Monday 19 November 2012

A Sketch of a Different Past



Virginia Woolf, in her “A Sketch of the Past,” states, incorrectly, I believe, “Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison.” Woolf laments such a standard against which to assess herself, since she was “never at school, never competed in any way with children [her] own age, [she had] never been able to compare [her] gifts and defects with other people’s.” 

Lucky her.  Never having had to belie herself with false compare, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Sonnet  130 (My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”).

It seems to me I’ve lived my whole life flailing against or taking comfort from some standard of comparison or other. Not often was it comfort. 

It began with always being compared by my parents to other people’s kids. Usually negatively, to motivate me to try harder.  Or by teachers, coaches, friends, girlfriends, spouses (the first mostly frequently and inconsistently. I was better than her previous boyfriend, but in the end less than her father). Co-workers (again unevenly). Other students, as a student. Students, as an educator.
Most damagingly, because I learned the habit early, by myself, always trying to find that one key skill, that one slightly better grade, that one higher degree, that would make me acceptable, maybe even successful by comparison. Not outstanding. That was for other people’s kids. And for cousins. Except those cousins who were “bad blood,” and to be avoided (this rather depended on which parent was doing the comparing, and to which set of cousins).

What’s so necessary about other people’s achievements and failings as a measure of who we are and what we have achieved, or even found worthwhile? Nothing. Sorry Virginia. It does not matter one minor bit of body lint what anyone else is doing or has, or had, done. You are (well, in your case, were) what you are (were), and what you fashion(ed) yourself into. If that happens to be a copycat existence, that, I know, is truly a path to all manner of dissatisfaction. Unless one can lie to oneself outrageously. 

Someone else’s achievements are someone else’s.  They do not make me a lesser person, by comparison.  Someone else’s defects are someone else’s. They do not make me a better person, by comparison. 

And if I write that often enough, maybe I can make myself begin to believe it. 

I am what I have done and left undone, for whatever reasons I did the done and didn't the undone.

I am the frightened two-year old in his crib, with a nurse helping my mother take the stitches out of my fat little left hand, and sometime later out of my chin, and sometime later still out of the back of my head. I am, and always seem to have been, accident prone.
I am the three-or-so year-old climbing the latticework fence my dad had just built, and told me not to climb. I didn’t know why not, because it wasn't that hard. Then I broke several of the lathes. The warning wasn’t for my safety; it was for the safety of the fence. 

I am the four-year-old building a snowman in the few inches of winter slush on Avebury, in Victoria.
I am the same four-year-old with my little brother, in a do-it-yourself recording booth (probably in Eaton’s in Victoria) telling our dad, away down east somewhere, getting reattached to the RCAF as a peacetime flight instructor,“Hi, Daddy,” and “Wish you were here” to the whispered promptings of our mother. Then explaining with an indignant sob, how I had just had a needle that day, “and it hurted.” And wondering aloud, with no prompt. “Daddy doesn’t speak?...”

And the six-year-old, going again with my little brother, hand in hand and list in pocket,  through the gathering dusk of winter Claresholm, to the meat market and the drug store on errands for our parents and for comic books for ourselves. I assumed at the time that they just let us go, having taught us the route, and introduced us to all the shopkeepers of a small town. We felt very responsible. Either they followed us, out of sight, to make sure we didn’t get lost or confused, or just go our own way for our own childish reasons. Or they took advantage of a little privacy in the light housekeeping motel unit that was our home for four that winter. I was older before I suspected they might have followed us, and a lot older before I realized they might have needed some privacy, let alone what they might have needed it for. The comic books were probably the bribe in the chore, and the price of privacy. 

And the nine-year-old scared at going to a new school in a new city, hiding in snowbanks trying to play hookey, rather than face the new and uncertain.

I am the eleven year-old school safety patroller with my white belt and big stop sign. And later the twelve-year-old with my Captain’s badge and record book, having my recommendation for patroller of the year ignored by the local police constable who oversaw the safety patrol program. He’d picked the winner, the son of a friend, months earlier.

And the fourteen-year-old, in my Boy Scout uniform, standing on shaky knees not very well hidden in navy-blue shorts, part of an Honour Guard saluting our friend Brian, from his graveside in early June 1963. He had been complaining of a sore knee the previous August, on a three-day camp-out in the Saint Mary’s River valley, south of Lethbridge. Bone cancer, as it turned out.



GROWING PAINS


A friend dead at fifteen
one quarter of the age
I remember him from
later in a life
time he never lived.

Chewed up
by bones that grew
too long too fast,
    metastasizing
into a short story or
a lyric of a life learning
of eternity too soon.


Was he the stuff of Chums
and Boy’s Own?
The hero of Scouting for Boys?
Not really.  But
who ever was?
Schooled as we were in the
thousand instinctively nasty ways
boys will be boys.


What did we learn from his death,
the first of our crowd
to have his own funeral?
Boy Scouts in shorts,
saluting at his grave side:
we would not cry
after all. We were becoming
Men. Grim-faced,
prepared
 

And a whole assortment of other younger me’s, doing things as only I could, within the limits and out to the extent, of my own abilities and understanding, at the time: shagging foul balls and selling pop and peanuts at the local ball diamond on Sunday afternoons; snaring gophers in the vacant lots; ending up in Emergency with sprained ankles needing wrapping, and gopher bites needing tetanus shots. The usual.

Compared to nobody. Gifts my own. Defects my own.

Sunday 18 November 2012

Bonding Routine



“E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v,” : 


This bit of “found poetry” was the “subject” line for some spam that came through my e-mail recently. I thought it might make for an interesting starting line for a writing prompt, as recommended by Natalie Goldberg. Here’s what has come of it.


E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v, was a most private and unassuming address in a rather ordinary looking gated community. The “v” E bore was its mark of distinction, engraved on the address plate on the front of the house above and to the left of E’s upper --, in order to distinguish vE from its cross-town suburban counterpart, E2.  Where E2 was a lab devoted, so far as the public was even interested, to arcane things to do with particle string theory, v-bearing E was the office away from the office for several of Bond’s employer’s weapons and special effects masters. It looked on the outside like an over-sized bungalow made of brick, but it was built onto a hillside, and its basement went in and down several steel and titanium sheathed storeys, emptying out into something that would have embarrassed the Bat Cave: A toyshop of destruction, right beside a full-sized, fully equipped gymnasium and firing range.
        But that was not vE’s most interesting feature. To get there, without a high security clearance or a licence to kill, you had to have dated or caught the amorous attention of M, James Bond’s boss. Because right across the hall from the weapons lab and fitness centre was a fully stocked boudoir, in which M entertained – well, whomever she pleased. Or more to the point, whoever pleased her. Though as she got older, that list grew shorter, along with her temper. 
       Unlike the employers of the director of the CIA, M’s bosses were not prudes. If she wanted to dally, even at her age, she had their full co-operation.  They had, after all, recruited her years ago for her talents at dalliance. With her relaxed, elegant beauty and her Oxford Ph.D. in the history of applied sexual anthropology, she had been one of their best agents for seducing cold-war enemy agents to reveal more than their physical skills under the covers, back in her younger, less acerbic, days.
           All those years of whoring for Queen and country had pretty much used up her patience with fumbling twits, impressive mostly for the fact that higher-ups believed they could be trusted with information, when they were just men, after all. Well—most of them. Some of those Russian agentesses had been spectacular. Almost as spectacular as M in her prime. Almost as spectacular, and a little harder to impress—the only real challenges to her inventiveness, but ultimately the key to her advancement up the ranks.
       None of M’s guests, for reasons best left to the imagination, ever took note of the v on the way in—only on their exhausted way out, their senses a tuned a bit higher to the finer details. But it was the thing they recalled ever after—maybe ruing, maybe relishing, the realization they had just become another notch on her headboard.  

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Now—where did that come from? Probably the fact that the newest Bond movie came out this last week, though I haven’t seen it yet. But I’ve sure never wondered what M’s back story was. Not until that weird V-bearing E opened the gate. Does this mean I am to become a knocker-off of Bond prequels? Something to look forward to in my retirement. Something even to retire to pursue—a career as a soft-core cold-war espionage pornographer. Who knew?

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Natalie Goldberg, in her entertaining and irritatingly inspiring book Writing Down the Bones, a book that's been around since 1986, so it's been inspiring and irritating for over a generation now, writes of Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with an absurd but strong first sentence like, "As a man sauteed his hat he was thinking of how his mother used to saute his father's hat, and how grandmother used to saute grandfather's hat, " or "Like a white snail the toilet seat slides into the living room, demanding to be loved." Her invitation is to follow this lead, to "dive into absurdity and write."

So I tried.

Here's what's come out--at least these are two I don't mind sharing:

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Ginger stepped orangely out of the rainbow and strolled through the unobstructed vision Ralph thought he was having of his rosy future.  He removed his glasses to make sure he had the right chromatic correction, then replaced them. No. She definitely came from a shade or two too far up the spectrum. Too bad, too, because in every other respect she was a perfect fit for the life Ralph had planned far into his level-headed future. He began to reconsider his options, wondering if maybe he hadn’t set his sights a tad too narrowly, or if some cosmetic adjustment could make up for her deficiencies. Ginger, a playful sort who had just wanted to add a little spice to the life stewing flavorlessly in Ralph’s monochromatic imagination, grew impatient with his dithering and procrastination, and withdrew, back into the prism that was her home. “I simply have no time for the terminally bland,” she muttered.


###########


The Queen Margharita pizza ordered the customers at the table to pay attention.  She was steamed. Well, baked, actually. Not half-baked, like before, like earlier on when nothing had gone right. She wanted fully to be the star, celebrated at this moment when something like perfection seemed possible out of the disgrace of earlier the same evening.   
The idiot rookie line cook who had falsified his resumé had begun a trial incarnation with a cheap undergarment of some ghastly commercial pesto before anyone could stop him. Then for a petticoat layer, he’d poured some weird reddish sauce over the pesto—which did deserve being hidden, but still…. A lady has her standards.  Then he had layered on an overskirt of processed mozzarella slices, the taste and texture of semi-congealed wall plaster. She had been sent out looking so common, then ingloriously been sent back, to finally just slip herself off the platter and into hiding in a plastic bin.
She had re-emerged in all her regal splendour when a qualified courtier, understanding the job and sensing the importance of decorum and occasion, fitted her out to emerge with dignity and command appreciation for all her richness. Her unbaked nakedness first moisturized and rouged with deep crushed romas;  this foundation decorated with an overlayer of tiny perfect dots of buffalo bocconcini buds, elegantly arranged and floated over the smooth silk of the tomatoes; a few perfect, locally grown, fresh basil leaves delicately, greenly, accenting the whole—just enough to get the aromas wafting into the hall. She commanded respect for her elegant simplicity, and everyone had damned well better acknowledge the fact.
She just hoped the diners were talented and gracious enough to appreciate what she brought to the occasion, whatever it was. There was no going back this time. She’d rather go out the front door cold and ignored in a doggy bag than have to return, discarded, to the kitchen with all the common trash.


Thursday 1 November 2012

Rerouting




A perfect Saskatchewan September Sunday afternoon in 1981, chauffeuring my mom and dad east from my place in Saskatoon to Muenster, then north to the Pathlow cutoff, a 2 ½-hour trip to visit my Aunt Dorothy (Mom’s sister) and Uncle Wilbur on their farm. This was a trip back through the countryside of their childhood and youth. Mom and Dad had been born and raised in this province, but had lived away from here, first on the coast, then in Alberta, since a few months before I was born—or when I was “on the way,” as Mom used to phrase it—over thirty-three years earlier. They’d moved away in 1948 for the same reason I moved in in 1973: to find work. And in their case to start and raise family, a commitment my wife at the time was in no mood to consider, an attitude I was beginning to resent as a mark of our own failure to grow up.
I had no way of knowing that five years later, neither she and I, nor my parents, would still be together, but would be separated, on our ways to the complete set of divorces that ended all the marriages of our seemingly model 1950s nuclear family—parents and five children all unable to sustain a relationship of wedded bliss, for a whole variety of reasons.
From the front passenger seat, Mom took in the scene. Frowned. “Where’s the lake?”
“What lake?”
“Lenore. The road used to go for miles along the lake when we went from St. Brieux to Humboldt.” 
           “The lake’s a few miles that way,” I gestured casually towards the west, out the  driver’s window.  “There’s still a road there, but you wanted to see the Imhoffs at St. Peter’s,” I reminded, referring to the ceiling paintings on the church at Muenster. “And besides, this road’s the better highway these days and it’s quicker this way.” My authority for such a pronouncement, given my total ignorance of the other route (a route I had never driven), is the symbolism of a line on a highway map.
“Oh.” Silence.
From the back seat a few minutes later, another frown, this one in my rear-view mirror, and a bemused rumble in my ear. “Where’s the lake? The road used to go for miles along the lake when we’d go down to Humboldt from Melfort to a dance.” Conversations with Mom and Dad were often like this—same page, different time zones. It seemed funny at the time.
“Lake Lenore?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s over that way a few miles. This is the main connecting road now. But maybe Uncle Wilbur can take that route when he brings you back next week.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
Another frown from Mom.
“Look at that. He’s out combining on a Sunday. Your Great Uncle Peter never worked on a Sunday. On Sunday he rested, and his horses rested.”  “Yeah.”  Same page at the same time with this one. Such togetherness. This one really matters.
“Combines don’t need rest, I guess,” I toss off, completely missing the point.
I look west as the combine passes behind us, and shrug off the scene the way they prefer to remember it: A field of mature wheat, glowing golden, biding its time in the soft autumn sunlight on a cloudless Lord’s Day afternoon.
And weary beasts of burden: a team of horses (Clydes? Belgians? Percherons? I don’t bother asking, so they never tell me—a family detail now lost from the record) and my Great Uncle Peter, all absent, absorbing the pleasures of a divinely ordained afternoon of R and R.
That was, in the eleven years I lived in Saskatoon, the only time I made that trip to visit the relatives who lived the closest by. But that evening, uncharacteristically curious, and in the area anyway because Mom and Aunt Dorothy had wanted to drive over to St. Brieux to see their mother's old homestead, as the four of them drove back to the farm, I drove the old route back south, down along the lake for a surprisingly few miles for a place and route so central to their memories, before turning west at Humboldt, towards home. 
 It was pretty, all right. But I was in too much of a different generation, in too much of a hurry, really to appreciate that fire in the sky, reflecting off a smallish, narrow prairie lake. That was part of their story, and like so many they told me over the years, I failed at the time to connect it with mine, only to regret the now forever gone chance the hear them tell it to me again, when time has slowed me down to a pace where I could maybe find reason to appreciate it from their point of view.
Now, my own son from a second marriage that has for 25 years survived the fact that I and my impatience are in it, lives four hours by air to the east, on the shores of the St. Lawrence (a place an impossibly long geography and history away when I was his age) and I have all my stories to tell him, and he has his own life to build, and his own stories to acquire. Will any of mine have any place in his, later? Will we get our Sunday in the September sun, one day? Will we make a better job of it?