Category Archives: Personal

Waiting

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I sit on a log at the bay, seek words for a strange and unexpected time. I’ve resisted words until now, words on paper, that is, — real or virtual — for there are many words already. Into a new kind of silence, a constant bustle of noise. It’s like everyone is talking at once. News, zoom meetings, invitations to Ted talks and re-configured choirs and spoken poems, virtual museums to visit, prompts for writing, prompts for art, tips for productivity, soothing reminders that productivity is not required. Words for information, words for grief and uncertainty and craziness.

The daily cacophony of pot-banging and honking and shouting at 7 p.m. seems about the truest we can do, word-wise. And the constant true refrain: we’re in it together.

Except that this is hard to believe. We can’t touch. We veer away from others’ breath. We’re in it together, we say, but each of us is keenly, separately Body now and our individual skin aches for contact and disbelieves assurances of together.

The tide is out. There are people on the mud flats. Putting floaters into distant water. Walking dogs. Everyone careful in their social-distancing zone. I step on to the flats, walk water-ward too. I have new shoes, grey Skechers with pink laces, blissfully comfortable, no breaking-in necessary, and then I notice their imprint in wet black sand and suddenly I notice many marks of other shoes. (Bare feet too). Crisscrosses, vertical lines, circles. Each brand unique. Who knew the underside of shoes had such variety? For a while I am thoroughly absorbed in the moment.

But eventually one needs to find language for the moments we’re in.

Waiting, that’s the word. That’s the sum of it. No wonder it’s hard to read or write with any kind of focus. The kind of waiting you undergo in a waiting room, like maybe the doctor’s office, some place where you have an appointment and you pick up a magazine and browse, listlessly, for you can’t concentrate, you’re alert to your name being called and everything is running late and it’s a watchful waiting laced with anxiety.

For about a week, I wasn’t well. I was afraid then. The inspiration of well people irritated me then. In my fear I wondered what I needed to still do or say. Just in case. Do: nothing. Say: a note in my journal to my children and grandchildren. I’m halfway embarrassed about it now, halfway ashamed. I was tested for Covid. The test was negative. In retrospect, I had an ordinary flu, an ordinary migraine. This time is strange and unexpected and I couldn’t see my ill-health clearly for what it merely was. I was continuously conscious of my breath. All I needed was air in my lungs, and I had it, but what if I lost it?

I’m surprised now how desperate I was over the possibility of not having it. Haven’t I considered myself a person of equanimity?

Waiting. It’s not the present that disappears, but the future. The main question on our lips is when?

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With the granddaughter. Before Covid.

The nine-year-old granddaughter texts: “COVID-19 is a nightmare, it is the worst thing in the world I’ve ever heard of. [Weeping emoji] But I’m somehow surviving it all. [A cluster of happier emojis.]” In her short world, definitely the worst. No school, no playdates. Yes, I say to her, the worst thing in the world.

But I’ve lived longer. I make myself read, make myself think into the past. If the future is failing us, or the assumption, at least, that the future is ours for the taking, perhaps I can be wiser, more robust, about the past. I read Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, set in the time of the terrible influenza plague after the First World War. I finally read Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, and think, that was worse, a siege so long, and hatred woven into it. Hatred and killing is worse. I have to find my reading among the unread books on my shelves, so I also finally read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and I’m touched by the old couple Axl and Beatrice and their tender love and the courage it takes to remember. The courageous necessity to remember. 

The lives of we two in our apartment aren’t, ultimately, so very different than before. We haven’t lost jobs, don’t have a house lively with children to teach and console. Nevertheless, we’re in it, we too, even though our skin, scrubbed clean more often than ever before, aches and finds it hard to believe together.

I remember Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s words and they orient me: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

And these, encountered in an interview at Paris Review with Marilynne Robinson: “One thing that comes with the [religious] tradition is the idea that you’re always being posed a question: what does God want from this situation? It creates a kind of detachment, but it’s a detachment that brings perception rather than the absence of perception.”

 

 

 

Better late than never

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Last week, out and about driving, I caught bits of the CBC radio program “Now or Never.” The hosts were celebrating “late bloomers,” people, that is, who embark on something under the auspices of “better late than never.” I thought of my recent foray into sketching and watercolour, a late blooming kind of interest, I suppose, but which in fact I was first attracted to in 1994. That summer, 26 years ago, I sketched — in light and timid pencil — some objects around me. A pot of geraniums, a clump of bananas, my children’s ears.

At that time it seemed an antidote to writer’s block I was experiencing, as well as a wonderful mechanism for close observation. I soon concluded that in spite of my desire to do it, I wasn’t a “natural” and would need to work hard to learn. And, shortly I was unblocked and writing.

But, about a year-and-a-half ago, the impulse rose again, from its dormancy, and I bought a sketchbook to try to set down on blank paper what I saw. The first entry was a tiny oak in our Toronto children’s front yard, which I’m just remembering that I wrote about here.

Last week, I looked through my (now 3) sketchbooks, recalling the occasion of each drawing or watercolour (which I also began to try, because there were some paints and brushes at the local thrift store). I rubbed my finger on the surfaces and noticed how the colour comes away. It was cheap paint. I could let myself feel ashamed of those amateur attempts, but I don’t, because of the enormous pleasure of the wet colour sliding into place, even if badly. A year from now I’ll view my current progress and see its failings too (though the paint has been upgraded). The point is, I’m happy when I have time to try. I’ve taken a couple of classes and there’s a plethora of online tutorials. Rarely does my picture turn out like the teacher’s, but this is the glorious thing about “better late than never”: who cares? I’m learning stuff I never had a clue about, in terms of colour and paint properties, learning enough to know that I’ve only begun and that the journey forward is bound to be absorbing. The outcome doesn’t really matter.

Neither do I have a particular focus or personal preference in style yet (what we writers call in writing our voice). One day it’s loose, as in the poppies below, the next it’s nostalgia as in the Green House I grew up in (yes, I know the kids playing croquet — my four brothers and I — should be higher into the picture; I worked from two separate photos). Another day, some hours doing a tulips-in-jar tutorial, or trying on my own to capture the simple beauty of pears.

 

DCD5116B-9F88-4975-B4FD-A1987206054EAnother day (last Sunday to be precise), I went to my first-ever Urban Sketchers meet-up in Vancouver and tried my hand at a look down Burrard Street from the Waterfront Plaza, though it was cold and said hand was soon too chilled to grab any more detail.

It’s hard to articulate the what and why of it all. Enough time and latent curiosity, perhaps, converging. And no idea if the doing of it will be sustained. I’ve been wondering too whether I’m trying to express my environment or control it. For now it’s some version of see and show and tell, and better late than never.

2019 in memorable books

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The everywhere-lists of December send me to my book journal, to review my reading experiences of the year and distill them into a favourites list of my own.

It’s impossible, though. Favourites isn’t the best word in any case; memorable–for a variety of reasons–might be better. So let me list a few, or maybe more than a few, of my memorable books of 2019. (If discussed in earlier posts I’ve linked rather than repeat myself.)

Because of the child

One of the granddaughters, 9, came down the stairs to greet me with her hands behind her back. She was hiding Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, which she wanted to give me, she said, because she’d enjoyed it and “because you love books.” Because of her, I read it immediately. It was a quick, touching read. Please don’t tell her, but she’s getting another Kate DiCamillo book for Christmas — The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, about a vain, disinterested rabbit who learns to love. The writing and illustrations are exquisite. (The best children’s books delight adults too.)

The Margaret Laurence project

This year I embarked on a project to re-read — or read, in the case of her early Africa work — Margaret Laurence, reflecting as I went. (A kind of devotional exercise, I suppose.) I’m not finished — other books keep getting in the way — but I got through This Side Jordan, The Tomorrow Tamer, The Prophet’s Camel Bell, and The Stone Angel, as well as Laurence’s letter exchanges with friend Adele Wiseman and publisher Jack McClelland. I realized again why she was such a force at a certain time in Canadian Literature, why she was formative for me as well. I hope to continue this project in 2020, and may say more about it then, but for now a bit of trivia: I discovered that Laurence wrote much of The Stone Angel in a small cottage at Point Roberts, which is just across the border from us, several kilometres away, where we sometimes walk by the water or fly kites with the grands. I don’t know why I like knowing that she worked near by, but I do.

Insights and Images

Mary Pipher’s Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age is a gentle, wise book about resilience in my current stage. Diana Butler Bass’s Grateful serves up insights on gratitude that go beyond personal practice (though that’s important) to public and communal gratitude — life not as quid pro quo but pro bono. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson is short and humorous and also appropriate for my current stage (and better than Marie Kondo’s philosophy, especially now that she’s gone rogue with online products to further clutter one’s life.) And I loved Robert Caro’s Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, with its stories and advice.

Giller shortlisted Lampedusa by Steven Price doesn’t have much of a plot (it’s about a man trying to finish the book that will be his legacy) but the writing is immersive. Price is a poet and it shows. For one example: “Far below the sea was a watery eggshell blue, the white sun millionfold and turning on the surface like blades.”

I read The White Bone (1998) by Barbara Gowdy this year, which I hadn’t read before, because it was chosen — by Margaret Atwood no less — as a Globe and Mail’s bookclub selection. Although I’m fond of elephants, I merely persevered with the novel. By now I shouldn’t doubt my own tastes when I don’t care for a book “everyone else” seems to adore, I wonder what’s wrong with me. But all this to say that in the midst of, and after, The White Bone, I fell into Penelope Lively’s Passing On (1989) with a kind of ardent relief. It’s about a brother sister finding their way post the death of their powerful, bossy mother. Lively is one of my favourite writers. I saw myself in: “Helen read a great deal… She read anything; she read in all directions. She read to learn and she read to experience… She became book dependent, for better or for worse.” And here too, a gorgeous image about light: “…the river gleaming below and the city reaching away in an infinite complex parade of shining white and pearly grey with light snapping from windows and cars.” Light snapping. Exactly.

People and Places I Know

Reading books by people I know, or about places I know, is doubly pleasurable, for the experience of the book itself and for the extra resonance the familiar voice or terrain provides. And, for what one learns about that known place or person. Into this category fell the fifteen 2018 books about Winnipeg I read as a juror for the Carol Shields Award early in the year and then later, Ariel Gordon’s Treed and Sally Ito’s memoir The Emperor’s Orphans. Finding Father: Stories from Mennonite Daughters was memorable for this reason too.

Intensity

Booker winner Milkman by Anna Burns is densely written, almost stream-of-consciousness, both psychologically penetrating and ominous throughout. Set during the Irish Conflict, a nameless young woman is being stalked. We feel the helplessness of that, as well as the paralysis of rumour and pressure in the community. She wants nothing more than to be left to herself, reading-while-walking, and not current books either! But, “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”

Five Wives by Joan Thomas also felt intense, because, as it was for Thomas, the story of Operation Auca (and the death of five missionary men in 1956) was a well-known and powerful one in my childhood and youth. Although the narrative had shifted and enlarged over the years –become less mythic — I wondered whether another narrative (this one fictionalizing the five missionary women involved, which struck me as both risky and brave) would free those women or trap them again. I’m still thinking about that question. Thomas compells us with great skill into all the various places and people of the Ecuador events, creating suspense even in a story whose outcome is known from the beginning. We enter the story from various positions and from within various characters; I think her use of LIFE photographer Cornell Capa as one point of view is brilliant.

And more

The daily goings-on in a used bookstore shouldn’t be interesting, should it? In the hands of Shaun Bythell and The Diary of a Bookseller it was. The villain, of course, is Amazon, which has definitely complicated the world of bookselling.

But this post is getting much much too long! So I’ll simply close by mentioning other memorable reads of 2019. Each mention may be considered a recommendation. Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es. Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis. Normal People by Sally Rooney. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. Another World by Pat Barker. Sweetland by Michael Crummey. River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Helen Prejean.

Were any of these memorable for you? What are your recommendations for me?