Friendship of a particular kind

Posted on October 24, 2024 by doradueck

I’m just home from a river cruise (Basel to Amsterdam, on the Rhine) with a friend, and while I’m thinking back at what we did and saw, I’m also thinking about friendship of a particular kind — not a long side-by-side as some are, but a then-and-now-again.

Miriam and I roomed together in a 2-room basement suite our first year of university in Calgary. When I do the improbable math I see that this was more than 50 years ago. I haven’t actually asked her how she found it, but I recall telling people she had been my “easiest” room-mate. I moved to Toronto the next year and she stayed in Calgary, where she would teach, but eventually she went to Europe, living in France, later Vienna, her base for work related to supporting the underground church in Iron Curtain countries like Romania. She also lived in Russia, where she did research for her PhD. She returned to North America after many years in Europe, leading and teaching in theological schools in Toronto, Chicago, and Calgary.

During the same years my life involved marriage and a family, study and writing, and living in Saskatchewan a spell, also Paraguay, but mostly Manitoba until Helmut and I re-located to B.C. Miriam and I kept in touch, but quite intermittently. I think there may have been a couple of short visits in all those years, one of them in the Winnipeg airport when she was between flights. Now and then we wrote letters.

In recent years, we’ve been in each other’s homes on occasion — mine in Tsawwassen, hers in Calgary — and somehow the idea of doing a “celebration trip” of our upcoming milestone birthdays developed, and so it was done.

I’m not sure where this rumination is taking me, except to register the marvel of a strong early connection in space and time, followed by a huge divergence in entirely separate geographies, and then an intensive mutual experience — a trip together — once again in shared space and time. The picture I have is of a rainbow, say, touching down on two ends and bridging a long stretch of earth between points. (The same thing happened when an even longer-time friend Eunice and I travelled together several years ago, after living in different provinces since childhood.)

Sometimes one meets someone from the past and the reunion is lovely but once the catch-up is done, there’s little to sustain it further; it’s simply a renewal of memory, a sweet brief gift. Other times, however, once-upon-a-time friendship can carry more.

At times, in our close ship cabin quarters on the cruise, it might have been yesterday and two girls getting ready for classes again, but next moment we might be leaning into the other’s “good ear” on account of diminished hearing in both of us, and there was no illusion about the passing of time. And when I observed her connecting with ship staff from Hungary, Romania, or Belarus with her “I was there” capacity, or me exchanging mutual experience with a widow, the awareness of differing life histories asserted itself. At any rate, we did this wonderful adventure together, strolling in a chain of cities on the Rhine, eating rather extravagantly, and looking at art, and it was a new fastening, a solid gift for which I’m grateful.

Seven years ago

Posted on August 15, 2024 by doradueck

Well beyond time to show up here if I’m going to call myself a blogger, but honestly, nothing original is urging itself upon me to say. How about a few days of my journal from seven years ago then? The prose is a bit loopy in places, but it’s a journal — one is talking to oneself! My words from the past often seem strange to me, events already over and long forgotten, but there I was, in those days. (Do you remember these episodes in “the news”?)

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

8 p.m. Enjoying cool air of balcony. Fallen flower petals litter the floor, cherry tomatoes now eager to ripen. Helmut at Habitat [for Humanity work site] today and I did revisions [to a story and essay].

Per David Brooks, who opined at NYT that he was trying to divest his brain of Trump, and Garrison Keillor who had a great column about his high school reunion and how the man’s name didn’t come up at all, and then how what’s (more) important is tomatoes, I didn’t watch news in the afternoon hour I often allow myself to puzzle, but listened instead to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with Edna O’Brien. “Oh wow,” I said to myself when it was done, “that was good.” Truly rich in ideas, emotion, compassion-capacity. – So all good, and turns out I have an Edna O’Brien short fiction collection on my shelves. –

But during my brief victory away from the news, there is a new “development” that occurs. Bombast from North Korea, bombast from D.T. who promises “fire and fury…and force,” “like the world has never seen.” Shock, for he sounds just like Kim Jong Un. It’s really quite frightening, this build-up of tension, both of them nuclear powers.

Friday, Aug. 11, 2017

Two quite opposite emotions today—one a sense of fear/sick/disgust/worry—who knows how to describe it, as the rhetoric continues, and continues—ON THE U.S. SIDE. It’s quite frightening really, and as leaders urge the rhetoric be lowered, D.T. carries right on. His poll #s continue to drop, as markets are too, and it’s as if he thinks he’ll gain people back by talking tough. “People like it,” he says…. It really did quite bother me. I bleat it all Godward, yes, but am mostly bothered by piety [when someone says] well we’re in the last days, we don’t understand, just “watch and pray.” That is good advice, but are we really in the last days? I think we have to resist warmongering like that. Poor Koreans and others in Asia, Guam, etc. Lord have mercy.

But, the world is coming to an end, so why not buy a painting? Was compelled by a “R. Lake” I saw in the thrift shop yesterday, a landscape, flat though low mountains on horizon, a large tree centre, some small buildings. It’s not like real detailed, you have to stand back, but there’s something about the blues. Anyways, it was still there this morning, had in the meanwhile looked up R. Lake, which is Randall Lake, born 1947, of Utah, ex-Mormon, his paintings recently more political—gay man, taking on Mormon Church for their damage to LGBTQ etc. $65. So happy with this acquisition, now in our bedroom.

Haircut today too, some puzzle fun, and some work (revisions), though not as much as I should have, if I wasn’t so anxious about nuclear war or busy rearranging our walls.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

So yesterday I posted my feelings on FB—re North Korea, my cries for Korean people, opinion that DT brought world to brink—….quite a few comments, which is always a little surprising… Karla B. alerts me to tomorrow’s Sunday of Prayer for Peaceful Reunification of Korean Pen. Betty B. says Australia feels very close. John L. proposes how both leaders will spin this. Carol Ann W. recalls Cuban Missile Crisis, how she played Bach. Dayna D. shares Anne Lamott:

What to do in the face of Locked and Loaded? The usual: Help! Thanks. Wow. Radical self-care. Trust & surrender. Serve the poor. Breathe.

So, interesting conversations that FB provokes. I just “like” everyone and leave it at that.

BUT, End of the World is so yesterday, she says (to herself) sarcastically. Who’s even thinking about that?! Today it’s Charlottesville, VA. Neo-Nazis, KKK, Alt Right gathering, violence and counter protests. A car rams counter-protestors, a woman killed, 3 deaths in all. DT generically calls for unity and condemns violence “from many sides, from many sides.” Dos not condemn white supremacists who chant Heil Trump and wear MAGA hats, David Duke who reminds who elected him. I listened to the statement and agree, it was tepid, he who can be so specific in his criticisms. He… can’t name it for what it is.

Someday, maybe 10-20-30 year from now, if someone reads this, they may say, well is she just hyperventilating, worrying… Believe me, it is this bad on this continent, this sense of division, this sense of something terrible unleashed from the top. “Blood and soil,” they chanted, as they walked with their tiki torches. And “Jews will not replace us.”

Well, the Sabbath nears. Breathe, dear heart. Read your Edna O’Brien book. Think of your new painting-print. Your kids and grands… [Gratitude] for this day. For the blackberries we picked this morning. For the Staples store that opened nearby today. For a pot of yellow mums. For Helmut.

On Porches and Balconies

Posted on June 20, 2024 by doradueck

“I cannot separate it [watching the world go by] from the porch where it occurs. The action and the space are indivisible. The action is supported by this kind of space. The space supports this kind of action. The two form a unit, a pattern of events in space.”
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Visiting my children in Toronto the past week I once again spent happy hours sitting on their porch. It’s a lovely place to have my morning coffee, a lovely place to converse, a lovely place to wait for the grands bursting up the walk after school. It has a roof, room for several chairs and a low table, and is tucked behind a railing with flower boxes and further sheltered behind a front yard tree. Nevertheless, I can see, at angles, the sidewalk and street and feel a part of the world while set away from it too.

The balcony in my Tsawwassen apartment poses more of a challenge for this effect than the Toronto porch. I live in a congenial complex of apartment buildings in which, as such buildings usually do, each apartment has a balcony. Mine faces south and is a great place for winter light and for greenery in summer. Many of the balconies in the complex are attractive with flowers and patio chairs and so on. Something I’ve noticed, though, is that I very rarely see people in those chairs on their balconies. I don’t actually spend much summer time on mine either until I create a bit of a cozy shaded corner where I can feel part of the outside world but still be somewhat secluded and private.

Back in the early 1990s, a friend introduced me to A Pattern Language by architect Christopher Alexander, quoted above. This book was a bible to me in understanding how space works — what, that is, makes us enjoy one space and not another. Pattern # 167 discusses balconies. “Balconies and porches which are less than six feet deep are hardly ever used,” he wrote. Less than six feet, there’s not adequate room to group chairs; they have to be in a row. People on balconies also need a sense of being recessed; a cantilevered balcony feels unsafe, if only psychologically.

My balcony is five feet wide. The railing panels, furthermore, are a glass-like material, good for light and viewing from within the apartment but offering too much exposure for any length outside. There’s nothing I can do about the width, but I’m lucky in that the balcony is covered and part of it is recessed a little, and using that, I can fashion a nook where I can come out with my morning coffee, hear the sounds, see the sights, feel the air of the emerging day, and do this almost hidden from street view. This year I have an Engelmann ivy which I will train to cover part of the adjoining balcony panel, and other plants for beauty and partial barrier. When I have a guest, as I did yesterday, we can turn our chairs to face one another alongside the flowers. I’m pleased with how this year’s cozy corner is shaping up. If you visit, we’ll sit there together!