Reading for something different in the way of "pleasure."

I didn't get as much reading done this year as usual. At least it feels that way. Didn't maybe get as much writing done, either. It might just be that more of my reading and writing were "professional" and tied to my teaching and other job-related duties. That is often useful, often opens up undetected and unexplored byways for my own curiosity. It's just not quite as satisfying. It feels too much like work for others, not work for my own benefit. (Though I must admit, I do appreciate the paycheques and find them highly beneficial.)

I did get a poem and a short non-fiction piece on winter into the popular (locally) 40 Below, an anthology of writing about winter in Edmonton. And Anna Marie Sewell, the outgoing poet laureate for the city, put a piece I wrote, "Wresting Place," onto her Poem Catcher website, one of her legacies (http://webofvisions.wordpress.com/). And I did get asked to join the board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which means I at least have to spend some more time around poets and their works.

Reading is another thing. The two books that made me sit up and think about where I have been and where I am were both memoirs: Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage, by Darrin Hagen. Both are stories of lives lived dangerously, on the margins and in the Underground, lives that have led to highly productive creative careers, but lives that have also seen the deaths of a lot of loved ones. For Smith it was life in sixties and seventies New York, with Robert Mapplethorpe, working her way to recognition as an artist, poet and singer-songwriter. For Hagen, it was life in the Edmonton drag community in the 1982-1993 period, a life lived as Gloria Hole, and a life leading also to recognition as a multi-talented actor, composer, playwright, writer.

What is the attraction of these books? Part of it is the pleasure of the reading itself. Part is just amazed wonder mixed with gratitude that they lived to tell about those lives, and that they have the talent to tell it so well.

The attraction is not exactly from envy at lives lived in too kind of Blakean excess. Like the rest of my generation--every generation, I suppose--I had opportunities for the kind of wisdom that comes only from going too far. I just did not have the motivation or the testicles for it. I was of the same generation as Smith and Mapplethorpe--but not of the same reckless, relentlessly desperate stamina.  Undoubtedly I was also too chicken, to unready to risk the predictable creature comforts of home on the prairies for cold, inspired starvation in infested apartments in bigger cities--definitely not Big Apple material. And no real incentive or life-models to emulate or guide me along. If I thought of it at all, I thought that kind of life was for other people, talented people but slightly (or extremely) odd and pushed by a creative bent. And I did not really have any ambition, motivation, encouragement, or mentoring to think of myself as "creative." Then, as now, audience material at best, I was programmed and prepared to want and pursue a middle class professional life.

Then, when I got it, as a public librarian in Regina and a newspaper librarian Saskatoon in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, I was bored senseless by it. At least I had a job at a newspaper, and took to the chance to try some writing--entertainment, theatre, and book reviewing, with occasional magazine features, as a relief from boredom and for some modest-sized fish in an even more modest-sized pond kind of recognition. That last was the kicker. People actually began to refer to me as a writer. Occasionally some still do. Good for the ego; bad for the career focus.

Later, I arrived in Edmonton not much later than did Hagen, who had come from an even smaller home town, right out of high school, to find himself in the Big Onion. I was many years older, starting my fourth university degree, and waiting out two divorces: one for me, and one for Eva, so we could start over, together. I was too broke and too focused on Ph.D. studies and getting established in a new marriage and on the child that came along a year later. I just was never really the type for endless nights of drugged and drunken clubbing. So, too chicken, too broke, and too straight.

Now? Well, I've never met Patti Smith, and likely never will. But I have met Darrin Hagen, several times. One of these times I think he might remember that we have met before. That's not exactly a fair observation--when we meet at workshops and other theatre-related events, he makes the connection readily enough. But when he has been emceeing a fashion show for Stanley Carroll, in a dimly-lit venue, and is surrounded by large numbers of friends and fans, then he gets momentarily distracted and has to be reminded for whom he is autographing this copy of his book.

I have seen Darrin perform. I don't think Darrin has ever done a number as Patti Smith. Patti remains an amazing talent, though not nearly glamorous enough to be of interest to Gloria. But I do think it is an act I would go to a club to catch.

NOTE FROM JANUARY 28, FROM DARRIN HAGEN BY WAY OF A MUTUAL FRIEND:

"I have performed patti smith music. In fact, it was my first punk-ish rock chick number. Guess what song? G-L-O-R-I-A of course. It kinda became my calling card."

I really should have seen that one coming.....  A true failure of my imagination.
 

Christmas Thoughts from a Lounge Chair

So, 9:00 in the evening Christmas Day, 2013. The nineteenth Christmas we have spent in this house. I guess it has become the place we mean when we use the phrase “home for Christmas,” since it is the place our son comes “home” to from his studies—this year at York University; the last two at Concordia in Montreal. Of course, today he spent most of it at his partner’s parents’ place. Last night was our evening for family at home: David and Kat; our neighbour, Dale; Eva and me. We have this tradition of the Christmas Eve dinner. David told us last night he plans to keep that tradition going—the Italian style fish / seafood soup with seven or eight different fishy ingredients swimming in a home-made tomato soup base; Polish herrings and a Polish potato and herring salad; red cabbage, and a huge bowl of trifle the main ingredients.

I wasn’t sure quite how to take the “I will keep this tradition going” statement. Is he already planning for a time in his life without us to come home to for Christmas? A time when he will be too far away, or too busy with his own life (and maybe family, though he says no to that right now. As did I until I met his mother-to-be). “Home for Christmas” will be a pretty empty phrase if it’s just Eva and me. We are “home” pretty much every day already. 

But the last time I spent a Christmas at my parents’ home was forty years ago. Dad spent a couple of Christmases here with us, before becoming an ex-pat in England for the last twelve or more years of his life (hard to calculate, because he went, came back, then left again).

Christmas was a slow starting affair this year. Eva and I got into a round of running errands for all the ingredients, some receptions from work, that sort of thing. She had kind of shopped for her own Christmas presents from me. Which maybe left me off the hook, but also delayed my getting out and into the seasonal rounds. In fact, all I had for her for under the tree up until the afternoon of Christmas Eve was a flashy pair of red knee-high ski sox.

I’m not a huge retail my way into Christmas kind of guy, anyway—especially since we do not go on such prolonged toy-hunting expeditions for David anymore.  That was a lot of fun when he was smaller. And the odd cool little gadget from some electronics store still has some cachet. But this year I just wasn’t feeling right. Not depressed, the way I used to get for a lot of complex and now by-gone reasons. Just not companionably engaged.

Then yesterday afternoon we went to a couple of our favorite shops—clothing boutique and coffee--where we go as much for the fun of meeting the owners and staff, and the atmosphere, as anything. That turned things more seasonal. At the boutique (Threadhill, on 124 Street) Kim was pretty much on her own, with only her Maltese terrier for company. We were chatting when a father and son arrived, for some last-minute Christmas shopping. It seems the wife/mother had been by earlier in the season, just browsing through the place for the first time, and had mentioned she liked it. So there they were. No idea of her size. No idea really of her taste. But as  luck would have it, Eva knew both men slightly, and she has known the wife/mother for many years. So we became consultants for the afternoon, and Eva modelled some of her favorite designers for them, being about a size smaller than the soon-to-be gifted one. 

That was fortuitous in a couple of ways. One—Eva was able to show them what the garment looked like off the hanger and on someone who wore it well and with pleasure (since neither father nor son had done any boutique shopping before, and didn’t really get the way some designers’ clothes can have surprise elements of shape, texture, or color, that are apparent only when worn). The second: it left the size Eva was modelling available when they bought the next size up. So soon enough I had a couple of surprise gifts for under the tree after all—things Eva had not really been interested in until she tried them on for the two men and realized herself there were some details she had missed. What we really wished was that we could have been at the others’ home this morning to see what reaction the clothes got. But by the time we all shook hands and wished each other Merry Christmases and other joys of the season, Kim was happy. The father and son were very happy. And I was suddenly feeling in the mood.

Then we went to Sorentino’s on 107 Ave. at 109 St. Our two favorite, most hospitable and outgoing baristas, Shai and Daunia, were there. Carmelo (the owner) was there. The place was reasonably busy but in a relaxed sort of way, as Carmelo chatted with some of his older buddies at the counter, but still stopped by to offer us a seasonal handshake and a small liqueur to go with our coffees. When someone asked why he was in on a day so close to Christmas, he laughed and said, “It’s the best day to be here. All my friends come in.” As he put it, on Christmas Eve afternoon, “We are in the people business, not the food business.” And he reminded us to come back on Boxing Day, which we just might do if the freezing rain doesn’t make the street impossible to drive. 

By the time we were home, getting things ready for dinner, I was just ready to be with people again, in a way I had not been, earlier in the day. And it was people who had put me in that mood, just by being on upper moods themselves. We had stopped “working at getting ready.” We were no longer doing the “countless chores of Christmas”: A bit late, maybe, but definitely a better feeling.

Today, out with George, our German wire-haired pointer, to the off-leash park (very empty) and then later around the neighbourhood (after our other neighbours’ pit-bull/American bulldog cross puppy planted Eva in a snowbank in his muscular enthusiasm). 

Eva, this evening, noted how she just could not see herself retired. A day by ourselves to relax together was lovely. But what if it were every day? She mentioned how one of her recently-retired friends is in the mode where she goes one way in the morning, and her also-retired husband goes another, so that when they get back together at home later in the day, they have something to talk about: “If they spent the day together, they would have nothing new to say to share with each other.” 

Time for that another year. This has been a good one after all, and in the end.

Learning to learn generosity of spirit

I have been reading Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resistance, by Monique Gray Smith. The book came from Richard Van Camp, who seems to have a talent for getting the right book into the hands that need it. It's too bad this fictionalized memoir, published just this year, hadn't been around when I was teaching Native students and Native literature courses on a regular basis. It might have given me a better window on the fuller range of things getting in the way of "success" for so many otherwise capable students--things like just plain fear and loneliness which are common enough for all first-year students, but come from a different history of exclusion and a different set of expectations about what "inclusion" means.

The story begins with Tilly as a child, not yet embarked on her years of alcohol abuse and recovery. She tells an innocent story of the day she went to her first movie, complete with popcorn, when the family was snowed in at Medicine Hat one night while trying to get from Kamloops to Regina on the way to visit family. That story of the movie woke me up to something I had forgotten about my own childhood--something so ordinary it was something to overlook and to take for granted. In Tilly's story, that would have been maybe 1974 or 1975, but suddenly I was back in the airbase theatre at Claresholm, in the mid-1950s.

Saturday afternoon matinee was a ceremony in many parts. It always began outside the theatre, with the rituals of the line-up outside the white two-storey wooden-sided theatre with dozens of other kids, If you let friends into the line, you had to let them in in front of you. If you let them in behind you, there would be a squabble from the ones behind.
           
The age demographic as I recall it ran from five or six years old on up to probably twelve. I don't recall any of the "teen-agers" spending their important time with us on Saturdays. Too many important adolescent things to do. Or maybe there were some parents of some of the littler kids around, so no freedom to play the role or throw their puny weight around.

The door would, and we would go our adult-supervised way past the ticket booth: 15 cents (just noticed--there is no key on this computer with a cents sign. Probably none on any of my computer keyboards. Just not useful enough to waste the space on, not when you can have a tilde.) Line up for the concession stand (as the candy counter was rather grandly called). Popcorn or a chocolate bar: 10 cents. Enter the hall--and leave adult supervision behind--no place here for grown-ups. Find an empty seat in the usual area with siblings and friends.

Wait for "the man" to walk down the aisle to great cheers to open the curtains. "The man" was sometimes my Dad, sometimes the Dad of one of my friends, since the movie house was operated by off-duty servicemen earning some extra cash or learning a possible trade for after their enlistment. Because Dad was the projectionist, Bobby and I got in for free (though sometimes the ticket man did not know that, so there would be an anxious moment as we had to explain the rules to the "New Man"). Because we got in free, we got only a dime each for popcorn or chocolate bar.

Watch the program, in a scene a bit like the kids' show scenes in Cinema Paradiso, though fortunately, Saturday afternoon matinees rarely featured a romance. Usually some kind of adventure movie--a western, a scary trip into some jungle, sometimes a Disney, but not often--we got mostly "B" movie offerings at best. To get Disney in first run, we had to go all the way into town (probably all of five or ten minutes away, but it seemed forever, that trip into town) to the local movie house.

The funny thing is, I can't recall pretty much any of the Saturday matinee movies, except for some comedies--Abbott and Costello Meet Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and one or more Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" movies. Imagine my surprise years later to catch up on some of these on late-night tv, and find out about Dorothy Lamour, who had been there all along.

But the movie itself was only part of the reason for gathering, and the final stage of the program. First was the cartoon. Probably Woody Woodpecker or some Loony Tunes thing. I recall one about an orchestra, playing some symphony. Doesn't sound great kids' stuff, but the musicians were all dogs, matched to the instruments. In mid-movement, a little Scottie came muttering in through the stage door, all bundled up, took of coat, gloves, scarf, muttered his way into the back row of the percussion, opened his little black instrument case, tingggged a triangle once, on cue, reloaded his instrument case, muttered his way off the stage, re-dressed, and left, still muttering, out the stage door. Hilarious, apparently. At least we all laughed.

Then the serial. This was usually something about a running battle between white adventurers and insidious African or Oriental heathens trying to protect some lost treasure from the collectors to whom it rightfully belonged. Or some crime-busting hero making the back alleys of the city safe for whatever one needed safe back alleys for.

Then the movie. On Saturdays, I seem to recall, the theatre dispensed with the traditional National Anthem to open the program and "God Save the Queen" to end it. We were probably making too much noise for "Oh Canada" once we saw "the man," and were already stampeding for the exits once the closing credits started to roll. We had been making some predictable racket all through--certainly at any of the dull parts. If anybody talked when the hero was doing heroic things, there would be a round of "Shut ups" ring the theatre: the first was aimed at the talkers; the next few were aimed at the "shut-uppers." If things got really boring (or mushy), then flattened cardboard popcorn boxes began to fly, prehistoric frisbee fashion.

But what were the titles? What were the actual movies? Can't recall. And that is curious, since they all, one way or another, formed my pre-teen world view, or tried to. And they must all, forgotten in detail though they may be, must still occupy some foundational space in my more recently un-accessed mental storage cells. If I am not remembering them, I might even be actively forgetting them, putting them and their simplified lessons abut good and evil away where they belong for now.

Getting back to Tilly.  Her first movie was not a western; it was something forgettable to all but her--The Apple Dumpling Gang, a predictable Disney comedy about three orphan kids striking it rich in goldrush California--but Tilly's upbringing seems to have been circled, wagon-train style, by fans of the westerns or at least of the anti-red-skin sentiments that they normalized. In spite of the lessons right in front of her of educated, professional and gainfully employed members of her own family, including a university-educated grandmother who nonetheless taught her all sorts of useful knowledge of traditional resources, medicines, Tilly had to walk a painful road to learn to appreciate positives in her own abilities and cultural background.

She had to learn those lessons partly to undo the damage from public insults like the snarled advice to her mother, "Goddamn squaw. Get control of your kid or go back to the reserve. Back where you belong. And stay there." The fact that the full-grown man had walked into the child and knocked the wind out of her did not seem to enter his calculation. That was in Kamloops in 1974--so that grown man would have been part of my generation, in all likelihood, albeit maybe a slightly older member of it. Raised in the certain knowledge he was in the right whenever two "racially different" citizens collided. Certain in the knowledge he had the right of way in any public space over anybody not like him--not white, male and bigger.

That seems to have been the lesson on any of those Saturday afternoons movie programs, one way or another: heroes were always white males. Of course, so were a lot of the villains--but they had black hair and five o'clock shadows, wore dark clothes, and hung around in dark places. Though I know for a certainty that girls were in the line-ups and therefore in the crowds at those movies, I cannot recall any movies or cartoons or serials that featured a female heroic figure. And if any were mushy girly films with lots of kissing, I certainly put them well into the vaults of locked-away memory. That's what boys learned to do.

But there is always something in the gifts Richard passes along--and the passage that resonated this morning was the advice Tilly got from her counsellor Bea, when, as a young woman, Tilly was heading to an International Youth Gathering in Ontario. Tilly was by then in AA, and unsure of her ability to function or have fun in a gathering of strangers--at least not if she were sober. Bea told her to go, have some fun and begin to get her inner wheel balanced: "Be safe on your trip and pay attention to everyone who comes along your path. You never know who'll have a teaching or story for you...or who might need one. Be generous in your spirit"  (105).

That's the catch for someone my age and in my profession--paying attention to what others (especially much younger others) might have to teach me, not what I have to teach them. It gets awfully easy to fall for the short office visit conversations over assignments, rather than to open up and listen to what the students really want to talk about. Maybe because when they do, I might have to face up to the fact that I do not have the kinds of answers they need, and the appropriate campus help groups tend to have pretty long lines already, when I try to make the referral.

Sometimes we just exchange stories. That is one form of "generosity" on both our parts. But then, it is also therapy. When I went through counselling for clinical depression, it was mostly in the form of telling and retelling my stories of a sense of failure to a psychiatrist who just mostly sat there and fed prompts to get the stories going, then would occasionally note a common theme or character across several and wonder out loud what the connection might be ?????

Prompts to bring the stories together.

Got to remember that one, more often.

It's a bit like what Keavy Martin, an Associate Professor of Native Literature, was lecturing about a week or so ago--going to Elders with questions (and a desire for answers) about Native cultural or educational practices or concerns, wondering about how or if to take up or carry on a practice. Then getting used to the answer: being told to work it out according to her own intelligence.

It's the spirit they are done in that goes a long way to establish the right or wrong of things.

Richard sets a pretty consistent model of generosity--and maybe hears questions from his friends before they think to ask them, which is why his stories resonate so widely, and he has so many to tell. He is also a pretty fair listener for one so busy.