The Theory and Practice of Snow

As a contributor to 40 Below: Edmonton's Winter Anthology, I am of course thrilled with the advent of winter and the build-up of snow as evidence of that advent.

As the owner of an extensive concrete driveway and patio, as well as a fifty-foot frontage of "city" sidewalk that local by-laws say I am responsible to keep clear, and as neighbour to a pair of eighty-something-year-olds whose walks are linked to mine, and for whom I provide an unofficial clearing service (if I do not, they go out and do it themselves, "for the fresh air and exercise"--recent hip surgery and incipient heart condition under treatment notwithstanding), I am less thrilled with the situation.

My back is stiff, and my mood a bit raw from shovelling and reshovelling and reshovelling and sweeping before eventually ceding the issue and using a small electric snow-thrower. All this to clear that area more times than there have been grey, low-pressure system days of consecutive snowfall. But I am trying not to be a sorehead.

After all, today is the day of redemption. A brilliant, clear sky. A brilliant full-circle ice halo, with sun dogs on the south-eastern horizon just after sunup. Air crisp all the way to the bottom of the lungs. The view from my office window a study in high contrast. This is the kind of winter to celebrate.

Sun dogs (technically known as parhelia, a Greek word meaning "beside the sun") are, for the uninitiated (i.e. from places that never get cold enough for them and for ice halos), bright reflections from the sun, at 22 degrees left and or right from the sun itself. They are created by the prismatic effect of ice crystals in the air. And they can be spectacular, when they are not blinding a person with their brilliance, and causing automobile accidents either from the blinding, or from the distraction that often results from their appearance.

             This is a partial ice halo with sun dogs, photographed in South Dakota by Joe Unterbrunner

But if we are going to celebrate the cold beauty, better to do it today. The forecast is for 10-30 cm. or so of new snow in the next two days. 

Moon re-Calling

So today was the kick-off at Block 1912 for 40 Below: Edmonton's Winter Anthology. Jason Lee Norman, perceptive editor that he is, chose two of my submissions--a poem called "Cold Comforts," and a prose piece, "Moon Calling," that began life way up this blog site, but had to be cut out once selected.

It was interesting meeting several of the other contributors and hearing them read. I did not read at the venue, but was on CKUA ARTBEAT this afternoon, reading both pieces.

Richard Van Camp, when he was Writer-in-Residence at the U. of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies told me some two years ago that I seemed to write a lot about the cold, and should try to get some of it published, so there it is. Richard celebrates the full moon every month, calling out "Happy Full Moon" to anyone in earshot (and given Richard's skill at projecting, that can be quite a distance).

It turns out I also write a fair bit about the moon. And snap a lot of pictures of it with my cell phone camera.

Two months ago, Anna Marie Sewell and I took a group from the Edmonton Poetry Festival through the North Saskatchewan River valley at Louise McKinney Park at the full moon, to see what the experience might inspire. We arranged to have everybody out on the Capilano Footbridge just as the moon came up right in the heart of the river, downstream. At first is was just a hint of something going on behind a screen of evergreen  trees. Then a faintly orange crescent began to assert itself, and after fifteen or twenty silent minutes, there is was, shining full, and changing to ever brighter silver as it got higher above the horizon.

Several of the seventeen participants mentioned that it was the first time they had just stood and watched the moon rise, and were amazed because they swore they could actually see it move--and I agree: with patience and rapt attention to its relationship with the foreground, the moon was in slow, deliberate, practiced motion.

Eventually we made our way to a building with some lights on its outside stairs, and people began to write up their impressions. Four later submitted drafts to the Edmonton Poetry Festival Facebook site.

My contribution was this:

Harvest Moon we call this glow, this ripened

moon of gathering that guides our steps,

encourages our taking in,

through eye, ear, nose, tongue, and skin;

yet tonight even as she comes to

full bright perfection, joins us, together

points our ways along

moon-shadowed paths,

because the moon is made for changing,

ever cycling, waxing, waning, 

eternal analogue reminder of

continuity in our 

on-again,

off-again 

digital 

times, 

she styles

herself as well 

a Moon of Letting Go, 

shifts, begins to perfect

her darker, shaded other faces.

Here we gather, give and take

          illumination, 

   collect ourselves, reflect upon,

        then moon and we

                 continue on.

But I think the Perkins who really got the moon was our son David, when he was two-and-a-bit. I used to take him for a ride in his stroller winter evenings after supper, while Eva went to work, four evenings a week at the ESL program at Alberta Vocational College (now Norquest). He would sit all bundled in his snowsuit, holding a flashlight. One night, as we went north towards a strip mall where he could look at the toys on display at a large drugstore, and take his time explaining them to me and discussing their merits as potential Christmas presents, he did not need the flashlight. There was a full moon reflecting off new powder snow--not deep, just enough to freshen the surface to bright sparkling white. He looked up to his right and said. "Daddy. The moon." 

"Yes," I agreed. "The moon. A full moon." 

"But Daddy, the moon."

"Yes, the moon."

"But Daddy. The moon. It's following us."

And he was right. There it was, coming with us to the store.

And there it was again, later, to our left, following us home. 

And if I and we pay attention, it follows us faithfully, every month we let it. 

And every month we do not.

Tonight's Moon

It is so useful, dammit

It’s not that I haven’t had a thought or found anything provocative since June 26. It’s that for late June and all of July, I was making up new eClass websites and notes for my Fall Term classes, so I could go on holiday at the end of July but be ready to go back into the classroom when I got home. 

Then it was that I was spending a lot of time in the sun on the beach at Nice, thinking about going into the water. And a lot of up to my chin in the Med., thinking about getting out to enjoy more of the sun. And a lot of time thinking about which restaurant we would go to for supper, to enjoy more piles of fresh seafood.

Then I was thinking about how relaxed I felt after coming home.

Then I was thinking about plans for a Sept. 19 poetry workshop I was co-hosting with Anna Marie Sewell, for the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Then I was back into Fall classes, thinking through the dullness of a cold that was draining my energy for much but teaching.

I was, with many of my colleagues, also thinking about provincial government policies and practices, backed by University blogs and state-of-the campus missives, that seem to indicate there is some concern that showing up to do our job is maybe wasting our students’ time, as we in the Faculty of Arts are not “training” them for jobs.

Pronouncements from the Ministry of Enterprise and Advanced Education the past few months mention the plan to develop more jobs through a more entrepreneurial spirit. Then they cut the budgets and shrink the programs of the universities and colleges where entrepreneurial (as opposed to MBA managerial) skills and vision can get a start.

Then the tech schools brag they are being spared because they are training people for jobs. But without imagination developed through non-job-training types of education (i.e. not just apprenticeships and other training to be employees), without imagination to see opportunity and to have the confidence and thought processes to see it through, what jobs are they training people for. Not the new ones that have not been created.  Just the existing ones—the ones that disappear with the end of every resource boom and the end of every construction project.  

Scouting not for Boys

Scouting For Boys, by Lord Baden-Powell himself. It was one of those good gift/bad gift choices. Good for a twelve-year-old boy just entering the age of independence, written to teach him all sorts of useless but time-consuming and distracting life skills great for a war fought long ago in South Africa, and to create a narrative to ease him out of childhood on the promise of competence in adventurous outdoor situations of all sorts. A book to stimulate the imagination.

Bad because it was, after all, a book for BOYS. The narrative spoke of courtly, gentlemanly standards of a time long gone—if it had ever been. And it didn’t say anything useful about the kinds of stimulation going on as puberty set in. Oh, there were some deeply coded warnings about being clean in thought, word, and deed, and resisting temptations to self-abuse or self-defilement, or some such activity. Nothing about his testicles, wrestling like rambunctious puppies in his nut sac. Nothing about the dazzling procession of erections that kept getting twisted up in his shorts. In Math class. In Science class. In Music class. In Literature class. In Sunday School. On the bus. On the street. On his paper route. While thinking about red-headed Nancy. While not thinking about red-headed Nancy. No help from Lord BP himself on that aspect of becoming fit for adulthood.

And no way to reconcile all that advice on courtesy and clean thinking and respect for women when all his hormones were urging “Go for it, Cowboy.” Whatever “it” might be. That was the worst part. Not having much of a clue what “it” was, other than sniggering acknowledgement it was something only bad girls did with bad boys. Older boys. Something older boys only smirked about. Something to do with that live animal in his pants. He knew that much because once, when some embarrassing story about teen pregnancies came up on the tv, his dad—the guy who had given him Scouting For Boys—had said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Keep it in your pants.” 

By that time, it wasn’t so much the contents of his own pants that concerned him. Not so exclusively. It was the mysterious contents of red-headed Nancy’s pants. But Nancy was a good girl. At least, none of the bigger, older boys had told any sniggering stories about her—not in his hearing. Not like they told about Rachel. Rachel who missed a lot of school. Rachel who, it was whispered—especially by the good girls-- missed a lot of school to go riding in cars with older boys chasing something called “tail” (which seemed to refer to something way different from what it referred to in Scouting for Boys). There was something not quite right here. Rachel who was so open and friendly and funny? Rachel who got pretty good marks in school as easily as she seemed to have acquired a pretty bad reputation outside of it? How could the two things be possible in one person? Nothing about that in Scouting For Boys.  

It took rather a long time before he figured out Scouting For Boys had been written to keep the red-headed Nancys of the world safe from ignorantly stimulated adolescent thoughts like his had been. And the Rachels safe from the pollution of unclean words about unproven deeds. And by then, the two of them lived in a different city from him--the surest socio-sexual counter-stimulant of all.

No compass bearing, star-reading, track-reading boyhood skills could close that gap.

Two for Father's Day:

 Fatherhood: No wonder it's such a complicated concept.

My father died forgetful, but unforgettable, for so many actions and so many traits.

Grand father and son                                      

In photos, desert-uniformed

military trimmed

nineteen and twenty year olds

lounge jauntily, pleasurably on or under

armed wings of now obsolete

killing machines in North Africa,

relieving boredom or

relaxing between or before

risking, meeting or dealing

death sixty-six years ago; men

young as this other

nineteen-year-old in

Death-Metal T-shirt

peacefully scanning, enjoying

images of himself reflected in

one subject of many pictures:

Family resemblance not completely

masked by much longer hair, and

flouting little beard 

Between these two young men is

me, the only aged face

in this unsnapped shot,

shared features wrinkled over by

gathering symptoms of late and

lengthening middle age---

Hair thinning beyond military standards

beard vainly removed because

a shade too close to Santa;

thankful the pictured youngster

survived to generate these now

bi-focalled eyes and gift this

vision, living history

traced in a cocky

bullet-proof late-teen

grin shared across

miles and miles and

years and years.

#####################

History lessons

Sunday night in September

at Greenwoods’ listening to the poet read

a poem about reading a poem

at Greenwoods’ four years ago.

Shelves of War Books

behind. My dad is maybe mentioned

in one or two of the histories. He was in

several sixty years after D-Day.

I’ve never read them or searched out

those references. Maybe they tell stories

I’ve heard a dozen times or more, live

in the living room or at the family table. Maybe

they’re stories a son should never hear

about his father.  Maybe they’re so

slight they will mimic the life

he seemed to think he had lived ever since,

trying to regain the status he once risked --

asking a kid on the C-train who has no idea

what he’s talking about, coming home

from a Flames game in Calgary,

“Say, why don’t  you stand up

and give an old Spitfire pilot a seat?”

Telling us in moments of our own relative

or perceived failure, “You’d never

make it as a fighter pilot,”

as if we should want to try.

As if that were the only test of a man’s worth.

As if he could have celebrated with us if we did

make it in the world that made him better

than we could ever be.

We all had to survive that war,

many times over,

his kids and him. 

June 2013 draft