Long time no blog

Larry had a job interview. It went well. Getting ready he pulled down some jeans from the closet he didn’t wear in ages he forgot about that look really nice on him he wore to it. Larry is magic. We were at the Pinery last week and he was making these beautiful ornate funny drawings of nature parts. Bugs, flora, creatures. Larry is listening and hearing the call, his call.

Sometimes I feel like a grabby, clingy bedridden old man. Kids are grabby too. I think I remember remembering not to be that way. To take something given with grace. Feeling the transferring from their hand to mine.

At work Tina’s hands are red. Her husband is a cook and she always has a good lunch. It’s some kind of psoriasis on them. I am thinking I wonder if it’s something Tina is eating causing it, looking at her every day her husband making them for her seeming so nice lunches. Amy said, “Oh you’re not wearing your new ring,” to Tina. Tina said she took it off because she’s always putting cream on her hands pausing, alluding to the problem of her hands. The way Amy said it like it was so nice I got the impression the ring was expensive and had diamonds in it. Maybe because Amy wears jewellery like that.

Larry said the reason they’re not accepting your work at the literary magazines is because it’s different. They’re not used to work like that. I said I didn’t think of it that way, but thank you. Listening.

x-rated

Poor Iggy has sex on the brain. Lilu doesn't get it; his constant sniffing at her nether regions; the distracted, nostril-flared dazed look on his face; the neck pinning and pelvic thrusts.

She visits me, I think for assurances, more often than she did.

I don't know if Iggy gets what's going on either.

Some months ago, we set Iggy's appointment with the vet for the snipping, except it's not snipping anymore - its laser surgery, for the last weekend of May.

I don't know if we're going to make it.

Love

Sigh.

Love, love, love. Love, love, love.

Isn’t that how that Beatles song goes?

Jacob was having one of his nightmare things last night, a light one. From out of sleep he joined us in the living room Larry surfing playoff hockey, basketball and watching some Blue Jays too.

To distract him from his brow scrunching bad visions Larry told him the Blue Jays were winning 4-2 in the 8th. In response Jacob switched his bad dream vocalizations to numbers. Six-six, four-two, he mumbled with more anxious trepidation, the numbers taking on the same bad meanings.

Our strategy to help him out was talking to him in normal voices he wasn’t hearing very well because of the dominating bad dream interference going on his head. I said, leave the door open, as he left the living room to return to bed. But he was closing it so I repeated it until he heard.

If there’s anything you need just call, I said. Then fast he said, love. I need love.

If only my blog entries were more socially relevant

We went out for an art walk yesterday. The funnest stop was at Paul Petro. Andrew Harwood had a show in the upstairs gallery called Psychic Friends. He was dressed in character as a drag queen Madam Zsa Zsa. The lighting was blue. He had his face covered in a veil. There was a swirling disco ball globe in front of him for his crystal ball.

What I liked about him was his intimacy. I was very comfortable with it. It made me realize I am like that too.

Since I know astrology well, I could feel Cancer energy about him. Cancer energy can be the most intimate. It’s water and it’s mother energy. I asked him his birth data and I was right. His Moon is in Cancer as is his Jupiter.

He needed you to get physically close to him to do his “readings.”

He was treating them like they weren’t serious and a joke but also like they were serious. He would say the colour he saw in relation to the question you were asking him. Having a methodology, seeing colours, means seriousness.

Since I am an Aquarius and my masculine side dominates my feminine in an (in my case) unhealthy way, I’m often in my cool aloof Aquarian side. But being with him, like I said, made me realize part of my strength is in my moony Cancer side. Except I’m always hiding and diminishing it.

When I went back on the street in the sunshine outside of the blue light I realized it’s my fear of men often knocking me out of that intimate side. All the scary men and my fear that I can’t be myself around them , that I have to succumb to their perspectives and needs, is how I get knocked out of that intimate side of myself and into my distant Aquarian head.

Also I am reading some literary blogs and feeling very stupid. People organize their thoughts in ways that don’t have the same kind of scope my astrological perspective does.

I’m scared it means they’re better and I don’t belong.

This Seder

For our Seder, in the kitchen between the main course and desert, after using the bathroom, Jenny, my mother in law complimented me on how clean the toilet bowl was. How did you get it that clean? She wanted to know, her voice in awe.

Really, I was thinking of an answer to her question. I was formulating it. The answer. But getting stuck. What I’d done to get it that clean really wasn’t that incredible. Realizing this made me think Jenny must also know that what I had done to get the toilet bowl the way it was really wasn’t that incredible.

While Jenny was in the bathroom she also cleaned the mirror I noticed after the fact, later in the evening after she’d left. Because I had Larry buy some Windex so I could clean it then I couldn’t figure out how to get it spraying then I went on to do some other house preparations for the Seder and forgot about it.

Then it was clean and I asked and Larry didn’t do it. No one else would have done it. No one else would be so presumptuous. Only the word presumptuous doesn’t come close to what Jenny does. Conversely the word bristling perfectly describes my response to how she acts. Other times, in the past, while visiting and using the bathroom she’s also cleaned the sink, the tap nozzles and the counter surrounding the sink.

Finding myself

What if a viable strategy to infiltrate the Toronto literary scene was to mill in crowds at literary events in such a photogenic manner that the crowd scenes photographer wouldn't be able to resist snapping pictures featuring me? And when enough of these pictures accumulated some kind of numerical function would automatically kick in, like daylight savings time, giving me instantaneous publish-ability.

I found this picture of me talking to Larry on Open Book Toronto's Facebook account.

Ongoing investigation

Larry found some cat puke in the bedroom and saved it to show me. The reason he saved it is because the majority of what was in the puke was fat blue elastic bands. We don’t know which cat it was. Larry thinks it might have been Lilu because she’s more antisocial. She’s weird. And eating blue elastic bands is weird too. I think it might have been Iggy. Because Iggy’s the one I see chewing on elastic bands all the time.

But why just the blue bands? There’s beige elastic bands lying around on the floor all over the place too. They’re the ones that wrap the newspaper. There’s also red ones negligently dispersed about the house. They come from lettuce heads for holding the lettuce leaves in place so the heads are easier to manage when you’re buying them at the grocery store.

One thing we know for sure. Whichever cat it was who puked is the one that favours the colour blue.

Mike's birthday

We went down to London today for Larry’s brother Michael’s 60th birthday. Michael has nice friends. They’re Londoners.

So am I. I didn’t realize it until now but I think I’ve always been in Londoner denial. Londoners are so conservative, plain, ordinary. Surrounding London is farm land. London is called the forest city. Because it has plenty of trees. What makes London and Londoners so plain and ordinary?

But Michael’s friends are nice. Maybe being a Londoner isn't such a bad way to be.

Last winter Larry’s brother moved from South London to the Pond Mills area.

As a child, Pond Mills held a mystique for me. I think it’s because for some reason all my teachers through grade school were always talking about Pond Mills. They just couldn’t get enough of talking about the particular geological feature of London that was the ponds of Pond Mills.

Readying to get off the 401 we needed to call ahead to get directions because, even though we’d already been there a few times, we still weren’t sure how to get to Mike’s new place.

Eli was on his cell phone calling ahead. He was describing to Michael where we were. He was looking at the street sign and telling Mike we were on Port Mills. I wanted to scream, you idiot, it’s not Port Mills, it’s Pond Mills!

I think only a Londoner would get so upset, even if it was just inside my head, at this minor little word misreading.

Later in the day, near the end of Jacob taking Larry and me on a walk through a swampy forest area with these cute little wooden walking bridges behind Mike’s and the other people in his subdivision’s houses, an elderly lady called to us from the backyard of one of the houses. Because she could see that Larry was tall and she wanted him to help her get a bird that was stuck in her eaves trough out. You’d never believe; this poor bird had its head stuck in her eaves trough. It was a sparrow.

The lady had one of those square shaped clothes lines with the pole in the middle holding it up going neatly into plain white concrete patio. She had noticed the bird when she was taking her laundry down. But there wasn't any evidence of her laundry having ever been there anymore: like a laundry hamper with white bed sheets folded neatly in it. When I was a little girl growing up in London in another subdivision our square shaped clothes line didn’t go into patio concrete. It just went into regular ground with grass growing out of it.

She brought out this kind of a step ladder I’d never seen before that was shorter than a usual step ladder and with a wheel on one side for Larry to use to get at the bird. Maybe you would call it a half step ladder. But once it was set up for climbing on, the wheel part was no longer functional so you didn’t have to worry Larry was going to roll away.

I was holding the ladder steady anyway, Larry on the top step, but just for the regular reason of holding any ladder steady for the person climbing it. Larry was struggling getting the bird’s head out. He would tug on the bird’s body and the bird would make this loud squawking sound that sounded like what the bird meant by it was, please don’t rip my head off my body.

The lady was saying maybe Larry needed a taller ladder and I was saying the same, because with the short step ladder Larry had to reach up to help the bird and maybe if he got higher he could see better how to get the bird out.

She brought out another step ladder, a regular one, that was taller and without the wheel. Both of them were silver metal.

But then Larry got the bird out without needing to switch ladders. It flew away to a bush at the lady’s neighbour’s house next door. Larry said what he realized was that where the roof met the eaves trough wasn’t firm. So he pulled the eaves trough down and pulled the roof up which allowed the bird to get its head out.

Jacob walked over to where the bird had flown to in the bush and it flew away some more. Larry said the softness of the bird’s feathers felt just like fur, like the soft pet fur of our two new pet kittens which surprised him. He didn’t know bird feathers were going to feel like that.

More

Some names for Lilu: Goth girl, Cleopatra, the bearded lady, lovely Lilu. Lilu comes when you call her. Iggy comes too when Lilu does. They start sitting on the couch in the living room and race each other to the cat carrier in our bedroom at the back of the house then fight over whose territory it is. Then climb up the cat scratch post to the window sill and to the spot on the top of the box I put the blanket on, on the top of the dresser. They look outside at birds and whatever is out there. They jump down and chase each other around the house more.

Their feet running together sound like horses galloping, very small horses.

They wake us up.

Different kinds of cats

There's scardy cats, 'fraidy cats; there's hidy cats. Larry says he's been a hidy cat. So have I. When he first got here Iggy was quite the scardy cat. Lilu approached new territory at a pace that better matched her ability to cope with the new environment. Iggy would stalk it, meet it head-on, discover suddenly his fear, then run away.

Iggy is clownish pressing his needs forward then finding himself embarrassed by human lectures about claws and biting. Lilu is discreet, catches on quickly, and hence is even more embarrassed when things, like artificial prey, get away from her. Because of her superiority she has more appearances to keep up than Iggy. More readily she must disguise motives that have been thwarted.

But none of this is quite what Larry meant by being a hidy cat.

Cow kittens

Iggy, the boy cat is getting big. His fur is very fluffy. Lilu, the girl cat is much smaller. Our old cat Quari was my cat first. Then I moved her in to Larry's before I moved in myself. Quari liked Larry but he never fully warmed up to her.

When Jacob was born Quari would lay across the bed over top of him when he was a sleeping baby. She let him take all the attention away from her. But he never warmed up to her either. I was always Quari's best and first person and was always happy about that.

These kittens move around. Lilu likes to sleep on Jacob's bed. Iggy loves to get on Larry's chest when he watching TV and butt his nose in his face.

Quari used to talk a lot. I talked a lot to her. I talk to these kittens too but they are very quiet. Their voices are small. They make funny trilling sounds sometimes; Iggy more. They gallop through the house together. They play with squeaky toys we got them - a bird, a fish and a mouse.

They like the bathtub plug. They take the plug from the bathtub and leave it in our bed.

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.