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.

Sleepover

Jacob’s friend Spenser slept over. They go to school together. Its Jacob’s first year at the school. He should have made friends with this kid sooner.

They are playing Halo. For a while they were fighting zombies on the front porch. When fighting zombies it’s important to rearrange all the porch furniture. I learned that when I came home and found the furniture that way.

Jacob has so many toy guns. He still likes playing with them and when his friends come over so do they.

It’s hot out. We have air conditioning. It’s better to not go out.

Spenser is twelve. Jacob turns twelve in a week and is worried he won’t get a birthday party again this year. Last year none of his friends were around. You can’t have a birthday party when there’s no one around to invite.

Jacob and Spenser giggle a lot.

Dead things

- Eli and Jake went down to the valley and brought home a brown snake. It was so sweet. It would stick out its tongue to smell the air when you came by to visit it. I talked to it every day.

Then Jacob left the top of the aquarium open a tiny crack. It was such an athletic snake. We knew it could get out because it was always finding ways to climb up to the top of the aquarium and curl up beside the light. It got out.

Just as Eli was leaving on his trip for leadership training in the reserves for two months, he found the snake. It was curled up in one of his boots.

Eli put the snake back in the aquarium. It was just a small snake. It wasn’t supposed to have so much personality. According to the article we read on the internet it was supposed to be nocturnal and maybe not want to eat the worms we fed it so soon after being captured. And just sleep under things we put in there with it to sleep under.

The snake wasn’t the same after being found in Eli’s boot. (Eli does have pretty smelly feet) Its eye it looked at me with was dull like it didn’t know me anymore. It didn’t stick out its tongue. It didn’t curl up so much but laid more in a straight line. He could barely lift his head.

- My dad.

- The two stuffed grape leaves which no one ate that were in a bowl initially covered in saran wrap but then the saran wrap came off, and moved around to various locations in the fridge depending on where there was room for them in relation to the other stuff in the fridge, for the past two weeks.

Ching-Mei

Ching-Mei came back from her father’s death in Brantford, her almost breakdown, her extended stay in the mountains of Kyoto in Japan not talking to anyone but her old friend from art school in the evenings, who is living there, who she stayed with. She came back from blending from everyone assuming her Japanese, her short bangs and black Asian hair bun with pointy bits growing slightly more pointy, from the pleasure of being a part of but of perfectly not understanding one syllable so just by herself alone understanding. Finally.

She came back to her job at the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security Call Center in Scarborough when she planned to look for new mountains, but seeing everyone, everyone convinced her not to, just to work less hours so it wouldn't be so draining.

I didn’t realize how much I missed her.

War cry

Eli took a long shower. He turned on his music very loud. Very very loud. I yelled at him from the top of the stairs. No reply. I yelled at him from the bottom of the stairs. Again, no reply. I knocked on his partly opened door and as he turned to me, wearing only a white towel wrapped around his waist and bending over to do something with his feet or his ankles, yelled at him from there. Yelled at him to turn the music down.

I didn’t really have to yell at him from there, I suppose. Its uncomfortable walking up behind someone’s back who doesn’t know you’re there and you don’t even know where they are exactly but just see them all of a sudden, because he could have been in his other room. And they’re barely dressed.

It would be different if I was a hunter. Eli is a kind of hunter. He’s in the military reserves and goes out on weekends to do war games exercises. When he comes home he’s always barely slept and talks excitedly in a loud voice.

I like turning up the music loud too sometimes. When Eli does it, downstairs, in his apartment, so you can hear it all over the house, it makes me think of some kind of war cry to scare your enemy. Like you know how the bagpipe music of the Scots was supposed to put fear into the hearts of its enemies. Except for me personally bagpipe music gives me a chill, but not the scary kind, and makes the back of my head tingle. Like in recognition.

The dynamics of this situation suggests to me that if you’re a warrior emitting, in whatever form, your battle cry you should be careful to not get so caught up in the miraculous and scary power of your cry that you forget that your deafening sounds provide an excellent opportunity for your enemy to use it as a cover and to stealthily attack you from behind.

Ships at sea

Most days during the week I work at a government call centre for Canada Pension and Old Age Security. My desk is dark. A woman came by I trained with and observed I have a lot of yellow sticky notes up. That’s what she noticed about my desk space. It’s funny when people notice things about you, you didn’t realize.

Some of the sticky notes actually say the same things because one of the programs we run is enormous and archaic and I hardly ever use it unless I have to so sometimes I accidently put up a sticky note I already put up before, not being able to find the original among the copious sticky notes I already put up. I have a helpful attitude towards myself even if I’m not always able to take myself up on it.

The other service agents and I have a lot of different programs running at the same time for looking up different things. I actually feel fairly magnificent running all these programs at the same time, like a captain of a large sailing ship at sea. Even if the person in the cubicle right beside me on the other side of separating wall between us is sailing her own magnificent galleon too. And even if we really were on ships they could collide and make a big mess at sea and everyone would drown in the high rolling waves.

Before I got the person who’s sitting beside me now I had a really mean person. She was really ugly too. If I was eating food she didn’t like the smell of she would go and tell my supervisor and not even say anything to me first. She could hear me chewing gum through the partition and told me to stop but then when I forgot that her step-mother said chewing gum is disgusting and not for ladies.

I don’t know why she told me it was her step-mother because that completely gave away probably why she was so mean, because she hadn’t had a proper mother-bond when she was growing up. Then at Christmas she gave me a Christmas card that included her husband’s, her dog’s and her fish’s name showing her friendly and unique side. She was laughing about the adorable interestingness of herself and her signing her fish’s name to the lady on the other side of her cubicle who’d she’d known for a long time and who was nice to her maybe because she was used to her, and to me at the same time. The mood was festive. It was thoughtful of her to give me the card. But I still couldn’t figure out with her whether I was coming or going.

Then it was her who was going. I was glad but didn’t gloat when I stood up to go to the bathroom or on break and was able to look directly down into her area. She decided to leave for a short term placement in another office for a change. It’s not that she told me personally. A team email from my supervisor advised me of the change. Usually I don’t complain about people but I did about her. I told my friends who I eat lunch with in the call centre how mean she was and they looked at her and declared that just by looking at her they could see it too.

When the new person moved in she asked if I would please try seeing how I liked it having the overhead light turned out because she would like to have them out. I said I’d try. They’re regular overhead fluorescent office lights. Then, phew, the second they turned the overhead light off I felt such a relief. So, I said, no problem, let’s leave them out. Perhaps the new person instantly liked me but that’s not why I did it. I did it because it felt so much better. I have no regrets even if it is darker. I have a light right at my desk too which I can turn on. To make it brighter, ideally what I could do is try to get a seat at the end of one of the cubicle rows near a window. Then, it wouldn’t be stressful fluorescent type. It would be natural sunlight. But I wouldn’t want to ask to move because I wouldn’t know who I’d be sitting beside if they moved me. I might get someone awful again.

Since ours is the phone line for pensioners we get a lot of calls from elderly people. Last Thursday, after I helped one - a lady - over the phone with a problem she was having, she said, bless your heart. It’s not the first time. My posture straightens and my heart feels all light and aglow when it gets blessed.

My sister's favour

My sister sent me an email in which she told me bad things were going to happen to me if I didn’t do what she wanted me to do which according to her is the right thing to do. We’re not a religious family. I guess you don’t have to be religious to suppose that your morality is better than another’s.

How my sister is acting reminds me of how my mother was with me when I was growing up. She’d cast you out if you didn’t maintain the same perspective as her. I know that now that I’m a grown up I shouldn’t be so worried about being cast out. My therapist told me so. But it’s still a really bad feeling when your sister tells you your thoughts and feelings are going to lead to you losing your husband and children too.

I feel helpless.

It’s like chain letters. I actually emailed back a supposed friend of mine who forwarded me one of those emails that say if you don’t forward the one that was sent to you to other unsuspecting victims, you will pay. Like a plane that had the loved ones of someone who didn't pass the chain letter on, crashed. Someone else who did the wrong thing got a bad disease and is seriously repentant. I said please don’t send me shit like this. I didn’t actually say shit. I’m just showing off to you my audience the possibility of how tough as nails I could theoretically be.

In the first place my sister lied to me to trick me into doing the thing she wanted me to do. But, if you look at it from her perspective since I am such a moral imbecile she had to. The only thing she did wrong, maybe, was not lie better. If you look at it from her perspective, knowing how wrongheaded she knows I am, she was only doing me a favour to help to get me to do the right thing.

From her perspective she has nothing to answer to if I say to her, you lied to me. It’s still all my fault for being the way I am.

I hate thinking about my sister’s perspective. It makes me feel sick.