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.