Drive in

Cars were honking at us when I dropped Jacob off in front of the Pizza Pizza today for school. Hurry, I said, there's cars honking at us. A paper was falling out of the car and Jacob grabbed it and put it back in and closed the door. Traffic was bad and I was anxious until I got on the 401. Then I was calm. Even though I was running a few minutes late I wasn't driving in the fast lane. Calm.

The sky was dull grey. The road was dull grey. All at once the street lights running along the highway turned off and it was even more grey.

Winter boots

I was shopping for winter boots again. I went into Sears because I have a Sears’ card. Their boots were terrible. They looked like they were boots from the Sears’ catalogue forty years ago. Every time I go in the Sears’ store with my Sears’ card I get the impression Sears’ targeted demographic is elderly ladies nostalgic for the days of catalogue shopping.

Then I went into a regular shoe store and asked to try on some boots in size eleven. The lady helping me was very nice I thought. She had at least four different shoe shoppers asking her to bring them shoes. She wasn’t even grouchy about it. She doubted she had an eleven. Sometimes I fit a ten, depending on the make, so I asked her to see if there was a ten. When she came back from looking she was very sorry the biggest size they had was a nine.

I saw other shoe buyers entering the store. With their big winter coats and slow shuffling manner due to the small amount of space in the shoe store made smaller by the large amount of shoe shoppers not to mention the aforementioned cumbersome coats worn by all, they reminded me of moles or at least some dim-sighted winter rodent working its way to its borough. Looking at them I could tell they were all going to be fine. Their inner animal compasses had led them true; they would all be able to fit into size nine or less.

Avoidence strategies

Larry put some visitor tracking software on my dashboard. I had a visitor from California who googled “while babysitting i did a sexy dance for me brother-in-law.” Sadly, the new software advised that the visitor from California stayed less than ten seconds.

I was going to go to the Y this morning after dropping off Jacob at school but came home and snuggled up in bed with sleeping-in Larry. I fell asleep again too but felt cold the entire time. Nobody likes that feeling.

I have to get back to my novel revision. I’m feeling nervous about it.

I bought new bowls at Ikea and one got broken already. It wasn’t me. I got mad when it happened.

We have a new fridge that sticks out further than the old fridge making it hard to use the microwave in the cupboard above the fridge.

It snowed the night before last.

The astrology website I visit most has a new format because the code for the old format died. Some of the contributors are writing posts about the change sounding very depressed about it.

I better get back to work.

Ella's graveside

Larry’s uncle Ella died. We got in Larry's brother Mike’s car after the service to head over to the cemetery. We complimented him on his car. I thought he would have had a more relaxed driving style. When we got there Larry's mom Jenny gave me some gloves she had bought for me. They were in the trunk of Mike's car. She was worried they wouldn’t be big enough. She’d even been talking to her friends about whether they’d fit. But they fit. I said for a person my size I don’t have big hands. And she agreed. Which I’ve told her before - but she still acts surprised and almost titillated about it. Actually they fit tight. But there was no way I was going to tell her that.

There was a newly filled in grave beside Ella’s and on the other side a big dirt pile which would be filling in Ella’s grave. It was muddy. Shifra, Ella’s wife, had a Pilipino health care aid holding onto her right side and a daughter-in law holding on to her left. They were also holding umbrellas which weren’t really necessary anymore. It was barely drizzling. A small girl, in bright coloured clothes wandered smiling and cooing around the hole to the grave too. Her mother had hair curled close to her head but hanging down like a variation on a flapper style and was continually squatting down to be at her level and putting her big pretty grown up smiling face in her daughter’s.

I was looking the other way when Shifra slipped and was practically lying flat on her back on the mud of the filled in grave beside Ella’s. Larry said she almost hit her head on the gravestone but made a twisting move and saved herself at the last moment. The daughter-in-law was pulling Shifra back up by the arm like Shifra was a pop up punching bag clown and I was standing right behind them and grabbing the umbrella away from the health care aid so she could use two hands and holding Shifra up from behind saying, gentle, gentle, gentle.

Best Canadian Poetry

I went.

I went to the celebration of the Best Canadian Poetry 2008. I stood in the back behind the coat rack. I didn’t want to go over and stand beside the bar because it looked too low. Gauging the height of the people leaning against it I determined they were all incredibly short. Another voice in my head was telling me there’s no way the bar and all the people standing at it could be that short. That standing by the bar would not equal me - in an attempt to lean against it - slumping heavily forward, my shoulders and back forming a negative attention drawing exaggerated question mark. It was telling me; here I was going at it again, with my literal delusions of grandeur. And I was listening to it. I was considering the possibility of it. But I still preferred it where I was despite the conceivable refutability of my own logic.

Eventually poets were reading and more people were coming in and it almost looked normal, I was thinking, me standing – not exactly behind – but behind and beside the coat rack. Anyway, I could see everything perfectly well. I could hear it too.

Before that though, before the comfort of feeling it was possible I was blending in, the publisher, Halli Villegas sent a very warm smile in my direction. When she was smiling at me I wasn’t sure who she was but then what she was wearing - a gorgeous red suit jacket and skirt - plus where she was situated – hovering over the books on sale- plus my remembering a picture of her I saw visiting her company’s - Tightrope Books - blog all came together like specially encrypted electronic surveillance data in a Mission Impossible movie. But I didn’t smile back because of all that. I smiled back because what her smile was saying to me was that even though she could see the awkwardness of how I was feeling she could also tell I was secretly like a cat who doesn’t mind, when necessary, holding the position of uncomfortable social dynamics even if I didn’t know it yet myself.

Clock tamborine

Larry’s brother Mike is too sexy for his body. He’s in his mom’s kitchen in front of me. I’m washing something in the sink and he’s looking at me and doing these dance moves with his mom’s clock he took down off the wall to change the time only the nail that hangs up the clock got stuck inside and its making a rattling sound so the clock is his tambourine and he’s banging it on his hip.

He has nice moves. He’s turning sixty this year and his wife is arranging the party and we’re going to be invited and his moves are way nicer than sixty. They’re nicer than a colostomy bag in his pocket he’s always had since I’ve known him.

He can never buy pants without big pockets for his baggie. Just like his mom never buys short sleeves because of her missing arm.

You can know everything about your brother-in-law and they can know everything about you. It’s the same family. It practically could be them you’re married to. He’s not acting seductive. I don’t think. But his seductive side shows. It’s there to see.

Even when I know that when his wife hit menopause she kept being nice, she kept being practical. She didn’t change. But those qualities then somehow began to add up to leaving him to his own devices which maybe haven’t turned out to be all that much after all.

Waiting for the art walk

Jacob didn’t finish his French homework so I let him stay home and finish it and took him in late to school. I wanted to get him to school on time because I always take him late on Friday. Because I don’t go into my day job on Fridays. Oh well. I let Jacob pick up a coffee for his teacher. His teacher likes it when the kids bring him coffee. But Jacob got him a latte. “A latte!” I exclaimed.

Larry and I are going on an art walk. It’s really nice out. There won’t be another nice day like this for another half a year probably. I’m waiting for him. I’m writing this on my computer waiting for him. What is taking Larry so long I wonder.

I went to my “the challenge of anger” class for women at the BJCC last night. I liked it. I had a headache that had been coming on all day. When I got home Larry asked me questions of what it was like. It seemed like I wasn’t telling him as much as he wanted to hear. We watched a show on TV. I got in the bath and went to bed with my headache. Now it’s gone. But my back really hurts. There’s two variables that may be why my back is hurting. Doing yoga again in the mornings - maybe I pulled something. I have a new desk cubicle at work - maybe I’m sitting different.

Larry told me he didn’t get to bed until two. Then when I get home from dropping Jake at school he thinks I’m being standoffish when I’m stretching my sore back when he’s coming over for a hug and I tell him his assessment is incorrect and he says nothing.

I picked up some pamphlets at my “challenge of anger” class. This one was showing how when you don’t express your feelings, often, it comes out as anger later.

This one woman in the class said she understands, theoretically in her head, that’s she’s angry. But she can’t feel it. This other woman said she hasn’t felt angry for a long time but now she does and she didn’t expect it and the way she acts when she’s angry reminds her of when she was a teenager. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

The class leader said because women learn to keep their anger in check, they’re not good at it. She said it’s like learning to drive a car, you need to practice. But when she said “it’s like learning to drive a car,” the woman who couldn’t feel her anger said, oh yeah, I remember that, and described how she was berated for being stupid and every other thing all the way through learning to drive a car by her ex-husband.

I laughed and reached over and touched her lightly on her arm.

Adorability and disability

I hate my last blog. I don’t mind the story of the ink. It’s just I’m so cloyingly adorable in places. It’s the repeated conditional verb tense.

Sometimes, in my head, I’m all down on Larry when I think he’s being too adorable.

Blech – adorability. But I don’t want to be all bitter either.

I found out through my day job this friend I knew in high school - who I met again a while back at a party at another friend’s place and was being all obsessive about wanting to change her name back to her maiden name which I have always regretted being snide about especially when I found out that subsequently her husband who was in my grade 12 creative writing class and was cute in a way that was brash and innocent at the same time, committed suicide – is on the Canada Pension disability pension.

So her two kids are getting both orphans’ benefits and dependent of a disabled contributor benefits. Seeing her getting that pension when before she was pushing frenetically, the way she always did, to get in as a high school French teacher makes me think she must not have recovered from what he did. But I never knew her. Each time I knew her she was a friend of a friend.

She was nervous and fragile in high school anyway. You’d come back from summer vacation and suddenly she’d have switched into a new identity. One of her older brothers played saxophone in different jazz bands. He had a reputation of extreme attractiveness to women. Which was way too far away from me for me to see. He had brown curly hair.

She is going by her maiden name again.

Larry's ink

Larry was tired and he spilled his ink on the living room floor. It’s okay. He cleaned it up. We have a hard wood floor that needs to be refinished anyway. Then he was in bed already and I was in the bathroom and his ink bottle had gotten in there. I don’t know how. It doesn’t make sense his ink bottle being in there. The living room is different because Larry is always listening to movies while he’s working in there and his art supplies are spread all around.

The ink bottle in the bathroom was on its side and spilling. Don’t worry, I said, I’m just going to put some tissue on it and you can clean it up in the morning. The good thing is our bathroom counter is black already, the colour of Larry’s ink. So if we had some alien house inspectors come in during the night they wouldn’t even be able to tell. Then Larry almost didn’t clean it up in the morning because he had forgotten about it and couldn’t tell it was there.

There’s always scrap pieces of paper around with little ink painted squiggle lines painted on them. That’s proof of Larry getting the tip of his brush smooth just the way he likes it. It’s no good painting with ink when there’s blobby bits on your brush. Your work would end up with blobs in it.

Recently he spilled ink on the remote that plays the movies. Now we can’t rewind our movies back, like ten seconds to hear someone say something over again we missed the first time. Larry tried to empty the ink out of the remote, to dry it out completely, but it still wouldn’t work after he did that. We didn’t get a new one yet either because it would cost eighty dollars to get that kind of remote back again. Doesn’t that seem awfully expensive? What we do is use one of our other remotes to move us back to the start of the scene we’re in. That’s a big hassle though because we have to watch the whole scene over again just to hear one little word we missed.

Halloween

I boiled some eggs for breakfast. I used Larry’s “get the water boiling then put the eggs in for four and a half to five minutes” technique. It gets the eggs to the perfect softness. The problem I’m having is when I put the eggs in the boiling water gently with a big spoon to assist in the gentleness, one of the eggs always ends up cracking and spewing out its innards which froths up the water and reduces the amount of egg in the affected egg.

Larry’s watching this film called Babysitters while he draws which looks sexy about babysitters having sexual relationships with the husbands of couples they babysit for. I criticized it for being about relationships of younger women with older men. Larry has a problem because he can’t watch action or comedic or subtitled films when he’s drawing. They’re too visual. Because, ironically, he doesn’t actually watch the films that much, he listens to them. It wasn’t fair of me to criticize it just because of the older man, younger woman thing. But I did anyway. Then I joined him and watched it for a bit and it wasn’t bad.

Eli came home extremely drunk in the middle of the night. He knocked on the side door, waking us up then collapsed on the stairs that lead up to the main floor. He was crying. He was talking incomprehensibly about being treated wrongly. About being beaten on. I don’t think it was that bad. Larry was talking to him and even helping examine him and making sure.

Larry was helping him so much this week with emotional problems he has. Making sure he got to see his therapist. I don’t know why he had to go and get drunk. But I’m not completely ungenerous. I told Larry that maybe it’s just that the only way Eli used to know how to cope with his problematic feelings was by getting drunk. Now he’s doing better so maybe the getting drunk thing is just an old habit. Wasn’t that sweet of me to think that?

Eli had black mascara on because it was a Halloween party. A girl he liked had made him up. But we don’t know what happened to that girl from his story. There were these guys he shared a tab with and it was about eighty dollars and they took off. But he was the responsible one and stayed and didn’t run away. Also he was helping sort out a fight that had happened earlier. So if he was the responsible one and not running away why should he have to pay the full tab? That wasn’t fair. He just wanted to pay his part. And it wasn’t right either that he was picked up by security in the first place. He was the one helping out and being responsible. What was the most upsetting thing – the bad treatment - I think was they wouldn’t let him go.

Eli couldn’t answer Larry how he got home. Maybe because in his head, he was still out there. He could answer. But his answer kept starting at when he was helping out with the fight and then winding somewhere other than answering Larry’s question.

He was going to take responsibility for the $4,000 lambskin jacket that he didn’t come home with that Bubbie had got with him a little while ago in the morning. Eli looked down at his arms which were only partly covered with a short sleeved shirt on and brought up losing it. But I don’t think they really paid $4,000 for it. There’s no way Bubbie would get Eli a $4,000 lambskin jacket unless it cost a lot less than that.

Includes incomprehensible astrological terminology

Larry stayed up late talking to Eli. Then he got up with me to go into work with me so he could have the car so he could take Eli to his therapy. He was doing a lot for Eli and for me too.

Larry asked me to drive because he was tired. Then he didn’t like the way I was driving. I was mad at him. I was in a bad mood when I got into work because he was angry at me too. I was also feeling groggy and spaced out. Usually I eat some breakfast at my desk but I forgot to. Then I remembered and ate some. Eventually I told some of my female co-workers about Larry criticizing my driving and they all said their husbands did the same thing. One of them waved her hand in the air, like in dismissal of the whole male act of criticizing female driving.

I felt a little better.

Since Jacob’s away I wanted to meet Larry downtown for a coffee before his etching class. But Larry said he wanted to take a nap before he went out. I called him back a little while later. He wasn’t napping. He talked to me in a growly mad bear voice but I was able to convince him to come down and meet me. I told him it would be nice and I would smile.

There’s a new moon in Scorpio tonight. It’s right on my draconic Venus. And close to Larry’s natal Mars-Saturn conjunction. I was trying to get Larry to enact some astro-drama with me on this point. We were walking down the long wooden-floor hallway of the art building where he takes his etching class. He’s not as good at me at thinking astrologically and has to remind me to not be so inconsiderate and talk so fast. Plus the proximity to his imminent class was making it even more difficult for him to entertain my extreme astrology. He engaged enough to tell me I was crazy which actually fits the symbolism so I complimented him for it.

I walked along Queen Street to get to the University subway line to go home. There were a lot of shoe stores along the way. I was looking in their windows at the winter boot styles. Fall Out Boy was playing outside at City TV. I stopped and listened for a couple of songs. The performance was for the TV audience. They played a song then left the stage for five minutes or so and then came back to play another song. How they related to us - the background audience of their TV performance - reminded me of being a kid and performing to a mirror that I could be completely fake to but that still saw only the amazingest parts of me.

Then I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan and of how his first and last name begin with the same letter, the letter “m,” and of how even though “m” starts the very fitting - for him - words, “media” and “message” and “meaning” and “matter,” you would still think someone like him would have had a name starting with cooler and more cerebral letters like “s” or “e” or possibly “t.”

Mysterious

The first time I went to the women’s toilet at Starbuck’s today I found many droplets of pee spray all over the back part of the seat. It looked like whoever had done it had had a very full bladder. It looked like it couldn’t, for example, be a situation of someone deciding to just try one more time on their way out, in case there’s something there; one of those “planning for the future”, preventative pees. Such a pee would have left far less prolific results.

I was cleaning it up with a few different pieces of toilet paper for my turn thinking it looked like it had been fun for the person who did it, spraying the seat like that. In a way it made me happy for them. Then I was thinking the person who had done it might have been someone who is afraid to sit on toilet seats and maybe the whole experience of standing or half-squatting over the toilet may not have been fun for them at all. Maybe in the tortured process of part-squatting the person got a strain in their thigh or their calf muscle and their entire leg was shaking in a spasm as they were making their pee.

The next time I wanted to the bathroom to pee I had to wait a while. Evidently a lot of other people had to go too. Which does make sense for a coffee shop. This time, when it finally got to my turn the toilet seat was up. It wasn’t down in the sitting position. It was up.

I have to say I find what goes on in the women’s toilet at the Starbucks so mysterious.

Automatic reboot

Larry made us some Smoothies for breakfast. Now I’m cold. Smoothies don’t suit this time of year. That is what I have to say about Smoothies. Brrrr.

I finally started working on some revision work for my novel. It’s been hard to get at because I just can’t seem to convince myself that the revisions I have in mind could possibly be enough. I just can’t seem to let go of the idea that what everyone in the world wants from me including, naturally, the interested editor at Coach House, is ruinous killing compromises of the soul. I think that surely it can’t be until I’m feeling that way that the revisions I’m doing could be enough.

Anyway I got through it enough, started working on it, was feeling good, but.

But my computer sometimes likes to reboot itself in the middle of the night. And I didn’t save it. Sometimes it can go for weeks and not reboot. Sometimes it likes to do it a couple of days in a row. I didn’t save it because I hadn’t quite decided what to save it under, what kind of file it should go in. I was enjoying waiting on that decision coming to me. I also didn’t realize that it would be lost if my computer decided to reboot itself in the middle of the night.

My old computer would never do that. Sure it might crash on occasion. My new computer acts like an inconsiderate bully sometimes. It’s so imperious. It’s very rude. It thinks it knows everything.

When I found out my work was gone and had looked everywhere on the computer I thought it could be I asked Larry if he could help me find it. He explained to me It was too late and he couldn’t help me. I should have saved it.

I’m sure it’s going to be okay. It’s not like I wrote that much. It just would have been nicer if it didn’t happen. I would feel a lot better now about it if it didn’t happen.

Leaders and followers

I just updated the template of my blog. I didn’t change how it looked actually. But people following my blog can now add their name to my follower’s list. Since sheep are such good followers I might get some sheep signing up too.

Like who wants to admit to being a follower?

Eli, my stepson, went to leadership training camp this summer with the reserves. He was in this class of like a hundred young men all training to be leaders. Now when we’re out, the family, in the car, say, and a situation comes up that requires some hot and fast decision making Eli starts telling all of us what to do. He’s twenty-five. He’s excitable. What does he know?

Sometimes in these situations he reminds us of the power he now possesses of leadership trying to convince us his inexperienced twenty-five year old ass is the one we should be following.

Also, this summer, Larry coached Jacob’s baseball team. He had this co-coach who ran a lucrative printing business but who knew squat about baseball. He looked like Jeff Bridges but with darker hair and eyes which when I told him he already knew about. But whenever Larry would be coaching the kids the co-coach would be talking in this loud parallel voice at the same time sometimes saying similar things and sometimes saying completely opposite things that made no sense if you knew baseball.

I don’t think he ever asked Larry’s opinion or advice. He just always acted like he knew everything already. He was a very good recycler though. He knew which products went in which recycling receptacles at the ball parks. I have to concede that.

It made me wonder how he ran his business because isn’t one of the key attributes of being a business manager recognizing who is an authority on what and then using that to your advantage. And then aren’t you supposed to get rich from it and then be secretly laughing under your breath that the smart people whose knowledge you’re managing to your advantage don’t get to enjoy as many vacations as you or to renovate their kitchen with stainless steel chrome appliances as often?

When Eli returned from leadership training camp he looked like he’d had the crap kicked out of him. Which may very well have been the case. If too many chefs spoil the stew, wouldn’t too many military leadership candidates ruin their shoes? (bit of a rhyme there)

By the final and deciding game of the first round of the playoffs the tension between the two co-coaches came to a head. It was the third out of five innings. The team was down four runs. The Jeff Bridges look alike insisted on a pitching change that would put his son, who had struggled all season to throw strikes, on the mound. Larry questioned his autocratic approach. Jeff Bridge’s temper refused to answer. Larry, in an attempt to manage his piqued temper, removed himself from the game collapsing on a folding chair on the sidelines between Jeff Bridge’s wife and myself.

The chair was actually one of theirs’ and was broken. The back support part wasn’t attached properly so Larry’s back was falling out of the back of the chair and he was turning around to check it out when Jeff Bridge’s wife began reprimanding him for not being a team player and not knowing how to make compromises. I was so sure when she was talking to Larry like that that it must be the same way she talked to her husband all the time.

I thought there must be some really weird kind of déjà vu going on for her with Larry being in the position she must usually find herself in with her husband and her –by virtue of the fact she was lecturing Larry for it - being in the position her husband must usually be in, but her saying the words to Larry that she would usually say from her regular position to her husband.

Sudafed high

Larry’s sick with a cold. We were invited to Sukkot dinner at Leon’s for the second year. Leon was an accountant. Several years ago Larry’s mother got him to help us with a loan. But he doesn’t do that anymore. Now he’s a partner in a door business. Except he still does some accounting work for Jenny, Larry’s mother. Also Larry played hockey at a pick up hockey game Leon was running on Sunday nights for a while. Then Larry made waves by standing up to some of the bad actors at Leon’s game.

Larry took a Sudafed. Even though we got there late we were still sitting on a cushy sofa waiting for the last couple to show up. Leon’s wife, Denise was upstairs getting dressed or something still. It was the same couple who was there last year. The husband was a real estate agent and an expert on the Beatles. The wife was Australian. The ten year old daughter had hair so blonde it was practically white. The twelve year old son was going to be a lawyer one day. He was game and they’d all been working on that eventuality together pretty much since he was born.

Larry made jokes to Leon about telling his mother beforehand he was sick and uncertain he should attend the function and her insistent response that he still had several hours to make himself better so get to work already.

Jenny looked regal. She had her hair done up and her eyebrows shaped up too. She sat in an upright position on the sofa in a cream dress with a stylish fifties look to it, as we listened to Denise’s nephew describe in a sharp yet commanding voice a lot of details about the rural high school he teaches at. He was very short and had big blue eyes.

Leon's is a house with mezuzahs, which are religious parchments put inside sometimes fancy containers, at probably every doorway not just entering, as prescribed by Jewish law, but inside the house too. I could see the one at the entrance of the room we were in and got the impression from my vantage point at its far end that it had pink flowers on it.

I thought about getting a word in edgewise but as hard as I thought it didn't come to me what that word would be. The sofa I was sitting and listening on was so soft I was afraid I might sink into its cushioned layers like a firefly into a molten marshmallow.

Yom Kippur blog

For Yom Kippur the dishwasher stopped working. Very observant of it. It’s plugged up, apparently. Larry and I kept partly scooping out the water left in the bottom of it and then running the dishwasher over again in hopes of flushing it out.

Larry did more than that too. But I don’t want to talk about it.

The dishwasher kept not working. It would stop part way through its cycle; some internal sensors sensing too much water collected in its bottom, saving us the disaster of dishwasher flooding.

I cleaned out the foyer. I emptied the closet of hockey sticks, gym bags, tennis rackets, roller blades. I found this kid’s microscope Larry bought for Jacob when he was like four that didn’t work, that we never returned. I scrubbed the floor and the wall trimming with Pine sol.

Classically Jewish people go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. They dress up. They don’t wear leather. For some reason I can’t think of now it’s not religious to be wearing dead animal skins. The public phones are turned off at the synagogue. This is another example of observing the “don’t work” principle of Yom Kippur.

But really everyone observes Yom Kippur their own way. And they have cell phones.

I was reading some yoga magazines lately that were talking all about how in the yogic tradition it’s through service and work that you get in touch with your spiritual side. That’s the approach I was employing by cleaning up the foyer. Honestly. Besides when else would I allow myself to do such a thorough cleaning job without feeling guilty about it? I really do have other things to do that I usually consider much more important. Like manifesting a writing career.

My mother in law called part way through the day. She was sick. She’d never been sick in her life before on Yom Kippur she told me. The sickness came on her the night before, first as a chill, when she was at synagogue for Kol Nidre, when we weren’t there with her.

Larry was out when she called. He had to pick up his MasterCard that he accidently left behind when he was at an art fair he went to on Monday and was buying a subscription to the Canadian art magazine cmagazine. Leaving the card behind was working out for him though because it was giving him the opportunity to go back and talk some more to the nice woman he bought the subscription from who is nice and savvy about today’s Toronto art scene.

I kept trying to get him not to go because it didn’t fit in with my idea of how to approach Yom Kippur. For one thing it’s not practical driving downtown when you’re fasting. It expends unnecessary energy.

The day before, when Larry’s mom was calling Larry working at home then me during my break at work, trying to get us to go to synagogue with her for Kol Nidre, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Neither was it what Larry wanted to do. I wanted to do some cooking during the evening to get stuff ready for breaking the fast the next day even if technically I should have already done that before sunset.

Jewish New Year’s is all about the symbolism. How things go, the decisions you make, is you symbolically setting up how you want your year to go. Do you really want another year of your mother in law guilting and dominating your life because you keep letting her perceptions of how pathetic a Jew you are win the day?

When Larry got home and I told him about his mother being sick, he immediately felt guilty, that it was his actions of not going to Kol Nidre with her that had somehow caused his mother’s illness. Funny, I said to him, it’s the first thing I thought of too.

Sunday Starbucks

Jacob has a mole over top of his top lip. It’s on the right side. It’s a beauty mark is what I tell him. He’s always had it. He’s worried that it’s going to grow too big.

The last few weekends Larry and I go for a walk over to Starbucks, Jacob stays home and does some homework, we drink our Venti Soya Carmel or Pumpkin Spice Lattes, Larry draws people in the Starbucks, I read Larry interesting stories from the New York Times Magazine over the jazz music that Larry can’t hear entirely or can’t focus on completely, perhaps because he’s concentrating on drawing, then Jacob calls and says he’s done his homework and one of us convinces him to do some more and then he calls again and we get him to read to us some of what he’s done and then we let him ride his bike over to Starbucks and join us.

Jacob gets a cold hot chocolate or a regular one or asks for this other chocolate drink that is so sugary and decadent we usually say no. He gets a pastry. We get him to buy us another Venti Soy Latte of another flavour to share between us but this one decaffeinated.

Today Larry and I got the purple cushy chairs. They’re the only soft chairs at our Starbucks. Jacob’s mostly too old to sit on my lap or anything like that anymore. But today he asked to squeeze in beside my on my purple cushy chair. Funny, when he asked I realized I was wishing it too. We jostled a bit before we figured out a way to get him in. I put my right arm around his shoulders and neck and patted it on his chest.

Spirographs

All the ladies are wearing black skirts with floral patterns on them. It's been like that for the past two days. The one walking up the stairs in front of me today had an abstract motif. It was in purples and whites and the edges were hard not round like regular flowers. Its pattern was like the result of an especially odd wheel you picked out then drew from spirograph.

Something sweet got spilled on the government courtyard walk near where I eat my lunch. Numerous bees were walking around in circles licking it up with their bee appendages. Don't bees clumped together in a bunch seem cuddly? But you know better. You're hearing a buzzing sound even if you're too far away for the sound to actually be reaching your ears.

It's bright out still. September. But if I want to get up in the morning for a walk before work, it's too dark. Besides, it's better I should pay attention to the news for a change, isn't it? Jacob's friend's dad was in it. He was the guy who when the truck that crashed into the sleeping lady's bedroom of the condos by the 401 came down from his unit to find his neighbours in a state of shock.

I saw a monarch butterfly. I saw a yellow butterfly. One time when Larry and I were arguing and I was in the kitchen and he was in the living room I saw a black and white woodpecker with red on its crown in the lilac bush outside the window and I wanted to tell him but if I moved or called to him I would scare it away so I didn't even though we were arguing and I wanted to so much so there would be something nice and sweet between us. I kept looking at it, its beak nudging into the lilac branches and it kept staying. It didn't leave for a very long time; maybe a minute or two.

Weeding

I weeded the back garden yesterday. The good thing about weeding at this time of year is the weeds are weakening. They don’t grip the earth in the same kind of life or death way. Most of them come out pretty easy. It’s a good excuse for having not weeded earlier.

I think one of the reasons the weeds are feeling this way is because their heads are in full blossom. The force of their life is in their seed. But what I did was squeeze the weed heads between my fingers so the seed pods or fluffs couldn’t scatter all over and sink into the soil and seed new weeds. Ha ha, I thought, to the weeds, as I placed their seed in paper garden bags, I have outsmarted you.

My hair dresser told me I should wear my hair so this bang section sweeps across my face from the left side over to the right. Before I just pulled it straight back. It looks really nice. It looks sophisticated. Except it means the bang hair tends to fall into my face sometimes covering my right eye. This feels nice too, like I’m an unkempt street urchin who doesn’t miss a trick and with a smart mouth to go along.

Except when I’m gardening. Would the damn hair get off my face already? I have to keep brushing it back plus my hands are covered in dirt from gardening and the dirt is getting all in my hair and my face repeatedly.

To deal with that, I went and got this hair clip I bought like three months ago that’s been sitting in the bottom of my purse and now has something all sticky on it. I don’t know what it is. It has the consistency of tree sap only there’s no way that’s what it is. I certainly haven’t been near tree sap over the past few months. It's been a very long time since I've been out in the garden.

So after a while some of the hairs started falling out of the clip so I had to take the clip off in order to get them back in only I couldn’t because the sticky stuff on the clip was sticking to my hair and it hurt too much to take it off. I sat down under the red maple in a lawn chair and eased it out. It wasn’t that bad.

The wind was blowing through the leaves of the red maple and it was making rustling sounds. There were just a few leaves on the ground from its leaves beginning to fall. There was nothing beautiful or exciting about these leaves because the leaves of red maples don’t change colour in the fall.

I had to get something hard and skinny to dig in the cracks of the hair clip to get the sticky stuff out but couldn’t see anything useful. The tree rustled some more and I decided to try one of the stems of one of its leaves. I pulled one off the tree. It worked okay. I got some of the sticky stuff out. But the leaf stem was still too supple from being so recently alive. Then I looked down on the ground and there was an old thin hard twig that finished the job off perfectly.

I went to pick up Jacob from school then to get some wine. I was looking for this one particular South Australian wine Larry and I got last time but couldn’t see it. Jacob was pulling this special plastic basket that you put your wine in with wheels on it like the kind of rolling-on-wheels suitcases people pull behind them in airports. He kept rolling it around under my feet and complaining I wasn't asking for help when I was enjoying just looking on my own.

Then I went to ask for help and he said, finally. We sampled some wines from the Asass region in France which is near the German border and which used to keep switching back and forth between being part of France then part of Germany. Only Jacob was embarrassed I was getting him to sample the wine too because he’s only twelve and doesn’t like breaking rules. So I told him to have some crackers and cheese which were also part of what was being offered for sampling along with the wine.

The lady demonstrating the wine acted like there was something she knew that was maybe about us that she wasn’t telling. She was elderly. I tried not to look at her face too closely because if I did I would notice how deep her wrinkles were and she might see my noticing them in my eyes and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So she had the power. Which I think is what made her look like she had a secret she swallowed that was still stuck in her throat and that might jump out any second if she wasn’t careful.

Our new driveway

Workmen leave things behind. As far as I know the first crew that came out, the crew that dug up the driveway readying it for repaving didn’t leave anything. It was a while ago, at the beginning of the summer. Weeds grew in it, among the stones, while we waited for the city to fix the curb first.

First a guy came by with a drill device and legs to hold his truck study while the drill drilled to drill open the curb so the next group of city guys could drag away the old chunks of cement the next day. They’re the ones that left a pair of gloves on Helen and Oscar’s lawn, our next door neighbours. Helen is very critical of our ability to maintain our property to her standards so the moment we saw what they’d done, leave gloves on her lawn, we quickly removed them. These guys also left a bunch of boards covering the newly dug out section at our driveway’s entrance presumably so no one would fall down inside it, hurt themselves and sue the city for damages.

The city’s sidewalk pouring guys came next. After them the city crew to fill in the road pavement section. They removed the boards that were covering the hole that used to be there before it got paved again and left them in front of Helen and Oscar’s house.

Then the guys we hired to pave the driveway came and paved the driveway and they left behind a rake with black tar on its rake prongs. It’s leaning against the basketball stand.

Perhaps the city guys who did the road part paved after the guys we hired to pave the driveway. I can’t remember which was first.

No one’s come back to get the gloves. No one’s come back to get the rake. No one’s come back to take away the long boards and the short ones still sitting on the road in front of Helen and Oscar’s.

Larry and I are both getting worried about how the boards on the street in front of her house must be making Helen feel. Helen and Oscar are one of the original owners still living on the street. Their across the street neighbours, and ours, who have also lived on the street since the beginning told Larry about all the nice people on the street but Helen wasn’t included. They told Larry she was in an entirely different category. Oscar wasn’t included on the nice list either by virtue of his being with Helen.

Helen goes out everyday in a windbreaker or a winter coat or a coat in between those two, dressed two degrees more protectively than everyone else, always in sunglasses and a suitably protective hat, for a walk for her health. Usually around ten in the morning. When we first moved in she told us that things had been touch and go for her for a while. She had been seeing doctors. Strict adherence to a walking regimen was one of the measures that was going to keep her alive. Then she got used to who we were and the only words she had for us were criticism.

Critical lines

Larry and I stayed up super late watching the final episode of The Wire, Season 5. I felt guilty. Larry’s always talking about getting to sleep at a good time. And since he’s identified it as a problem he has, getting to sleep at a good time, then what I do is think that my new job as his most ideal and supportive spouse is to suddenly, automatically and devotedly, instantaneously be good at helping him with his problem and never have the same one myself.

McNulty went crazy in season 5. A homicide detective for the Baltimore police department, McNulty staged dead bodies he’d found, during the course of his work day to make it look like there was a serial killer was on the loose so that he could siphon monies allotted to the new fake serial killer investigation to an older actual drug and murder investigation for which funds had been cut.

Talking about it this morning, Larry still felt higher ups in the department should have showed more sympathy to McNulty’s situation. I didn’t really think so. I thought McNulty had crossed a critical line. Although if Larry had been all hard about it and said McNulty deserved everything he got, I probably would have been arguing for more leniency too.

Larry says some friends are just too much work. I know this could be me making Larry sound bad but, isn’t it true? Why work so super hard at maintaining friendships in which the supposed friend doesn’t really get or value you the way you need a friend to? What is the point of that? Isn’t that just politics, really? Which there’s nothing wrong with. Which has its value too. But shouldn’t you know the difference?

I’ve had this sample of perfume on my desk sitting under my monitor for a long time. For months. I just put some on. It is so stinky. I think I’m going to wash it off or at least try to wash it off. I hope it washes off. If it doesn’t wash off, I hope it partly washes off. It’s very strong. It smells like baby powder and burnt tire rubber with a touch of skunk thrown in.

I’m doing laundry for Jacob’s first day back to school tomorrow. There’s some kind of leak going on in the laundry room. The floor near the washing machine is wet. There’s beads of water coming up between the seams of the tiles of the recently replaced laundry room floor. It’s not a lot of water. It could be nothing. Jacob was messing around in the laundry tubs yesterday. Maybe it has to do with something he did then. I wish we still had the old wrecked floor down there. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about figuring out the solution to the leaking water issue so much.

Jacob is at a friend’s house. It’s really gorgeous out. I changed the calendars. It’s September.

Olympic update

I am so tired. I am tired of watching the Olympics. I’m also tired of being sick. I’ve been sick since we came back from NYC. First a fever then the ear ache, now the ringing ear with the vinegar feeling in the throat causing all the coughing which I try to keep light so it doesn’t hurt but sometimes it goes deeper and the coughs rips into the pain at the bottom of my throat that I can mostly ignore otherwise and then it rips into the pain in my ears.

The nice part of being sick is getting to hold onto my personal perspective better. I’m always so way out there in everyone else. I’m always lost. Out there.

I don’t want to get better. That’s bad. I know. But it’s a thought. Worth thinking. I bet it’s a thought that happens to a lot people who then can’t think of anything better and then can’t find their way back to better.

Larry and I cry at all the sobby Olympian stories. We check each other out for amount of tears to measure how much we have been moved. Sometimes I can’t even talk. That’s how moved I am. So I would get the gold medal between us of strongest emotional response. I liked the one about the taekwondo girl with the pretty eyes and long neck who Larry said looked like Angelina Jolie and her coach father also with a nicely shaped face and long neck and how close they were in their preparation and how when he was the coach, he was just the coach, not her father. And then later on they were out getting a coffee together - although maybe she was getting something else because should an athlete really be having a coffee? – and then he was just her father and they were so close and she was telling him everything.

I wish that was my father.

Although I’ll admit there was a small cynical part of me thinking there had to be something they weren’t talking about because could their relationship really be that good? But I don’t really like that cynical part. Sometimes it’s so mean spirited. Not only that, sometimes it’s completely totally stupidly wrong. So then, at least in those cases, I would really like to know, what is the point of having that cynical perspective?

The juice of the now

I should have been taking notes in NYC.

I started reading a book by Canadian writer Katherine Govier. Reading it is part of a self-education program mostly involving reading Canadian female novelists. I’m finding the particular novel I picked up, The Truth Teller, so tedious.

I loved David McFadden’s family oriented Trips around Lake Erie and Lake Huron but couldn’t relate to his later writer with film crew as rock star Trip around Lake Ontario. I gave the volume of the works as a gift at a wedding at which the bride and groom requested books for their gifts. I read Huron and Erie to my son last year when he was eleven and he loved them too.

Of course some of the jokes went over his head. Of course many of them still go over mine. Surely my not appreciating Ontario has all to do with my lack of sophistication.

I like how McFadden often portrays his wife as callous or bumpkin like and the fall guy. I love doing that when I write about my husband. But he hates it. It used to be it’s the problem of my lack of romantic-ness all over again. Now, it’s he’s waiting for me to become aware of my gentler sentiments toward him.

Nevertheless, sometimes he’s all paranoid and thinks I’m doing it when I’m not. Other times I’m doing it and he doesn’t realize. I think perhaps I may have outfoxed him. Or maybe he’s just not letting on, he knows. It’s a very delicate situation. And ironic.

I should have taken notes when I was in NYC.

I think there’s a place in David McFadden’s earlier Trips in which he’s writing about writing about writing notes. Was that one too many “writings”? The point is clearly he was writing notes along the way. Which is what I should have been doing.

For a while there I think I may have been losing myself in NYC. Jacob got sick right way. He had a fever. He was sleeping. He didn’t want us to leave him alone. We were thinking of killing him. I was. Larry left his bag at home on the bed and we had to buy him some new clothes. It was hot and sunny and I was wearing pants and a black shirt that was attracting too much sun to it, making me hotter. I needed to get back to the hotel room and change into some shorts and a lighter coloured shirt. Or get in the shade.

The pond in Central Park had all these turtles in it. They were sticking their heads out and looking at us where we were sitting in a Pagoda talking to a woman from Brussels. She was small and critical of American eating habits, their love of over-sized portions, their huge muffins. We were eating this amazing Spanish goat’s cheese on crackers that we got from Zabar’s, a tour book featured deli on the Upper West side. And some deli salads. We shared some with her and after two helpings, the correct amount of time to accept food offered by strangers, she had enough. I couldn’t stop eating the cheese and neither could Larry. It was so tasty. She brought up American eating habits again which started making me uncomfortable thinking maybe she was secretly trying to comment on ours.

Belgium is separating maybe and was without a government for six months recently. She quit her job as a personal assistant and is going to do something new, like take a course of study, when she returns from her trip. Her friends in America wouldn’t talk about their political beliefs over the phone with her when she was in Brussels. They were afraid. Her Canadian friend in Brussels didn’t feel comfortable expressing his opinions when he lived in Canada.

She had a problem with her leg which is why she had signed on to take tour busses around the city for the past few days. She had a wet hand shake when she got up to leave. It made me think she was sick.

Do you think Katherine Govier found writing The Truth Teller tedious? Personally, I don’t like writing when I’m finding the writing tedious. I stop. I am so bored. I don’t like recounting tales either. The energy of the story gets all big and large and sweeping and conventional and tedious. Whereas by taking notes the same day it’s easier for you to find your way right back into what was the juice of the now.

Although: it’s not completely impossible to remember these things too.

Home

Yesterday we drove home. First Larry and I went for a walk to the health food store at 54^th and 7^th. On the way we picked up some fruits and vegetables at an open farmer’s market at 58^th and 8^th that wasn’t there before. It must have been because it was Saturday. It was sunny and clear, the depth of the blueness of the sky emphasized from looking up at it against the shadow side of buildings. We woke Jacob up to tell him what we were doing but only with a whisper in hopes that he would be able to fall back asleep if he felt like it.

Larry and I oohed at restaurants and architectures we hadn’t noticed yet. We were seeing them again more like how we had on the first day we went out together, just us, when Jacob was sick and we had to leave him back at the hotel room.

One of the things we got at the health food store was granola. Jacob likes granola so I thought it would be nice for him, like a souvenir, to bring him home some NYC granola. Plus it looked really good.

It is good. Now we’re home I poured him a bowl and ate a few bits of it myself, then decided to have some for breakfast too even though I don’t usually eat granola because it’s too heavy on my stomach. Neither does Larry but he agreed to join in on the granola fest.

Our house seems really cute, like a doll house, because it’s a single house with a space between it and the next one and not never-ending tall buildings attached one to another I can’t believe have been there like that so long without me. One day we estimated we walked 90 blocks, Jacob too. Our feet were so sore. When we got back home to the hotel room, we took turns massaging each other’s feet with peppermint foot cream we’d brought with us.

Eating granola in front of the TV but not watching it, Larry telling me how depressed he’s feeling now he’s back, Jacob showing Eli his new electric guitar he bought on the lower east side and practiced learning on all the way home in the car, I’m imagining walking city block after city block of tall buildings making different jagged sky pictures and not knowing where to go to get it because all there is outside right now is the quietness of the summer and cicadas and no car honking sounds echoing off of building walls. There’s just curly streets that don’t go anywhere big, maybe to the ravine by the Jewish Y where Eli and Jacob found the snake that time on the rocks.

Jenny, Larry’s mom keeps calling his cell phone. It turns out she wants us all for dinner tonight up at her place in Thornhill. What do you want to do? - Larry says to me - voice neutral, as if her request isn’t just adding insult to injury.

My dad always said no. For a while there when my sister and I were young, my dad would take us downtown to the market building on Saturday mornings. Things the market building had that regular grocery stores didn’t were brown eggs. Also special thick white honey in big tins with tin lids, which when you wanted to eat some, you had to pry off with a knife unless the person who used it before you didn’t put it back on all the way.

Can we have a donut dad from the donut store? No. Can we have a cookie from the bakery? No. Can we have a kitten from the pet store? These kittens are the most adorable ever. No.

The only time I could get him to say yes was when we went together to a regular grocery store. Not every time, because that wouldn’t be realistic, but as seemed fit, I’d start coughing part way through our shopping. Not crazy, heavy hacking because, again, how realistic would that be? Just subtly, conveying in the portrait of my cough that maybe what he’d been too distracted to notice is that I’d actually been having the coughing problem for a few days already.

Then when we got to the checkout I’d make my move. Dad? I have a bit of a sore throat. Do you think you could buy me some cough drops?

Ludens; not Vicks because Ludens were round capsule shaped not pointy triangles so softer feeling in your mouth. They were bigger too, super lemony and less mentholated-tasting.

**

I bought a new camera yesterday. The guy selling it to me recommended a Fuji because of their great warrantee. I’m buying it for our trip to New York City next week. It’s pink which I’m okay with. Although, upon sharing my neutral response to the pink with the salesman, I think culturally speaking, he may have felt badly for me that I didn’t know enough to be moved more.

I would say he was gay. Big open blue eyes with no hidden corners, gossipy; he got a better price for his hotel when he went to NYC through Priceline than we did through Hotwire. The deals he got were always the best and most savvy even under the most trying but also interesting of circumstance but meant conspiratorially not to compete. None of the embarrassed, eye lowering, problematic tug of our sexes between us I usually get with men, and even more especially with the incorrigibly young and their high testosterone that won’t forgive them for backing down from it.

**

Larry’s not working right now. I mean he’s not working at a job that makes money. He is working. He is working on his art like he never has before. It would be wiser to spend none of it, to sit on the money from my father’s inheritance.

I don’t feel like spending it is a way of making up for all my father’s “no’s” along the way. They were easy. They were predictable. I didn’t mind them. I didn’t feel unloved.

Larry booked a hotel in Manhattan with an outdoor pool on the roof. By which I mean to say, Larry found the perfect hotel for me. Of course he and Jacob will love it too. It’s going to be the end of the day or the beginning and I’m going to be floating in a rooftop pool and feeling the sky and the vibrations and the sounds of New York City all around me.

What I feel about the money is: I feel like my dad just wanted me to be happy.

Pleasure and love

Larry’s reading a letter I’m writing to my brother.

I have a lot of problems relating to my brother because of a bad thing he did and went to jail for a long time ago and which we’ve barely even talked about even though what he did made things very hard for me.

Larry’s going to make suggestions about better ways to say things. I usually forget any diplomacy when I’m seriously expressing my feelings to people. He’s going to point out places I completely skipped over important things I feel. Suppressing feelings forever and then learning how not to doesn’t mean you still don’t continue to suppress the juiciest ones you can barely stand to feel.

Yesterday we dropped Jacob off at overnight camp. It’s the first time he’s been to one. He really wanted to go.

We were embarrassing him lurking around wanting hugs and kisses and to make sure he was going to be okay. He barely paid attention to all the last minute instructions we were giving him that we forgot to tell him on the three hour drive up there, actually it was more because of the horrendous traffic on the 400, but he was okay about our mentioning a forty dollar credit for him at the tuck shop.

We stopped in Gravenhurst on the way home, a place Larry remembers from vacationing there and thereabouts when he was young. We ate in the finest restaurant we could find and ordered a bottle of red wine to go with our meal.

We’re learning how to drink wine and took turns describing the one we were drinking. First we couldn’t come up with too many words. The more we drank the easier it was to come up with words to describe it. We were very funny.

Initially I toasted to “pleasure” but Larry thought that was too hedonistic so I toasted to “pleasure and love.” Then, as our funniness increased, Larry got on the theme of appreciating one another and I said that was the reason I toasted to “pleasure” and Larry felt bad because he thought I’d switched it to only “love.”

But I explained to him that he’d heard wrong, I hadn’t taken out the “pleasure” from the toast, I had just added the “love.”

Avoiding getting sucked in

Apparently there’s a war waging between Eli and I to get Larry’s attention. Larry and I came home from a walk. I was finishing a story I was telling Larry. It was a story about a story I was reading.

I said, to Eli - hold on a second - I’m just finishing telling a story. Eli put an affectionate arm around Larry, stretched and made himself taller, yawned and belched loudly - the weapons of his secret war against my unworthy, since I was now in his presence, desire to finish telling my story.

Naturally Larry got distracted and lost track of what I was saying. To which I responded that I appreciated that Eli’s presence must be distracting Larry from our conversation and that it was okay with me if we picked it up later.

I deferred. I deferred but not without a hint of critical commentary. Eli responded with a cringe. It wasn’t really a cringe. It was like heat waves coming off of parking lot pavement in the middle of the summer.

Eli is so hostile towards me. If he was really pavement and our planet was closer to the sun I wouldn’t have a problem. He would just melt away, big globby black pavement melts.

It’s tricky when someone is angry at you and fighting with you but you’re not fighting with them but what it is you want means to them that you are.

I was going to say something to Eli about it. But with him so mad at me I couldn’t see the point. But neither do I want to walk around feeling cowed by him.

What do I do? I said to Larry, after. Larry was glad I asked for his advice. He said - ask me to step away with you to the side so you can finish what you are saying. It sounds like a good idea.

Beach at the Pinery

We went to the Pinery to camp and hang out on the beach last weekend. The first day we got there the waves were high. Jacob let me use his boogie board and I figured out how to pick the biggest waves, wait, wait, wait and catch them just as they began to furl, then kick, kick, kick to stay with the rush of the ride as long as possible.

The waves came in waves; some small ones for a while, then a slew of big ones.

Larry didn’t stay in the water for long. He went back to shore and drew an elderly couple sitting in their beach chairs watching over the lake and their grandkids. Their daughter saw it and thought it was amazing how it captured them. That’s what Larry told me. Something like that. Naturally he wouldn’t have blown his horn so much.

He thought it was nice she said that. I wondered why she didn’t fall down on her knees beseeching him to give it to her. It was so beautiful. How could she live with herself knowing she didn’t do everything in her power to find some way to get it from him and give it to her parents?

Another day we went out and picked a spot behind a driftwood log. It wasn’t very crowded that day. A while later this couple decided to make their place at the beach right on the log. They were practically sitting on us. Even Larry who likes to arrange to sit with people nearby so he can draw them thought their choice of locale impertinent. They had two small kids with them.

We went out with this special ball we have that has a multi coloured tail and depending what part of the tail you catch you get a different amount of points. Their kids were playing in the water with a soft ball. A soft ball is the big kind of baseball, the kind you play slo-pitch with. They’re called soft but they’re actually hard. The girl who was older was throwing it at the boy and it hit him hard on the leg, right below the knee and hurt him. He went in and sat between his parents like he was hurt. They didn’t know what to do about it. They looked like they were trying to decide whether to take him seriously or not.

Larry was back on shore again and I was playing with our special striped-tail ball with Jacob and kept looking in towards Larry on the shore but this other family sitting on the log directly in front of him kept getting in the way of my beacon of familial love connection from lake to shore with Larry.

You should always take your children to the beach their whole lives because it helps you become more aware of the invisible umbilical cords that are still there that yank at your soul and your gut making you certain you will never allow any harm to come to them which reminds you of and makes you feel the same kind of cord you also have with your spouse.

You shouldn’t, if you can help it and the beach isn’t too crowded, sit directly in front of another family and interfere with their umbilical cord connections.

Temperamental

This guy I was talking to at work on the phone today did this thing, this thing I think is a guy thing. It made me so angry. I had to keep putting him on hold to try to get control of my temper.

Towards the end of the call he puts his kid on the line to take down an address I’m telling him to send information to because he can’t write and before he puts the kid on he asks me to cooperate with the kid like the way I’m acting with him isn’t being that way and has everything to do with me and nothing to do with his feeling so damn comfortable subtly taking control of our conversation because of my natural social deference toward him, alternating with my outright frustration in the face of how he’s managing to maintain the conversation on his own ignorant terms when he knows fuck all about fuck but is acting like it’s me not him when its him not me.

There’s a new QAA (Quality Assurance Advisor) sitting across from me temporarily, a guy, and he is so low key and so receptive I’m starting to get self-conscious around him. I’m starting to notice myself wanting to act ways that I think he would like so he’ll like me.

I have to keep putting the guy driving me crazy on the phone on hold. I’m telling the guy temporarily sitting across from me what I’m doing. He’s being encouraging. I’m telling him this guy on the phone is making me so mad I can’t function. I’m telling myself it’s good I’m telling the guy sitting across from me temporarily this because I don’t want to act like I’m someone I’m not for him even though I also do want to do that so he’ll like me. But I also don’t want to do it because on what basis would I be acting? I would be out of control. I would be in a fantasy of what I thought he thought was beautiful.

In reality what do I know about what he thinks is a nice way for a person to act? I only know what I think. I only know how close or far away I am to being the way I want to be, like even though I feel embarrassed for having this problem with this guy on the phone I can tell who I am by the ugly unfortunate issue I’m having with him acting like he’s the sweetheart and I’m the problem when he’s not the sweetheart.

On my bathroom break I look at myself in the bathroom mirror when I’m washing my hands. I’m wearing a nice pink necklace I got at the beach which makes my skin colour from my sun tan from being at the beach look pretty but it’s also drawing attention to the stringy, up and down wrinkles on my neck that look like the way a chicken’s neck looks. The QAA sitting across from me looks young. How could a guy like that like me when I’m so old looking? I’d have to fool myself pretty hard to see a young looking face looking back at me. My nice hair cut helps though.

This morning walking into the mall, which I walk through to get to work, a man opened the door for me. I couldn’t understand why he would open if for me. I don’t act the way men want me to. I don’t act the way they think is beautiful. So why would one open the door for me? But then I see this woman walking towards me who looks like a regular normal woman, with regular prettiness, and I think he would open the door for her too. I look normal enough just like she does. Why shouldn’t he open the door for me too? It’s something men do sometimes for women, for regular women. How it’s actually easier to open a door for an older woman who isn’t beautiful anymore. How it’s also easier when you’re an older woman to have the door opened for you.

Men

No idea really how to talk to men. Not just talk but develop relationships with. My girlfriends talk to them.

Actually I can and do talk to them. Actually I’m married to one.

But I can’t handle the going into the abstractness to deal with the opposite sexes of ourselves between us. It’s not that I’m not smart. I’m smart enough. I just can’t remember who I’m supposed to be when I’m acting like that. I’m sorry.

I’m okay if I have something to discuss. Work. The workiness of our workingness together is a good subject of communication, isn’t it? But look! Behold my girlfriends. They are having much more interesting conversations with them. They look like they’re enjoying themselves. What are they talking about? How are they doing it?

I think it’s technical. I’m squinting my eyes so I can focus in on and study their moves. I’m making better friends with my girlfriends too. We have more in common than I thought. I should have been appreciating them more before. Now I am.

No title yet

First we saw Richard. He was looking across the street at the parking lot of the plaza. He had this wild and excited look on his face. There were other kids too running toward him bigger kids. He didn’t look like he was scared of them so I was wondering if it was a game they were playing, like tag. Like Richard, they were also turning around looking at the parking lot. The way they spread out together in one flowing motion was like they were some kind of spawn brought in by the tide. They looked like the characters running alongside Tom Cruise in the War of the Worlds remake about the future that are being chased down by mechanical robots with guns from outer space.

We told Richard that Jacob was over behind Chat, the Hebrew Day School with two tennis rackets if Richard wanted to go over and play with him. Richard had sweat on the back of his head hairs at his collar. He had sweat on his bangs. Richard always hangs around the park getting in on every possible game he can.

Richard said, sure he was going to do that. He said there was a fight over in the parking lot. He walked toward it to show us where it was happening. There was a guy on his back down on the ground. He was moving his limbs but staying down. Larry was asking Richard who the kids involved were to find out if the guys involved were the same two kids who took Jacob’s baseball glove in the spring because Larry’s still planning to call those kids to task when he gets the chance. Richard stared over at the movement in the parking lot and answered Larry’s questions.

I was calling Jacob on my cell phone to let him know Richard would be coming over to play with him but decided not to because Richard didn’t look like he was ready to go yet.

The kid who was lying down stood up with some of his friends around him. Larry and I started walking toward a girl standing near the outfield foul territory of the baseball diamond. She said she knew the guys who were fighting. We walked past this other kid who was standing straddled over his bike watching the parking lot. A guy playing left field was trying to get his attention because someone had just hit a fowl ball right beside this kid. He was trying to get the kid to throw the ball back to him so he wouldn’t have to walk all the way over to the edge of the field to get it himself.

Larry called Jacob to tell him Richard should be coming over to play tennis with him soon, to stay where he was and not to come over to the park because there had just been a fight but Richard would be there soon.

When we were a few blocks away part way down the hill that goes to the valley Jacob called us from the park to tell us the kid who we had seen lying down had been stabbed. Larry told me he had seen something red on the kid’s back but he just thought it was just his friend had something red in his hand. I told Larry I didn’t notice anything red on the kid’s back. The police were coming and the two kids who had done it were hiding behind the Irving Chapley Community Center.

Larry called Jacob back to tell him if the police ask him any questions to not tell them anything because Jacob didn’t see anything first hand and it was up to people who saw things first hand to let the police know what they saw. Larry said to me Jacob has a do-gooder tendency that could get him labelled as a snitch.

We were going to walk along the path beside the river but right away it was way too full of mosquitoes. I told Larry I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed to turn back. We were running. It took a while for us to lose the mosquitoes even though we were way past where they had first started to bother us.