Knot

Recently, I had a friend take a close look at my left eye after noticing extra red near the lower lid. I had been out skiing in full sun that afternoon and was worried that I had somehow done damage– more than was already there. Initially, when I was around 10 years-old, I had burst a blood vessel in that eye. Here’s the tale of that:


 It was a summer night on the farm. Mom was sitting, smoking a cigarette in the enclosed porch that ran down a chunk of the side of the farmhouse. I was sitting with her. My father must have been away on business and my two siblings were away wherever. My grandmother, an ogre of solid and terrible mental brutality was staying with us as she did now and then. She was elderly and hunched, which doesn’t mean anything, except that it fit slim with her personality. She was never the sort you would look to for comfort had you skinned a knee, or given yourself a sliver during a noteworthy tree climb. This was in stark comparison to my other grandmother, my mom’s mom, who was kind, birdlike and delightful, so I knew nice was possible.  I don’t know what the hell my father was thinking, having the ogre stay with us. She wielded judgement and cruelty down on my mother like she had the right, which she didn’t, but my father didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t–I don’t know exactly. She was mightier than all. Yes, she was a lawyer, and a suffragette, but she was also a bully and an asshole. The woman had woven the limitless potential of her two brilliant, sensitive offspring into straight-jackets that imprisoned them in mere ideas of themselves–suffocating anything full and vibrant. She cheated the world on that one. I am told that even her husband, my grandfather, shrunk from her–walked a few steps behind in order to keep and hold the little bit of himself that she allowed. I wish I had met him. He died the year that I was born.


 It was quiet that night except for the frogs in the pond telling tales to each other. My grandmother was enthroned in the living room listening to the radio. There was a window into the living room at the west end of the porch, and light from it reached toward us. The wallpaper in that living room had repeated forest scenes on it, so you could think that my grandmother was a dark beast camped on a trail somewhere, collecting brittle bones, and throttling whimpers from unsuspecting prey, but the piano in the near corner of the room broke that image. It was mom who played. She could launch into some Gershwin, or Bach, and would often stop in the middle of cooking a meal, walk to the piano with her apron on, leaving whatever cut of beef she was busy destroying to roast or boil unmonitored toward its leathery end, in order to sate her desire for music. Mom wasn’t a great cook. She was a better pianist, and I was going to say that this wasn’t useful here, but really it is. I think her thriving, the creative arc that she had foolishly assumed that she could continue, was flattened when my grandmother got at her. The whole party seemed to stop–three great kids and a mother who all seemed set on having fun. 



This night, mom was clearly bushed and fed up with all of it. “I just don’t want to live anymore,” she said, to me, her young daughter who had no business fielding such a line. In those days, I was busy reciting TV commercials by heart, mimicking Don Adams from Get Smart–basically trying to be a kid. But I took the line, “I just don’t want to live anymore,” lofted without any reason for me to doubt. I stood and moved myself into the living room. I can’t remember if I walked, or ran–I just seemed to get myself there somehow. Then, up and out of me came a wash of rage and hatred more powerful than I felt my child-body frame could house. I was out of control, and hollering enough to bend the drawn trees on the wallpaper. I remember the look of fear on my grandmother’s face–that terrible, pruned face. I stopped when my nose started bleeding. I was crying so hard that I had difficulty seeing. The next morning, I noticed the knot of blood vessels in my left eye. 



Through the years, I would see the knot, remember that night, and then lean the memory up against other terrible events that happened through the years like records in a milk crate. Each one had a specific feeling to it, and each had been set in motion by the thoughtless, arrogant monster, even posthumously. I hadn’t thought of it much until the other day, flagged by the seeming ocular irritation. The beats of that specific night on the porch are still clear and brutal; those kinds of things live lush lives in memory, the body wrenched out of childish play with unfair emotional violence, and the experience stored and locked at a cellular level.



How idyllic and lovely would it have been to have had skiing in sunshine as the only scenario brought to mind by my concern.

Pulse

This was a day of contrast, simple as that: two different scenarios–both could have tipped toward scintillating, or both a slog, but I got one of each. What was the deciding factor in each scenario you ask? Service and the people serving the service. I will tell of it here:


Today was symphony day. I had tickets for me and my mother to see and hear the Toronto Symphony play the goodly notes of Shostikovitch’s 5th at Roy Thomson Hall. The performance, stellar and moving though it was, is not the focus here except I must give a shout-out to the whisper-impaired couple two rows behind me who felt that part of my ticket price included the thrill of listening to them talk out loud during the delicate, sacred beginning of the Shosti piece. (I turned and silently summoned a world of misfortune and uncontrolled flourishes of skin tags on them and their progeny. I may have spit fire.) Aside from all of that, the afternoon was wonderfully enjoyable thanks to the legions of Roy Thomson Hall floor staff. Each one we came upon was eager, kind, and witty. Even the young man tending bar was in a good mood and played along when I asked him which wine paired with Shostakovitch. Our seats were on the third level, in section “C,” which I took to mean Celestial, and the journey to them took some doing: we rode two escalators, and scaled several small flights of stairs–all challenging for my mother so we took our sweet time. During that journey–that measured ascent–each attendant we came upon made us feel glad we were there. We had conversations by saying words and then listening. One of us would say something, and then the other person would reply. Together, we explored an idea or sentiment! You’ve likely seen this in movies or possibly experienced it yourself. It’s called communication I think. It was like we were human to each other! 

"Sounds fun," says my inner writing prompter.

It was!

"Then what happened?"

The symphony was a matinee, so we were ready for dinner when all of the applause was over. The area restaurants were all full, so we drove out of the city and ended up at a casual dining, cottage-themed, Turtle Jack’s . 

"And?"
…

"Well?"

You know, I’m not that hard to please. Show me that you’ve got a pulse, and I’m on your side, but Turtle Jack’s was somewhat…

"What?" 
…

"WHAT?"

DISAPPOINTING! We were hungry, happy initially, but also tired. We walked in the door and nobody was there to greet us. NOBODY for longer than was acceptable unless the deal is that you go for the fridge and help yourself. There’s casual, and then there's this. 

"So? What did you do? Did you hurl the bowl of mints into the fire, shake your fist and spit bees as you stormed out in a huff-and-a-half? Did you?"

No. Someone lovely showed up, so I figured it was simply a hiccup and everything else would be fine. That’s what I thought. But it wasn’t fine. We sat at our table, figured out what we wanted, sat for a bit, changed our minds, went back to our original decisions, wondered about the menu font, if there really was a person named Turtle Jack and what kind of terribly deformity might he have to deserve such a title. I think it was the manager, or someone appearing managerial who came to our table and lit the little tea light. Ambiance! We had ambiance now, so I figured that THAT was the sign that things were going to swing on track. There was fire on our table so our presence had been acknowledged.

"Keep telling it!"

Okay, someone young and dressed in waiterly clothing came to our table. He might have been on mushrooms, or had just woke up from a bonkers good afternoon nap. Turtle Jack’s is cottage-themed, as I mentioned, so perhaps he had just come in from water skiing in some of this March snow melt. We seemed to confuse him. Or disappoint him. I’m not sure which. When he approached, I said, 

“Oh, there you are. We were wondering when you were going to show up!” 

 He could have apologized with gusto here, and easily endeared himself to us, but he didn't. He did manage to take our order, but it was if he didn’t quite know what we were. Again, if he had been on some kind of psychedelic enhancer and was reacting to my mother appearing to him as a deck chair, and me having a head that was a trolley with people boarding but never leaving, well, I would have understood.  He served us our drinks, and then vanished. We never saw him again. Perhaps he left to go put the water-skis away.  I hope he’s okay.

"Really?"

I've served tables before and I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but Jesus!

"Did your food come?"

Yes, we had a new person bring us our food. Okay, I figured that THIS had to be the turning point. I did. 

"And was it?" 
…

"Well?"

Okay the food wasn’t the worst I have ever had. THAT was at Shoeless Joe’s where I had a California wrap that tasted like the floor of a bus. Now to be fair, mom loved her seafood chowder, and the Greek salad was fine. I'll come clean here: I was ready to complain about the veggie burger, but in my effort to be a better person, which is why I had ordered that burger in the first place, I realize that if the service had been at all reasonable, I would have happily eaten it and not given it another thought. I would have been in a good mood! But, since I was losing my happy-and appreciated-customer feels, I convinced myself that the veggie burger was wanting, and held together with ennui and sadness–it had no pants of its own, depending completely on the condiments. That's not fair to the kitchen staff, but that was how it seemed–it happened. 


"What did you do, huh? What happened then? Did ya spike the plate of mediocrity on the floor, hurl the tea light at the bar and summon your inner demon? "

I was deflatedly unimpressed, if that’s a thing. Our second waiter brought the bill, and she seemed put out while my mother pulled cash out of her wallet. She stood back from the table as if mom was pulling bald kittens out of her purse as currency and was unsure of the kitten exchange rate. There was no polite discourse, no passing conversation about the weather, what we had been up to, or why the entry way was full of bees. I felt ignored. 


   I hate feeling ignored more than anything.


We stood, put our coats on and walked slowly toward the door, foolishly waiting for someone to thank us for enduring the disappointment, or fling even a timid, “Come again, won’t you?”

           There was nothing. Not a thing. 

The gang at Roy Thomson Hall would not have let this happen. 


                    God I miss those guys.

Thank You for Your Complicity



I am at the grocery store picking up fancy cheese and good crackers to take to a dinner, plus a new stick of deodorant so that I don’t get turfed out of said dinner. Only three items to pay for, so I head to the express lane. A sign on the near side of the belt says, 

            Sorry, please use another lane.

 I look around, wondering if perhaps I have arrived in the middle of a shift-change and the mighty-and-brave cashier charged with triumph in the speedy lane is on her way. I see no evidence of this possibility coming true, so I step into the closest line in a regular lane. The store is not that busy; the line I have chosen is not terribly long, and nobody in it has a full cart so I am not frothing-annoyed, but I do keep looking over at the express lane just in case. One or two people step into line behind me. A minute passes and one of the head cashiers comes toward us:

“Anyone paying cash or credit and not buying alcohol, I can take you over here,” she says. 

I assume that “over here,” refers to the express line since she’s standing right beside it so I accept the invitation and blissfully step toward her.

                          I am a fool. 

                              I am. 

  I think foolish thoughts, and I do foolish things. 


She leads me to the nearest self-checkout station–like you would a cow into a squeeze chute.

               I hate self-checkout stations. 

                          All of them.

                         Everywhere. 

                   With my all-of-me.

Why? First of all, the cold voice, smarmy and programmed, reeking of the psychological intimation, 

          Idiot human, how little you matter.

Second of all, and mostly, I want a human experience when I shop, and I get that here when I have a cashier. I know most of them and I like them. Plus, I often get into conversations with other people in line. The experience is pleasant. I also find it distasteful to think that I am bagging my own groceries, handling the payment on a machine that is reducing the data on all of my purchases to algorithms so that I may take my place as meaningless host; predictable, unremarkable–repeatedly offered purchase suggestions on the card loyalty site which I must always hurry to load because hell is missing out, right? And to think that I might eventually pay less if all of the cashiers were replaced with these robot check-out machines is laughable. I’m not that much of a fool.

Yet, here I am. I groan out loud, like a child,

 “I didn’t know you were going to bring me here.”  

She mistakes my displeasure for a blinkered inability to use the check-out machine. 

“Oh, it’s okay. I’ll do it for you,” she offers.

I sigh audibly and surrender my items onto the scanning platform–I am committed now. I take out my wallet. “Oh, it’s not that I can’t manage this on my own,” I explain. “I’m sure it’s easy.” I find my loyalty card, look at the screen and grok the whole process as, yes, straightforward, but I still hate it. The woman sees that I don’t need her technical support here and turns to leave.

“Wait. Don’t go,” I say with a tone of, you-got-me-into-this-you're-not-getting-away-so-easily. 

She stops and steps back beside me. “The thing is,” I explain, as the machine accepts me as a willing player in this mindless complicity of societal slaughter, “I’d rather have a human experience here.” I look at her while my data is being processed. “Tell me a joke,” I say.

 She laughs. “Oh, I don’t know any jokes. I can never remember any of the good ones,” she says. 

“I’m the same way,” I say. “’Drives me nuts!” She laughs again. “Being human is bonkers,” I add. 

With only three items to scan on the glass slab, my check-out process is quick. “You’re all done,” my kind task-minder announces. 

“I am, and thank you for adding humanness to this insanity,” I say, sincerely. I head towards the door. 

“Have a great evening,” she says. 

“You have a great evening too,” I say.

Yes, the machine took my data, but I did not let it take my soul.

Ahem

I peeled my back away from the wall and went to the winter woods. The cold cracked the trees – loud snaps like the ones that kid used to make in algebra by cracking his knuckles. It was as if he had fire-crackers for hands.

Here in an opening, the snow-devils twirled just out of reach, leaving circular kisses on the perfect, curvy skin of new snow. Wind peeled sheers off the abandoned long shed roof, all under a glorious sun. A voice somewhere in my head said, 

        "You might not need to try so hard." 

I unclenched my jaw and expanded my rib cage with a few breaths. The best advice. 

I walked on, enamoured with this day. Full, until I noticed the coffee spattered down the front of my jacket creating some unsettling Rorschach pattern in Dark Roast, leaked on the sly through the gap of my poorly threaded travel cup lid. I cursed, quietly though.

I Too Have Watched a Spider

For the past few months, I have been meditating in an effort to learn how to undo banish the sea-monkeys of fear and anxiety growing in my gut. I am happy to say that I can do it now. In the space of a moment, I can refocus my energy and go from what would likely develop into one fucker of a belly tumour left unchecked, to a feeling of ease and expansiveness in my chest. But the feeling is not locked in yet–I am not a yogi, and so have found it necessary to be careful how I expose my senses. The safest place for me is among the sentences of my favourite authors, Mary Oliver being one of them. Oliver, 83, died on January 17th. I dove deep into the pages of her work upon learning that she had flown, and with this rather vulnerable heart chakra of mine, delighted in my love of her.



First of all, I admire the courage of anyone to write.  To compose and publish despite, or perhaps without any consideration of the judgment, or imagined eye roll of a reader is a strength mightier than Hercules. I can’t tell you how many essays I have deleted, succumbing utterly to feared opinion, and withdrawing under my desk with a bottle of merlot and a stack of Premium Plus. Did Oliver ever do that? I doubt it. Not with a twist top, at least. So, I admire her as a person.



Secondly, we might have gotten along nicely. I share her love of the fresh world. I grew up thankfully able to walk out my door and disappear for hours into fields, and forests that I came to know exactly. There were swamps, springs, aggregate hills, rich, dark-dirted crop land, grazing fields for beasts, coniferous and deciduous trees, a pond, streams, winter, summer, all my own whenever I wanted it. Now, my address has changed to my own private hell–a second story apartment, up, away from the ground. Its saving grace is that my neighbours are kind, and the space is quiet for working. Also, there are trails and forests minutes away that I scramble to every day that I can–long, multi-hour efforts navigating in the lush green growth, or the frozen, snow-covered scenery, sung to by the cold cracking of the trees. Yes, I have a favourite tree. Am I a lunatic? Stand in line, sister!  



We both built, Oliver and I; she built a small, simple house with her own hands. I built a stone wall, a bunch of benches, and a swinging seat that I’m really not sure that anyone noticed. Oliver seemed to have confidence right from the beginning. Me? Not even close, plus I have smoothie on my shirt as I write this. 



I was reading Jung, when I heard that Oliver died (I feel odd referring to her as ‘Oliver’) and re-binge-watching The Good Place during breaks, embroiled in another manic attempt to find a way to philosophically grok all of this. Yes, I had bits of myth, individuation, dreams, and symbols in my teeth, and remember, I was also continually having to stop, focus, and get rid of those fucking sea-monkeys whenever my mind wandered to anything with that political stink on it. I marched to my bookshelf, took down all of her work that I had, and tucked in.  The pressure-treated, lock-step world went away. My desire to achieve, to make good, eased, and I fell into a summer day at a pond. I am sad that she’s gone. I am envious of her life and if I could simply emulate her courage from now on, I would be happy–happier. I’m not much good at hollering, and am not near smart enough on my feet to lead warriors in to battle against these most recent despicable world leaders–


                “But I can write, damn it.” 


There. I said it.



“We are each other’s destiny,” Mary Oliver wrote*. Perhaps the key is to get dirty–to get deep into the work of it, whatever that is for each of us, and do our heartfelt best with empathy and compassion(My words). Nothing else makes any sense–plus, there are sea-monkeys.


*Upstream, p.154 Penguin Press, 2016

Van Pelt's

The bar is from a deep city stereotype. The bartender is a cartoon character from a 1965 iconic holiday cartoon. He is drawn older, but the red on his t-shirt is still bright. The day is done. The week is done. There is one man at the bar. His head is forehead-down on the dark wood, right behind a rock glass that holds an ice cube, useless in that it gets little chance to cool the whiskey poured over it in regular intervals. The man bolts down the liquid, requests another, and the dance repeats with excruciating pauses; like the minimum moments spent before it is polite to leave a party but you wouldn’t want people to think that you were rude, or in this case, struggling. The man straddles his barstool like he might excel at sitting a horse, but his shoes–one untied–betray a man of business, or some discipline carried out under a roof, near office supplies instead of under an open sky, or near any kind of hoofed beast. This is not to say that the man is meek, or diminutive. He is physically robust and healthy, but only physically. His shoulders, lean and defined from gym time, sit in symmetry as points of two triangles–his elbows, winged away from his ears, and then his hands, wrapped around the glass– make the other necessary points. Emotionally, he has no shape, and at this moment, no hope.



The bartender holds up a wine glass, examines the rim, and moves a linen rag in contest with the lipstick mark missed by the dishwasher. He wins. He hangs the glass upside down with the others in its rack. He turns and takes a drink of water from his own glass, set back underneath a small, blue cartoon blanket that hangs up on a hook between the great, long mirror, the shelves of different liquor bottles, and the coffee machine. 



The man raises his head from the surface of the bar. He finds the bartender with his eyes, briefly examines his own glass with the lone, melting ice cube, then pushes himself up so that his spine is straight. He wavers slightly, then steadies himself with one foot on the ground and both hands clawed onto the edge of the bar as if he was a lobster. He stares at the bartender. He squints and then gasps. His jaw drops. He wipes spittle off of his hung-open lower lip, then opens both arms as he can hardly believe whom he is seeing. 


 “You. I…say it,” he says. “Could ya say it? Not the whole thing. I don’ need it all. Jus’ start it off. Start it off with those two words. Jus’ the two, an’ then I’ll go.” He closes his eyes, and bows his head, hanging it off of his shoulders again. He folds his arms and rests them on the bar in front of him. “Plze.”


The bartender sets his glass down, turns, and walks over to stand in front of his real-life patron. It is dead-late in the night. There is no noise. Nobody else around. He wipes some water off of the bar. He shakes his head, clears his throat, and says, in that voice,


                         “Lights please?”


The man stands straight and looks at the bartender. The man is weeping, but there is a glorious smile on his face. He slams money down on the bar, tucks in his shirt, fixes his hair, then makes his way to the door. He steps out onto the street, but then turns and leans back into the bar. “Ligh’s plze. Ligh’s plze. Beautiful.” He waves to the bartender, and then leaves, muttering to himself, “Beautiful. Jus’ beautiful."

The Pizazz Dimension

November 15th, and I am sitting on the cozy, safe side of the window of a downtown café, browsing the humanity navigating the crosswalk while I wait for 12pm to shiver closer to 1pm; I am early for an appointment. I’m usually early–I feel that somewhere inside my matrix is an overactive promptness gene–but to arrive a whole hour early, and at the middle hour of this November day that is absolutely, smack in the middle of the last day of October, and the first day of December, is curious. November itself exists only to separate its neighbouring months. If your birthday is in November, I would petition and have it moved to something more gentle, although, if you are around other Novemberites, I suppose this would bring you together as a group so, it’s your choice. The rest of us, in the remaining eleven months, are pulling for you. November is hard.



The landscape showed bleak along the way here. Drivers behaving, distracting their souls from the bleak with the neon glow from their dashboards. Once I parked my van, my bladder and I began a race to see who could remain composed the longest. I swooped into a café and walk-cantered to the bathroom. My bladder laughed out loud at the security keypad on the door, ready and eager to accept the pass code that I did not have. I cursed quietly, sidestepped to the counter, and asked for the number. It was hollered out at me, loud enough so the whole café knew what I was up to, but at least I was back-in-the-game. I punched the code into the judging keyboard, and the green light flashed, acknowledging my worthiness, my acceptance, and to my bladder, that I was the victor for another day. Fine. 


I strolled out, no longer under duress, and ordered a tea and a small sandwich to tide me over. I received what resembled, rather than a sandwich, more a steamed slab of linoleum with a yellow crayon melted on top between a pair of small kneepads. The heating process resulted in the guts of the sandwich sliding almost completely out from between the knee pads–the presentation similar to something you might find at the bottom of a child’s locker at the end of the school year–and yet, I paid money for it.


Fine. It’s all fine. Here I am.


I sit and watch the people through the window as if I am audience to a play. Most of the throng at this intersection are well-shod, zipped and tied into their new winter coats, and sporting smiles full of well-tended, vigorously flossed teeth. Only a few appear intimate with hard times. They pass, and I choke down my travesty of a sandwich. At least I am getting my quota of salt. Yes, it’s fine. 


There is nothing remarkable here, on this day, until I see her. She, a person, materializes out of some alternate reality, another dimension–the pizazz dimension. She is elderly, but maneuvers the length of this crosswalk as if it is a Paris cat walk and she is a pro. In all of this grey, she has commandeered the pink–all of it, as if she is charged with marking this day, the 15th of this terrible month, with as much pomp as she can muster to buoy our fragile, human spirits. Her hat, a knitted toque the colour of raspberry gelato, sits puffed on top of her head as if there might be another toque underneath it, or perhaps a snoozing kitten, or a pile of glitter. She has excellent posture, so the kitten theory is not completely bonkers. I could lie here and make up what she was wearing on her feet–I’m sure whatever boots or shoes she was wearing were sublime, but I was completely captivated by her jacket. You would have been too.



That jacket. It was puffy. Its puffy was puffy. It looked like a great big, pink cartoon grenade with arms. The sight of this jacket would have given the Michelin Man a hard-on. It was twice the size of most jackets, and judging from the size of the woman’s head, and her height, I’m guessing that the jacket was close to three times the size of her. There was a class about her though. She was wearing sunglasses, though the day did not call for them. Perhaps it was the sunglasses; high-fashion frames positioned on her nose just-so, quashing any possibility that she would be considered clownish. Or it could have been the red lipstick. Both perhaps. No gloves, or hands to be seen. No sir. This woman would likely have her gear carried for her. Or was it all hidden inside, in a series of pockets, or drawers even? 



The woman floated up onto the sidewalk and exited stage left–the show was over. As of this moment, the month tipped toward December, fêted, at least somewhat if you were lucky enough to witness. I took my tea and crossed the crosswalk, trying to walk like the pink oracle, but instead, settled into my usual sharecropper mode. Still early, but no longer embarrassingly so. All fine.