of drawing paper, even if it was just the backs of photocopied documents from her work. At school I favoured band and jazz choir over art class - somehow one had always to choose between the two - but by Grade 12 I had decided that I would make room in my schedule for art class. That class became an oasis for me and stands out as a memorable time full of colour and the meditative, expansive work of making art.

I did not go on to become a visual artist, but I did learn a great deal from my teacher, Ms. Konkin. She was a pretty, round-faced blonde woman with striking blue eyes. She was calm and honest about our work. I only remember being enthusiastically congratulated on one piece, which was a drawing of a glass of water with a spoon in it. I suppose I had captured the visual effect fairly well. I no longer have that drawing, but I do have a painting I did as my major project. I was studying dance at the time and was completely in love with that particular art form. I had a poster on my bedroom wall of a female dancer in a black dress leaning back and kicking one leg out. Her strong pose created a beautiful line. I decided to paint her balancing on the moon with a backdrop of a city scape, while kicking her foot into a blazing sun. The end result of the painting was certainly not technically brilliant. Against Ms. Konkin's advice I chose it from all my work to enter into a district student show down at the mall. The work was being judged by a famous local watercolour painter, Les Weisbrech. He didn't think very much of my painting, and when I looked at my painting through his eyes its faults glared painfully at me. Some time later I brought my painting home and showed it to my mom. She happened to love it, which took me by surprise, so I gave it to her. It hung in her bedroom for at least twenty years. She gave it to me and it now hangs in my bedroom. For all its faults I love it now. It seems to contain all the wonderful naive optimism that youth holds about the future. I truly thought the world was my oyster back then, and I was ready to take it on like my 'Stepping Out' dancer. Now, she reminds me of the beauty of innocence and to embrace life.

As part of our study that year in Art 12 we worked with clay. I particularly enjoyed working with the delicate porcelain clay, making pieces of jewelery and a teacup, if I remember correctly. We learned to throw pottery on the wheel and to my surprise all the skills I had learned making bowls with our old family friend Carol when I was little had vanished. One assignment was to make a free form sculpture with clay. We could not use the wheel, but we could use as much or as little clay as we liked. As I played with the lump of clay in front of me and listened to Ms. Konkin's guiding words about the options before us, a figure seemed to speak to me out of the clay in my hands. I had worked hard in high school to defy labels. If one day I spiked my hair and wore a man's suit and tie, the next day I wore a trendy Benetton rugby shirt and jeans, but by Grade 12 I had given up the fight. I was starting to mature and to relax into myself. If people wanted to label me I no longer cared so much. I took one lump of clay and formed it into a cross about eight inches tall and four inches across. I took another lump of clay and formed it into the figure of Jesus with his arms extended and his head falling slightly to one side. I placed him on the cross and added a crown of thorns and tiny nail heads in his hands and feet. Ms. Konkin came around to check on our progress. I believe she was stumped when she arrived at my place at the secular high school table, and out of the corner of my eye I saw one of her eyebrows rise. But, to her credit she said nothing critical at all about my choice of subject, and I offered no explanation. All our pieces were fired in the kiln and mine survived the oven despite its delicacy. I carefully wrapped it in paper and put it on the top shelf of my locker.

A few weeks later It was the end of the school year and I was cleaning out my locker. Somehow the clay crucifix fell to the floor and broke into six pieces. I gathered them up and was looking at them sadly when my friend Rachel with whom I had gone to school since we were in Grade One at St. Joseph's offered to fix it if she could keep it. I said yes. Years later I went to visit her, and there was my little mended sculpture hanging on her kitchen wall. "I love it," she said.

Yesterday I found out from a friend that Ms. Konkin who had also been my Home Economics teacher in, I think, Grades 10 and 11 is retiring. My friend posted the news on Facebook and as I read through the thread of comments my year with Luba Konkin as my art teacher came flooding back. Like so many rooms where the arts are taught in schools, Ms. Konkin had provided a space where creative and often sensitive souls could relax and feel appreciated and encouraged to do what came naturally to them. Teachers around the world who do the same are worth their weight in gold.

The Taxi Driver

I had taken the bus from the East Vancouver basement suite that I shared with my sister Clare and her husband to Simon Fraser University where I was to meet up with my girlhood friend Tanja. The bus ride had involved a couple of transfers and a bit of waiting at bus stops. In the waning daylight the trip had been alright, but I was not anxious to repeat it in reverse, in the dark, alone. I had supper with Tanja and her boyfriend at one of the campus places and we lingered, talking for several hours. When it was time for me to return home I decided to spend some of my precious student fund on a taxi, believing it to be the safer option for me at that hour of the night.

The taxi arrived and I said goodbye to my friend. I climbed into the back and gave my direction. The taxi driver was the chatty sort and he immediately began to talk. I soon realized that what he said did not make a lot of sense. He was asking me about how school was going in St. Catherine's. I told him, no, I was in my first term at UBC, and sat back to enjoy my door to door ride home. He kept on about St. Catherine's, which was a town in Ontario, over half way across the country. After trying to correct him once more, I realized my efforts were futile. He kept asking me about people and places I did not know in the least. I began to feel uneasy, wondering if my chauffeur was quite right in the head.

My taxi driver drove a bit erratically, turning down alleyways and cutting across blocks. He told me he was going to stop at a convenience store for a Coke. Did I want one? I told him in no uncertain terms, and perhaps with just a tinge of hysteria, that he was not going to stop and get a Coke, that he was to take me straight home. I was genuinely frightened by then. I wondered if I was going to get home. I wondered if he really meant to stop at a convenience store or was it an attempt to stop the car in some out of the way place where I would be raped and chopped up into pieces, stuffed in a duffle bag and dropped in a dumpster in some sketchy back alley where I would be found by some poor person searching for discarded food, my murder reported the next day on the front page of The Province. (My gift of imagination did not serve me well just then.)

My heart in my throat, I sat forward, gripping the vinyl trim on the edge of the back seat while my driver chatted cheerfully and nonsensically. He took me on a labyrinthian journey, none of which I recognized. Just when I was thinking about opening the car door and flinging myself out onto the pavement like they do in the movies, he turned onto our block and pulled up in front of our house. The trip that had seemed endless had taken, in actual fact, a fairly short time. His route, while unrecognizable to me - I had only lived in Vancouver a couple of months and was geographically challenged at the best of times -  had been a short cut accomplished by someone who knew the city like the back of his hand. With shaking legs I got out of the car. "How much do I owe you?" I said as calmly as possible. He quoted me a fair price, less than I had anticipated in fact, and I paid him.

My sister was home when I entered the house whitefaced and completely unstrung. I felt half relief and half guilt for misjudging my driver. I am sure now that he was a decent person, although I wondered if he had been high on some substance. Or maybe his state of mind was a mixture of working a double shift on very little sleep and good memories of a youth spent in St. Catherine's. I could only speculate. In any case, I felt lucky to be alive and extremely glad to be home with my sister. Clare gave me something to drink to help bring the colour back into my face and calm my frazzled nerves. My boyfriend (now husband) drove over from Kitsilano on the west side of the city to comfort me. I am not sure I ever quite fully recovered from my fright. I refused to go anywhere at night alone for the rest of the year.

While I was having a good experience at UBC and enjoying living with Clare and her husband my adventure with the taxi driver did little to ingratiate me with the city of Vancouver as a potential home in the future. I lived there on and off for the next three years, developing a love/hate relationship with the city. The love was for its beauty and variety, although I now know that I sought out places that reminded me of home: water, lakes and mountains. The hate (perhaps a slight exaggeration) was for the fact that I never seemed to fit in there. Too sensitive and inexperienced to let the sad scenes of my neighbourhood fall off me like rainwater off a duck's back, I was haunted in particular by the mute woman who accosted me every time I walked down the street, begging me for money while she shoved the scars on her wrists and throat in my face. Her plight, so dramatically contrasted by the ease and comfort I perceived in the wealthier neighbourhoods of the city, filled me with a sense of helplessness. I knew that my coins could do little to make her life better.

My boyfriend and I got married a year and a half after the taxi driver incident. At the end of my third year in Vancouver, my husband finished his practicum and was offered a job in the East Kootenays. I was ecstatic. The only thing I seemed to miss after we moved was the Greek fish market on Commercial drive. I could buy two plump, fresh fillets of sole for a song and bake them up beautifully with a sauce of dill and yogurt.

L.M. Montgomery - a First Love in Literature

In my early years as a dedicated reader of novels, when it came to authors, I tended toward serial monogomy. Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, The Painted Garden, White Boots, and several others was my first real love as a reader, but when the time came for me to move on from her delightful books for children I was at a bit of a loss.

Every time I would talk about needing something to read my family would suggest Anne of Green Gables. "You'll love it," my sisters insisted, and because they insisted I resisted. I finally gave in when I was fifteen - my sisters had all moved out by then - and tentatively began the book that would change my life. I was not prepared to enjoy it, but by the first chapter I was hooked and would remain an Anne fan for life. And not just an Anne fan, but a fan of the writing of her creator Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would spend the next several years scouring second hand book stores for copies of her many books, building up my collection which I read over and over until Jane Austen became my new obsession in my mid-twenties. I credit L.M. Montgomery for helping me greatly through my teen years, for giving me another world to inhabit in my imagination, adding much light to the very real world I lived in every day.

I did not identify with the character of Anne as much as with the general tone, humour and background wisdom of the books themselves. Anne, with her red-haired temper, her heedless ways and her enormous scholarly discipline was not a mirror image of myself, but I did admire her goodness, her loyalty and her literary gifts. I was encouraged by her strength of character and desired to emulate at least some of what she represented. The first few times I read the books I read them for the plot alone. L.M. Montgomery is known for her descriptive passages of the land she loved so well, but I will admit I skipped over many of them to find out what happened next to the people in the books. A good book has that quality, even when you read it for the second or third time and know what ultimately happens, you still want to have the satisfaction of finding out, again, exactly how it happens. By the time I was in my early twenties I still read the books once a year, but by then I was revelling in the descriptions which painted such a beautiful picture of the land, sea and sky of Prince Edward Island and other Maritime provinces. The Blue Castle is set in Muskoka, Ontario and I still read it every few years for its pictures painted so masterfully in words by the author who had moved to Ontario after her marriage.

My mother often said that she liked Montgomery's Emily books even better than the sunny Anne ones. She felt the Emily books were deeper and more reflective of the author's own life as a burgeoning writer. I read the three Emily books immediately after I had read the eight Anne novels, and I could see what my mother meant. I imagined that a lot of authors identified with them, especially those who had known they were writers from a young age. The road to authorship is not easy for the character of Emily; the literary colours in the novels are in various shades of light and darkness, intimating the depth of emotion lived in real life by Montgomery. The happy ending is there, but it is hard won.

When I get into something, I really get into it, so when L.M. Montgomery's journals were published I read them. Her selected journals filled five large volumes and I expected them to reflect the light and happy endings of her novels. What I discovered was that Montgomery's life was a complex blend of light and dark, of longing for the freedom of an intuitive and highly spiritual artist while 'keeping up appearances' in Canadian WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) society of the early part of the twentieth century. I read them during a particularly hard time in my own young life, which perhaps was not fair to either myself or to Montgomery whom I admired so much. Her journals sent me spiralling downwards into a blue funk. I was disappointed in her for some of her choices in life and in love (as disappointed as I was in myself at that time for some of my own choices), and I had a hard time reconciling the author of my favourite books with the author of journals which suggested so much personal disappointment and emotional trauma.

I think, after giving it another twenty-odd years, I might read the journals again. I will probably read them with a more open mind and with much more compassion and empathy this time. In 2008 Montgomery's family came out with an admission that Lucy Maud suffered from depression and had, in the end, taken her own life. Her family revealed the truth in hopes that it would help to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness in our society. And while that news about her death made me sad beyond words, I have a bookshelf full of proof that inside Lucy Maud Montgomery's often troubled heart and mind was also a mystical land of humour, insight, love, and joy of the greatest kind which she shared with her readers through her writing, a refuge for her and for all of those who feel deeply and attempt to live sensitively on this earth.

A mature L.M. Montgomery

For those of you who read the end of my previous post I have an update: My dad was able to go home from the hospital yesterday. Such good news for him and for all my family! Many thanks for your kind wishes and prayers.

Handsome is as Handsome Does

Occasionally, as I was growing up, I heard my mother describe a young man of our acquaintance as a ‘wolf’.  A ‘wolf’, my mother explained, was someone with a predatory nature, particularly toward young, innocent girls (Little Red Riding Hood anyone?), and once identified, a ‘wolf’ was to be avoided at all costs by my three sisters and me.  Wolves came in many different styles of sheep’s clothing, but the costume of which I believe my mother was most wary was of the smooth-talking, preppy frat boy type.  Interestingly enough, she distrusted a guy with a squeaky clean appearance, and often for good reason; after all, she was a teenager in the 50’s and knew this type very well.  She knew these boys could be very crafty wolves - the type to flatter a girl’s parents and then take her out, get her drunk and take advantage.  But, as everyone knows, teenagers often rebel against their parents’ ways and wishes, if only to assert a certain amount of independence, and I was no different.  In high school I developed a crush on a boy of the preppy frat boy type which seemed to resurface in the 80’s.  He was the kind of boy featured in teen magazines, the type to make young, otherwise intelligent girls act silly.  He wore name brand polo shirts with the collar turned up in various shades of pastel, leather loafers, and sported spiky, gelled hair. To my mind he had the face of an angel, and I pointed him out to my mom one day.

“He’s very ‘pretty’, isn’t he,” she said with a curl of her lip.
“He’s not pretty, Mom, he’s handsome,” I protested.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” was her short but pointed reply.

A Very Handsome James Spader as the preppy jerk in Pretty in Pink
-definitely a wolf

To my utter bewilderment at the time, the boys my mom generally favoured were the long-haired rocker types, especially if they played an instrument.  I’m not sure why - perhaps she felt they held an honest disregard for convention.  I had five older siblings with many types of friends, maybe all the rocker kids she knew were just really nice people.  At my high school these kinds of boys were called ‘head bangers’. They usually went around with girls who sported similar rocker hairstyles ornamented with feathered roach clips and head bands.  They tended to answer teachers’ questions in monosyllables and didn’t usually top the academic charts.  Some were even classified as ‘stoners’, an even less desirable label in the upper echelon of my school.  Though friendly with some of the head bangers, I was certainly not their type and, admittedly, they were not mine.  I continued to develop crushes on the ‘wrong’ sorts of boys, often preppy jocks who usually weren’t interested in me beyond a nod in the hallway or as someone’s little sister. My preference for that certain type of boy continued until, as often happens when we begin to grow up, something came along to widen my view of the world.

I took piano lessons until I was fifteen, and in my last year I once again participated in the local music festival. My piece was very difficult and I could not get it right, no matter how hard I practiced.  On the day of the festival, thirteen young pianists assembled on the front pew of the Nelson United Church.  The lights were dim, except for on the stage, and at the desk of the adjudicators, making them look like pale distant ghosts owning only heads and pen-holding hands.  I was extremely nervous but glad to be in the middle of the pack, not at the front.  Sitting next to me was a boy I had never seen before.  He had long, blonde hair, an Iron Maiden t-shirt, and jeans on – mom’s type.   “This should be interesting,” I remember thinking to myself as he approached the bench when they called his name.  I fully expected to hear a less than stellar performance, maybe a laboured rendition of that Leila Fletcher classic ‘My Little Birch Canoe’, or at best, a choppy interpretation of Beethoven's 'Fur Elise'.  I do not remember what he played, maybe Chopin, maybe Rachmaninoff, but it was a shock to see and hear this long-haired dude blast his way through his challenging piece with such skill and confidence. I was dumbfounded, and after the thunderous applause died down, I was *gasp!* next. As I rose to go up to the stage I could hear people whispering about the long haired pianist:  “Who is he?”  “Where is he from?” Then I heard someone say, “He’s ___ ___ from The Valley.  His family is so talented”.   I was really nervous now – rattled, actually.  My pre-conceived notions had just been turned upside down.  How could I possibly follow Rocker Valley Boy's performance!  I sat down on the bench.  I started to play.  I stopped after a few bars and started again. I stopped again, and started again.  I screwed up so badly the adjudicators took pity on me and allowed me to get my music, even though we were supposed to have memorized our pieces.  I got through my nasty piece somehow and with a limping heart and downcast eyes I returned to my seat.  Mortified, and afraid to look at my mom and sister in the audience, let alone at the blonde piano star beside me, I kept my gaze downward.

Quietly, from beside me Rocker Valley Boy spoke.  “Hey, that was pretty good,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t, and you know it,” I managed to whisper.
He turned to look at me.  I finally looked up at him, barely meeting his eyes. “Yeah, it was,” he said, smiling encouragingly.  “Don’t worry about it.”
I was immediately cheered by his friendly and generous words. I could breathe again.  He wasn’t lying either, so I couldn’t accuse him of mere flattery: later, the adjudicator even praised the bits between the screw ups.

I developed a sort of admiration for Rocker Valley Boy out of appreciation for what he did for me that festival day.  On rare occasions I would see him in town and feel a little flutter of the heart.  There is no telling when the words of our mothers will come true.

I Know Why the Englishman Drinks Tea

I have never been so cold as the winter I moved to Vancouver to go to University. I grew up in the Kootenay Mountains in south eastern British Columbia where it snows in winter, rains some in every season, and is pleasantly hot in the summertime. As long as I wore a coat, hat, scarf and gloves I was warm enough in winter, unless we had a rare cold snap of -15 for a few days. Then, I wore long underwear under my jeans. After a beautifully warm fall in Vancouver, the winter rain set in. It rained, and it rained, and it rained. My hair loved the moisture, and I had waves in it for the first time. My limbs, not so much; I wore my long underwear and wool sweaters all winter long. Some days, when I was walking to my bus stop on Broadway and Commercial I was chilled to the bone by the damp, and it wasn't even very cold outside if the thermometer was any indication. When I arrived at my class, I looked forward to a break in the arts lounge where I could buy a cup of tea and begin the day's bodily thaw.

We were tea drinkers in my family. My mom always served tea after supper. I would have a cup and then head upstairs to my room to do my homework. I drank tea at breakfast when I was an older teenager - I wasn't allowed coffee until I was in college - but I'm not sure I appreciated it as much as I do now. I have a cup or two of tea every afternoon. I use it as a break in the day and a lift of both my spirits and energy which often begin to flag after lunch. After supper, in the fall, winter, and early spring I can usually be found with my hands wrapped around a cup of herbal tea as my work is generally done, and I need to keep warm while I sit with a book or in front of the TV to wind down the day. The hardworking furnace can only do so much for me.

Last night was another dark and rainy one. I drove with my son the twenty minutes into Chilliwack for his music lessons. Well, he did all the driving. I just sat and directed him from the passenger's seat. Before I left home I had filled a thermal mug with Bengal Spice tea (sort of an herbal chai in a teabag) to take with me. After dropping my son at his first lesson I went off to do errands. When I returned to wait for him outside his teacher's house, I took a few sips of my still hot tea. The spicy, milky sweet liquid warmed me as it went down my esophagus and I could feel my shoulders relaxing. I had been chilled all day, and I so appreciated the radiating comfort that tea gave me. I dropped my son off at his next lesson and went to sit in the waiting room. I made myself comfortable in one of the wooden armchairs and proceeded to enjoy my tea as the rain hammered the roofs outside. I grew warmer and sleepier by the minute. I managed to stay awake talking about books and movies to another person in the room, but it was hard to keep my eyes open. I needed Mr. Bean's toothpicks.

Or perhaps I needed some Yorkshire tea. An old friend of mine had immigrated from Yorkshire, England with his family. The first time I went to his house his mother asked me if I drank tea. I assured her I was a 'big tea drinker'. She made the tea in a small metal pot, the proportion of tea to hot water most likely equal, for the tea was the colour of mahogany. I added sugar and a lot of milk and drank a mugful. My friend's mother offered me another cup and I, already vibrating from caffeine but too proud to admit it, had another cup. I had to admit defeat after that second cup, however, and my friend and I went out for a very. long. walk. Recently, I discovered a tea called Yorkshire Gold, which has a lovely, slightly exotic flavour and reminds me of the tea I once drank with my friend's family. The tea was part of a gift basket of international foods our friends gave us for Christmas, and they informed us laughingly  that Yorkshire Gold, a tasty blend of Assam and East African teas, is 'what the commoners drink' in England (where it also rains an awful lot). The 'commoners' in this part of the world are now drinking it, too, and enjoying it very much, although we use only one tea bag per mug, or two for a pot.

Do you like a good cuppa? What's your favourite kind or brand these days? Over at my other blog Stella is sharing her easy recipe for a homemade Chai latte. It's delicious and oh, so warming on a bone chilling early spring 'Wet Coast' afternoon. Cheerio, and happy weekend! 

Above image: unknown

The Saving Grace of Satire

It began in high school: my friends and I made a habit out of making fun of pretty much everything we could. We would gather at Jenn's house for the annual 'sing along with The Sound of Music' event on New Year's day. We would watch the film, recite the dialogue along with the characters, sing, and then when Maria whips out her guitar on the mountaintop for 'Doe a Deer', we would always say to each other as the orchestral strings of the soundtrack commenced, "And suddenly out of nowhere there appears an orchestra on the mountaintop" and we would laugh and laugh at the idea. We would put Duran Duran records on the 45 rpm setting on the record player, and Jenn and Mike would go on their knees like Duran Duran dwarves and sing and dance along to the sped up tunes. That was hilarious. When we discovered Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, my friends and I would memorize long passages and songs from their films and spend hours reciting them to each other around camp-fires and at parties, or in the back of the car on our college commute. We ate up satire and sketch comedy with the eagerness and voracious energy of youth, and we told funny and embarrassing stories on ourselves and about each other. Laughter took up the greater part of most of our conversations. Almost nothing was sacred. Almost nothing escaped the microscopic lens of our sharp wit and our desire for fun. We made a sport of critical thinking through satirical humour, and I do believe, in many ways, it saved us.

My children have the same approach to life that my friends and I had at their age. I see evidence of the fact every day, and I love it. The ability to laugh at one's self is of great importance to my way of thinking, and the ability to laugh at the world, and what it continually serves up, is vital for the survival of one's individuality and true purpose in the world. My family recently acquired Netflix and we are making our way through ten years of missed Saturday Night Live seasons - my husband and I watched the show all through the '90's but missed the 'naughts (2001-2009)' or, as they are called by some here in North America, 'the Bush years' of the show almost completely. SNL's 'good natured skewering' of everyone from politicians to the head elf in Santa's workshop makes for good TV. Some of my favourite episodes are when an actual politician, be he George Bush Senior or Senator John McCain, appear on the show and are given a chance to retaliate. The result is always a healthy experience for everyone: for the audience who get to see a more human, not to mention humourous, side of the politician, and for the actors and writers on the show, who get a bit of their own back, exhibiting a tremendous sense of fair play on their part. The first Monty Python film I showed my children was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with insulting Frenchmen, anachronisms galore, a wimpy knight named Brave Sir Robin, and King Arthur riding a non-existent horse while his squire knocks two coconuts together to provide the sound of the horse, should one actually have been in existence. My kids, all of them, found the film refreshing, intelligent in its silliness, and downright funny.

We in Canada have always revered satirical comedy in general. With shows like SCTV and The Air Farce, which began on CBC Radio and made its way to television, Codco out of Newfoundland, This Hour has Twenty-two Minutes from Halifax, and The Rick Mercer Report, Canadian politicians, celebrities and Canadian contemporary society are never safe from a good natured ribbing, and I think we are better for it.The U.S. has, of course, Saturday Night Live, but they also enjoy the brilliant political satire of John Stewart in The Daily Show with John Stewart, as well as The Colbert Report with the irrepressible Stephen Colbert. Stewart and Colbert are so well loved and respected in their nation that an overwhelmingly large percentage of the people stay abreast of the political situation chiefly through their shows. I know there exist many shows out of the U.K. which provide that nation, as well as many fans around the world, with countless opportunities to laugh at themselves and the world at large. Comedians such as Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Tracey Ullman, and of course the aforementioned favourite Monty Python, all use their great talents to help make their society truly democratic. As writer and satirist Jonathan Swift said, "As Wit is the noblest and most useful Gift of humane Nature, so Humor is the most agreeable, and where these two enter far into the Composition of any Work, they will render it always acceptable to the World."

I remember reading a satirical essay in my English Literature course in college entitled A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, in which he suggested a way to deal with poverty and hunger, which were rampant in eighteenth century Ireland, was to raise babies for consumption by the upper classes: "I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." The essay was shocking to me for something written in 1729, but it also appealed to me greatly. I am not sure of the effect it had on the social policy of the time, but obviously, the essay swept the nation much like the latest YouTube video does now, and woke many people up to the absurdity of a nation starving its own. A Modest Proposal is not far off the sort of satire produced in the present age. In fact, Swift's essay, and others like it, as well as the political cartoons of the time, most likely inspired it. Every age has employed its satirists, and they are as important to the workings of a healthy society and its institutions - churches, schools, government, etc.- as the institutions themselves. Satirists provide the checks and balances every person and every institution with power over others needs, and they accomplish this feat with the most welcome leaven of humour and the intelligence of wit; I shudder to think what would happen to us if this was not so. Apparently, a school district in Texas tried to shut down classes which taught critical thinking to students for fear that teaching children to think for themselves employing logic and reason would cause problems in the more God-fearing homes of their student body. To that I, whom some would call 'religious', cry foul and laziness - should we not teach our children to think, to question, to form opinions based on the good values we have brought them up in? To my own children I say, "Question everything by all means. Just be prepared to do the work to find the answers." And laugh. A lot.

Here is one of my favourite Rowan Atkinson sketches, satirizing the stereotypical English public school headmaster.

Emma and I have a new post over at Stella's Virtual Cafe. Check it out...please. 

A Feast of Family

Our youngest was quite sad for the first day back at home after our recent trip to Nelson to attend the wedding of her cousin Gisele and new husband Paul. We had stayed at my parents' house along with my sister Clare's family. "I miss Clare and Brent (her husband) and our cousins (Clare and Brent's two girls, aged fourteen and eleven)," she said with a few large tears in her eyes.

"What do you miss the most about them?" I asked.

"They're just nice to be around," she said.

In these few words our daughter said much. The joy of meeting kindred spirits, even if it is only once in a long while, is not something to be taken lightly. Finding people who possess a similar kind of sensitivity, intelligence, and a flair for the dramatic was such a joy to her and she sighed when realizing that in less than a month she would be back at school with a whole lot of kids she feels little in common with. Well, I said, that's the human race, unfortunately, (And then to myself I admitted that is the very reason we have signed her up for acting classes at the local school for the performing arts starting this fall. For the past two summers she has taken part in summer drama camps offered at the school, and has felt right at home.) and it proves how lucky we are to belong to a family like ours.

Ours is a large family, growing ever larger with the addition of the groom's family now, and the prospect of baby cousins to come sometime in the future, their potential beauty much discussed at the wedding reception. I remember almost thirty years ago, a similar event when my eldest sister, Monica got married to Matthew, a man she met in Winnipeg after moving there with a good friend Catherine a few years before. Matthew's entire family including his parents, five siblings, and an uncle or two came half way across the country for their wedding and our own family grew some more. After I graduated from high school I went out to Winnipeg to stay with Monica who was pregnant with her second daughter (the one so recently married). My second eldest sister, Clare, had also gone out to Winnipeg a couple of years previously and met her husband, so I spent much time with them as well. Matthew's brothers took me to a David Bowie concert, Clare and Brent took me to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, various friends took me other places (mainly places to eat) and welcomed me into their homes.

My niece Gisele is the first grandchild of Matthew's parents to get married, and the second of my parents. Almost all Matthew's siblings came out to the wedding with their children. The groom's family, including a cousin and his family from Denmark all came, and the attending guests numbered around two hundred and fifty. I had not seen the Winnipeg family, except for the grandmother, since my visit in 1987. Getting around to visit with every one of them took the better of three days, but fortunately, there was ample opportunity. The party extended beyond the wedding reception to the lakeshore where we all enjoyed a day of swimming, visiting, and relaxing while grazing the afternoon away on the leftovers from the wedding banquet the night before, and then another gathering was held before Matthew's family all had to leave. All but one of my five siblings were able to attend the wedding, and most of my parents' grandchildren were also there. It truly was a family reunion as well as an extremely joyous wedding.

The happy couple's first dance...and a tiger

Beach Day, post wedding

Staying in my parents' house along with my sister Clare and her family was a treat for me as well as my children. Clare and I have only met three times in the past several years due to the huge amount of country between our homes. She lives in southern Manitoba which is a full three days' drive from us out here on the west coast. It has made the most sense for us to meet in Nelson on our rare holidays together. Clare and her family slept up in the sleeping loft at the very top of our parents' house, our boys in the loft above the kitchen and my husband and I and our girls slept on the sleeping porch which wraps around one side of the house -  where we siblings all slept in summer when our second floor bedrooms were too warm. Every morning, Clare and I rose at pretty much the same time and took turns making the coffee.  We would visit with our parents while one by one the kids got up to join us in the living room or around the table. Two mornings of our visit we went for a run together, which was great, and I showed her some of my yoga stretches and she showed me some new ones from her running clinic. We talked about our children, we talked about our husbands and their work, we talked about our work in our respective communities, we talked about everything and nothing with humour and that great and comfortable love that comes from growing up in a close knit family and increases with the mellowness of age. Clare's husband and I were friends from the beginning and I enjoyed getting lots of time to chat with him as well. It was he who was instrumental in bringing my husband and I together, and we talked about that time in our lives when we all lived in Vancouver. Brent also introduced me to a quirky little cooking show parody called 'Posh Nosh' which has many episodes online...and got me hooked. I remembered how he was the one to introduce our family to Black Adder as well, and how he once made me a mixed-tape of some of his favourite songs. Our boys were also now old enough to find plenty in common with him as well, and enjoyed getting to know him better.

Later in the week, another nephew arrived from Victoria, and he slept in the den/library/office which used to, long ago, be my bedroom. Cooking for the household of fourteen was a job shared between three of us and so was almost stress free. We pooled our resources and came up with very satisfactory meals (many including additions from our parents' fabulous garden) which were enjoyed with wine every evening. The young people sat at a table on the front porch, and we adults sat at the dining room table. Meals were quite civilized that way, at least at the adult table. We enjoyed dessert almost every night, so it was a good thing there was plenty of swimming and walking up and down those Nelson hills to burn off the excess calories. Other families involved in the wedding stayed in the houses of friends and relatives in town so it was easy to gather together for afternoons at the beach and for evenings of wine and music at one or the other of the houses. We kept each other barely aware of the events of the London Olympic Games - someone, usually Brent, telling us of the latest glorious victory or crushing defeat.

The week went by so fast, and if the truth be told, I could have stayed on longer after the wedding, and done more: some hiking in the mountains, some shopping, some more visiting with Nelson friends, but it was not to be. The wedding and the visiting with family was what we went there for and jobs called us home - we stayed until the last possible day. I was very tired for the first couple of days home, but I still basked in the glow of the event and our time in Nelson, as I always do. We are so lucky, so blessed to have a large and loving family, which includes some members who, although not related by blood or marriage, have been connected to us for so long that they really, honestly do feel like family.

Today we finished the moving of our eldest son Ian and his stuff to his new place in Vancouver where he will begin a term of study in September and become a part of the music scene. Our second eldest turned eighteen on Friday and I know it cannot be long before he also goes off to find his life. I am wistful, but I am also confident, especially after our family holiday, that my children, even though they will move on and branch out as is good and natural, they will be happy to come home for a visit - maybe even an extended one - and to take part in larger family events. Heck, I'm forty-two and I still love 'going home'.

What kind of mother would I be if I didn't promote my son Ian's new 5-track E.P., A Stone's Throw now available for download here. The first song is timely for his move even further to the west. Have a listen and hear the results of growing up in a large family full of artists, writers and musicians.

Viva la familia! (and thanks to my brother in law Matthew for most of these photos)

Ian on the beach with his first love

One Unforgettable Meal

Maybe it was because I had been reading too many early 19th Century romantic novels (Jane Austen) that I decided, of all the choices on the menu, to order The Quail.The gentlemen in those novels are always going off shooting in the fall, and returning with all sorts of birds for the cook to roast over an open fire. Or, perhaps it was because, several years before, a family friend had arrived for a visit bringing with her a basket of tiny quail eggs which she pan-fried and served, four to a piece of toast, and they were so delicious that I thought the bird might be worth eating as well.

I was sharing an apartment with my sister and her husband, just off the colourful Commercial Drive in Vancouver. I was a student at UBC and living on a tight student loan budget. Eating out was a rare event, but one night my new boyfriend, my sister and her husband who was a masters student at UBC, and I decided to treat ourselves to a decent dinner at one of the Drive's many ethnic eateries. We chose a Mexican place with very plain decor - it looked like an office tacked up with cheap souvenir decorations - but with a reputation from at least one source for good food at reasonable prices.

I had eaten less than usual that day to make room for the Mexican feast and was starving by the time we arrived at the restaurant. Perhaps it was an off night for the cook because, while we all ordered our meals at the same time, we were each served at different times over the next hour and a half, with my boyfriend waiting ninety minutes for his meal. I cannot remember what the others ordered or if they enjoyed their food. Those details are eclipsed by the memory of the appearance of the small platter placed before me when The Quail finally arrived. I am not sure what I was expecting. Perhaps something like this dish described in Julia Child's wonderful book My Life in France: 

The patron beautifully and swiftly carved off legs, wings, and breast, and served each person an entire bird, including the back, feet, head, and neck (when eating game, you nibble everything). He had placed the breast upon the canape, an oval-shaped slice of white bread browned in clarified butter, topped with the liver - which had been chopped fine with a little fresh bacon - then mixed with drops of port wine and seasonings before a brief run under the broiler. The sauce? A simple deglazing of the roasting juices with a little port and a swirl of butter. Delicious!

There was nothing gourmet about my serving of quail. Spread-eagled, beak up on a single, large piece of green lettuce, my poor little bird was charred to the bone like some kind of burn victim from the apocolypse.  I looked down at my 'meal' and wondered what to do. In an effort to honour what I thought was some sort of Mexican delicacy, I took my fork and knife and attempted to scrape away some of the blackened flesh of which there was very little. I tasted it, and decided not to proceed. Still extremely hungry I picked at the lettuce and finished my beer.

We left the restaurant in a terrible mood, some of us still extremely hungry. I'm sure we went home and made some unromantic but satisfying toast and cheese. It was no accident that I spent the next phase of my life as an almost, very pretty nearly, vegetarian.

The other evening I assisted my pastry chef friend at her table at an annual event for local foodies. While my friend and I manned her table filled with hundreds of tiny blackberry buttercream macaroons and s'mores tarts (little graham cracker cups filled with chocolate ganache and topped with her famous homemade marshmallow which we toasted at some risk to ourselves using a butane blow-torch)  her mother made the rounds to the other chefs' tables and brought us back tastes of everything. Over the course of the evening, we enjoyed chicken liver pate flavoured with brandy on rounds of sourdough baguette, tender rare bison, bocconcini skewers with cherry tomatoes, salmon tartare, various wines and flavoured mead. I was feeling adventurous by then and as I bit into a particularly foreign-looking canape I asked what it was. "Duck Confit with two kinds of duck!", said my friend.

 "Ah", I said, and bravely finished my portion, washing it down with some lovely red wine. I think Julia Child would have approved of the duck confit, but I had to admit after tasting it that while I had made my peace with meat-birds long ago, I would never quite learn to appreciate anything more exotic than a plump, golden chicken or a wine-basted turkey.

Have a wonderful weekend, and if you go out for a meal try something new on the menu...or not.

Thank you Bill Watterson for the great comic from Calvin and Hobbes.

Walls and Windows (or Treeplanter For a Day)

Treeplanter in action by Hugh Stimson

While doing some driving around on Mother's Day afternoon, I was enjoying a radio program called The Vinyl Cafe on CBC.  The Vinyl Cafe is a weekly variety hour hosted by Stuart McLean, who, as well as reading aloud letters from all over Canada, reads his own stories and welcomes a wide range of musical guests. It's an old fashioned concept which works very well on radio (think Garrison Keelor), and like so much of what the CBC does, serves to connect people from all corners of this vast country. This past Sunday, the theme of the stories was treeplanting, a job thousands of tough, young Canadians do to put themselves through school or to make their next adventure possible.  Stuart first read out a wonderful letter written by a man from Winnipeg, whose adventurous 62 year old father-in-law spent a summer with a treeplanting crew, and while he wrote home despairing at his lack of treeplanting ability (it has got to be one of the toughest jobs out there) he proved to be a wonder at keeping up the spirits of the rest of the crew with his fireside stories and encouragement. After the letter, Stuart read one of his own stories about the fictional family of Dave and Morley and their two children, Stephanie and Sam.  This week's tale was an uplifting and comical one about Stephanie's summer (and great success - a final daily tally of 2600 trees - after much perseverance) treeplanting in the blackfly-ridden bedrock of Northern Ontario.The story was so good and brought back so many memories that I sat parked outside the video store until it was over.

The following post is an edited version of the fifth one I ever wrote. I'm posting it because it has a bit about my own experience with treeplanting, and also because, in our recent Federal election the Conservative Party won a majority government for the first time in years and there are rumours they want to do away with, or greatly cut back on funding for the CBC - something which concerns me greatly. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this reposting.

***

Last week I was rifling through my CD collection, looking for something different, when I found Paul Simon's Graceland album. I put it on and was struck by the colourful imagery of the lyrics. I listened to the album every day for a week and each time I listened I heard more and more in it - a far cry from my response in 1986 when the album first came out. Back then I was carried away by the African rhythms and the words were, to me, more of a prop than anything. The fourth song on the album, called 'Gumboots' has a particularly fantastic line. I even posted the line on my Facebook page:

"Believing I had supernatural powers I slammed into a brick wall."

I think the song is about love but the line stands alone for me like a mantra. A few Facebook friends, one now in Toronto, one in Salt Lake City, one in Vancouver recognized the lyric and responded like the album really meant something to them too. I love when that happens - when a little community comes together for a moment over a joke or a shared passion for something. I guess that's the beauty of these social networking things.


Anyway, last week, after I had found the album I put it on and started cooking dinner. (My kids, who had never heard the album, asked if it was some of my 80's music- and then scattered.) That line about slamming into a brick wall jumped out at me and I've been thinking about it ever since. Now I think I know why. When I was younger, a lot younger, I didn't exactly put bath towel capes over my shoulders and leap off the shed roof, but I did want, like many kids, to be, to do, so many things. In many ways I wished I had been born a boy, because I believed they had much more fun than girls. My closest sibling in age was a boy, two years older than me, and he and I played together most of the time. I always got along well with boys because I found them much less complicated than girls. When I was a skinny, undeveloped eleven and twelve year old I used to wear cut off jeans and baseball shirts and kept my fine hair short. I remember going into Woolworth's to use the bathroom, and when I asked for the key, the woman at the counter said, "Um...would that be for...um...the girl's bathroom?" She really wasn't sure. Not too long after that, when I was walking with my friend, Toni, who was extremely pretty, some boys called out, "Toni's got a boyfriend!" That was my first brick wall. I knew that even I could not be both a girl and a boy, and since I was getting to 'that age' I was pretty sure I preferred to be recognized as a girl. When my mom took me shopping for grade eight clothes I let her buy me a flowered blouse. Even so, my young life continued to include a series of attempts to be something I was not destined to be. Granted, I had many successes, but I would invariably take on too many extracurricular activities, and then crash hard when I could not handle my superhuman efforts.


After my high school graduation I took a twenty-eight hour trip by train to visit my sisters in Winnipeg. Travelling alone was so unnerving that I stayed with my food basket in the one car the entire time, even though I knew one could move around most of the train - so I did what came easily. I introduced myself to the only person my age on the car and he and I stayed up almost all night talking quietly. During my third year of post-secondary education (I was still living at home with my parents) I decided that I should go to Europe. After all, everyone else was doing it, my friends were all well travelled, and it seemed like a rite of passage for college students. My sister Clare and her friend had recently come back from four months in New Zealand and Australia and I wanted to be able to do what she had done. I began saving money and looking around for someone to travel with. When none of my friends proved available, I began to think about going alone. The more I thought about it, however, the more I knew I couldn't do it. Every fibre of my being told me it was a bad idea; I just knew I did not have the confidence and worldliness necessary.


The travelling given up I decided to try treeplanting - my brother was making loads of money at it, and I had university to save up for now. I was hired immediately by my brother's crew boss on recommendation alone. We rookies were to be bused in and out each day during a two week trial.  The first day we left at 5:30 a.m. I had my new caulk boots and shovel, a plaid shirt and cargo pants, so I looked the part at least.  We were given our heavy shoulder bags of pesticide soaked baby trees, given some instruction and a plot of slashburnt slope and told to go for it.  I had never been one for hard labour and I wasn't sure how holding a treeplanting shovel in one hand and a baby tree in the other was going to change that, but I was willing to try.  The girls around me were encouraging, but it seemed they already knew what they were doing, particulary one European girl who was built like a brick #$%*house.  I planted tree after tree, about 500 by the end of the day.  That doesn't sound bad for a beginner except for the fact that I planted at least a hundred on the wrong line and the European girl came to my rescue and helped me replant them.  One day of the two week trial was all I managed in my very short career as a treeplanter. I came home after the first day with badly stretched achilles tendons, which had been shortened by being a dancer for several years, and could barely walk for a week. Oh, the humiliation of having to quit after one day! And yet another brick wall. A few days later, however, my mother's friend offered me a job working for her at the Kootenay Lake Summer School of the Arts as an administrative assistant. She had told my mom that if she had known I was going to try treeplanting, she would have talked me out of it. She had once owned a treeplanting company and knew it would not be the right kind of work for 'someone like me'. I was a bit choked when I heard that, but relieved about the arts admin. position, a job I loved and held for three summers, and a field I continue to feel at home in.

Brick walls are, undoubtedly, hard to face up to and extremely humbling, but in the end, can prove to be our greatest friends. There is that old saying after all: "When a door is closed, somewhere a window opens," usually a window into our own natures and our limits, with a better view of the path we are meant to be on.

Click here to see Gumboots performed live by Paul Simon

Language Lessons

Canada is known as a bilingual country, but the working ability of most western Canadians to speak French is limited at best.  We all take French in school, most of us learning to conjugate a few verbs and to ask for directions to the bathroom by the time we graduate.  Some lucky kids, like my friend's daughter attend French Immersion schools in the nearby city where her mom travels to work each day, but most do not.  I knew a lot more French in high school than my public school friends because I went to a Catholic elementary school where it seemed to be more of a priority. My children are presently not even able to take French classes beyond their Grade 11 year; there simply is not the demand in their small public high school.  It is sad, really, that in our school system it has to be all French or almost nothing.  I believe that if we are to call ourselves a bilingual country, then a language program should be just as important as any other course in school.  I suppose I have felt that way for a long time because I continued to take French in college.

I was not the greatest French scholar, but I loved to speak it, even coming third in a regional high school French speech contest.  I wrote my speech on Vancouver's Expo 86, which I had been a part of for a week with a teen theatre group, putting on a play with an anti-nuclear message two or three times a day at the British Columbia Pavillion. 

During my second year of college I had the opportunity to participate with my class in an exchange with another college in Sept Iles, Quebec.  By the time I was in college I had been on an airplane only once and had never been east of Kenora, Ontario, so the prospect of an exchange was exciting.  Each college would host the other for two weeks, and Sept Iles came to us first.  We hosted them in Kootenay style, took them sledding, on sightseeing bus tours, etc., and introduced them to our friends at the college. I designed a t-shirt for our exchange with a circle logo of snowy trees, mountains and two gold stars above them to represent our two colleges.  Some of our guests spoke English very well, many telling us they improved their skills by watching English daytime dramas, but others, like my guest, spoke very broken English and would translate directly from French.  We would laugh together when she said things like, "I have to go at the bathroom for to makes the peepee."

And then it was our turn to go to them.  We flew out of Castlegar sometime in March and landed six hours later in Quebec City, where we met our exchange partners with whom we stayed in a motel for two nights.   We got reaquainted with each other, exploring the beautiful old city and eating in a restaurant with an interior sign which translated as, "Get ready to unbuckle your belt".  Someone told me that the sign used to say, "If you can eat it all, it's free," but they started having to give away too many meals and wisely changed their tactic.  Coming from a health-foodie background, I was not enamoured with the heavy, fat-laden Quebecois cuisine so I mainly ordered 'le club sandwiche, s'il vous plait', which came heaped on a platter surrounded by pomme frites (french fries).  I rarely ate a third of it, and I'm no bird. 

Quebec city is very much like any old European city, I would imagine.  The buildings in Place Cartier are over four hundred years old, made of stone, and are beautifully heavy with history.  Although the sidewalks were slushy and the ice on the St. Lawrence river just beginning to break up, we had good weather which contined when we travelled by bus along the frost-heaved road to Sept Iles.  Although a bit carsick I was still able to take in the scenery along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, which was dotted with characteristic Quebecois stone farmhouses with steep pitched rooves for the snow. 

I do not remember much about Sept Iles itself.  Translated, it means Seven Islands.  I remember taking a helicopter trip over the islands but the day was cloudy and wet and the scenery snowy and monochromatic that time of year.  I remember going to various houses and socializing in a combination of broken French and broken English, and I remember that my host family lived southwest from Sept Iles along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in a small town called Port Cartier, so we did a lot of driving.  Unlike in the larger cities and the Anglophone neighbourhoods in Montreal, the people of the towns up the St. Lawrence were completely French speaking.  My host family spoke to me only in French and I struggled to understand their patois.  We went to a large Catholic church for Mass on Sunday and I was happy to see they had all the French lyrics up on the wall via an overhead projector, so at least I could sing along.  I think everyone knows that it is one thing to have conversations in academic French with teachers and fellow students, and quite another to speak the language with dyed-in-the-wool locals in a small region of France or Quebec.  My host family was wonderfully kind and generous to me.  My host student, Nadine was a gentle soul with an equally gentle mother, a twinkly-eyed father, and a shy younger brother.  When we all gathered at the breakfast table I watched in barely guarded astonishment as Nadine and her brother devoured sugary cereals and buried their toast in caramel spread.  "Would you have any peanut butter?" I asked.

The sweetness continued when we spent a glorious sunny day at one family's elegant summer cabin on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  There we partook in the famous Cabin au Sucre, or Sugar Shack, which is the traditional celebration of the sugaring off of the maple trees.  We pulled hot maple taffy and put it down in the snow to cool.  We ate ham glazed in maple syrup (delicious), and Les Oureilles de Christ (ears of Christ) - eggs fried in lard and smothered in, yes, more maple syrup (not my favourite dish-and not only due to its off-putting name).  I put my hand in the icy Atlantic gulf water there and I remember we bought fresh prawns from a fish shop on the wharf.  The prawns were boiled whole with their roe attached, and my new friends showed me how to pull off their shells and eat them by the bagfull while we walked along the wharf.

At that time in Quebec a language bill was a major bone of contention and the idea of separation from Canada always hung in the air; I know there was a small degree of tension between our groups because of it. As the two weeks wore on, the topic would come up more often from our French hosts and we would struggle to understand.  Fortunately, our French teacher was a wonderful, understanding woman, and she did her best to help us figure out what the issue was all about.  To remain a distinct society within Canada, our French-Canadian friends wanted to do everything in their power to keep their language the dominant one in their province, and I had no problem with that.  Quebec did feel like a bit of a different world to me, but I was open to its differences and only wished my French were better so I could take more in of its culture.  On our final evening together in Quebec our adult leaders held a debriefing session with us.  We were each to give our impressions of our experiences in our own language, which would be translated for the benefit of the whole group.  Some of us took the chance to air our political concerns regarding the language bill, while some of us made tearful Academy Award-type acceptance speeches.  Instead of being a time when we should have focussed on the good that had come of the exchange, it quickly descended into dangerous territory.  I was one of the last to speak.  I don't remember much of what I said, but I think I expressed my frustration at what I thought was the wrong approach for our last evening together as a group.  I remember voicing my concern that instead of taking away all the fun times we had learning how much we were alike, and the progress we had made in bilingualism, we were in danger of parting from the experience with a bad taste in our mouths, and how unfortunate that would be.

The next morning we all went to the airport and said our goodbyes.  The tension had lifted somewhat and the good will had mainly returned.  One of the French-Canadian students came up to me and in an expressive manner, made a long speech to me.  I did not know her very well, but she had hosted a party at her parents' opulent home. She was very pretty with sleek dark hair and a genuine thoroughbred elegance about her.  As she spoke to me in rapid French, I worked very hard to try and get a grasp on what she was telling me.  She kept stopping to ask if I understood, and I would say yes, (but only every third word).  When she was finished her speech she gave me a firm hug and kissed me on both cheeks.  I understood enough to know she appreciated how hard I tried to speak French at all times when in Sept Iles, that she appreciated what I had said the evening before in the debriefing session, and that she was expressing warm feelings toward me.  Although I was dying to know all she was telling me, I just didn't have the heart to tell her I could barely understand a third of what she was saying.  I think I felt shame in that.

When I got married a few years later, my husband's French was so much more limited than mine that he used to tell people I was practically bilingual.  I wish I were.  It is a beautiful language, and I could get by in a restaurant or reading signs, but of course, that is not enough.  I am saddened by how little French my children are taught in school and that the initiative to gain bilingualism in Canada is mainly up to the individual.  Many federal jobs require proficiency in both languages (to my mind the reason for the funding of French Immersion programs by the government), the cereal box on the kitchen table has ingredients listed in both languages (and often in Spanish as well), and the bank machine asks if you prefer your service in French or English, but that is about as far as it goes out here in the west. Even if my French were perfect, I wouldn't have much of a chance to use it.

In Switzerland, much of the population can speak French, Italian and German, but then Switzerland is a much smaller country than vast and expansive Canada.  The distance from here to Quebec could encompass much of Western Europe, I believe.  Canada is also a multicultural country and in British Columbia it may seem more useful to learn Cantonese rather than French.  It is also true that many immigrants have a hard enough time learning one of the languages of their adopted countries, let alone two, and First Nations people are relearning their own languages.

However, if my experience in Quebec taught me anything, it is that we have to work harder and smarter for a sense of national unity.  In short, we have to learn to speak each others language, whether literally or figuratively.

The above photo was found here.