Cat behaviour

We have new adorable kittens. They are black and white both with black masks over their eyes but the boy kitten's mask goes down further making him look sadder and like a Panda bear. He also has round black markings on his shoulders like he's a football player wearing shoulder pads. The girl kitten has a little black beard.

We got them from a cat rescue organization. They were taken from a feral cat colony. They were given to us with a clean bill of health. Prematurely I would say. We have already had a few vet bills getting them back healthy for real.

As the girl kitten's health returns she is turning into something of a hellion. Bad kitty. Yesterday and today I heard her growling at the boy. She growled at us too. When we were feeding her a treat. Then she galloped over our faces when we were sleeping.

Then Larry said he wanted to give her away. This was making me very sad and then I needed him to console me. I don't want to give the girl kitten away. Someone has to help socialize her. Why not us?

I ordered some cat behaviour books from the library. I predict that soon we will be cat behaviour experts.

Snow mountain

It’s cloudy so you can’t see it’s a full moon tonight. There’s some planes flying in the sky making bright lights against it though.

Last week there were a bunch of snow moving bulldozers of some sort up on the snow hill they make out of snow they take off the streets. When I drive by it again tonight it looks like a snow cliff. There’s a big chunk missing out of it.

Last year the ice mountain, much diminished, was still there in June. It was dark brown. I think because as it melted down the dirt and crud that was in it was getting left behind on top. Little rivulets of water trickled out onto the street beside it; the top of The Allen, proving there was still snow and melt going on inside.

I grow tired of making the edits to my novel. I am ready to take on new territory. I think. The landscape around me doesn’t change.

New Year's

I bought champagne for New Year’s Eve. I’m not really the champagne type. My friend Berna was. Mostly I wasn’t getting why she liked champagne so much. I didn’t feel bad about it not being for me either.

Naturally I have a theory.

Jacob loved his. He was giggling. He said, I’m drunk, it’s the first time I’ve ever been drunk. Larry timed it to pop the champagne cork right at midnight but he was late by about five seconds. We had Kim Mitchell in Niagara Falls in the background on TV. He said his fingers were so cold he couldn’t move them. Then we saw him putting them in front of a large stand up heater onstage. We switched through all the channels. There were other people in the glasses with the 2 and 9 of 2009 for the Year of the New Year we’re going into on the outside of the glasses frames and the two 0’s on the inside as the frames of the glasses in Times Square in New York City. Jersey Boys doing fifties and eighties stuff at Nathan Phillips Square. George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC for thirty seconds. Pussy Cat dolls we didn’t realize who they were; Larry just thought they were bad singers while I debated that their great bodies and sexy get-ups might compensate for their weak vocals. We told Jacob to brush his teeth and get ready for bed and he said he was going to walk around the long way because there wasn’t much space between the coffee table and the TV and he didn’t trust himself in his inebriated state.

Then Larry and I did some pretty fancy New Year’s kissing on the couch.

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.