Measures

I was talking to some of my fellow swimmers today. One was a chattery nervous woman. She initiated. First she apologized for butting in front of me earlier. She apologized at a point when I was resting at the end of the pool and she was making a turn. She was actually talking to me while she was turning but she kept thinking of more qualifications to add to her explanations so her turn was taking longer and longer.

She was right to apologize. What she did really pissed me off. I’m allowed to feel that way again these days. I used to think I shouldn’t. Not that I wouldn’t be disdainful. I surely would be that.

You don’t just jump in front of someone and then start swimming your big splashy kick style swimming. Right in front of them!

So then I had to swim around her and make sure to not get run down by the people swimming down the lane on the other side of the lane. Her apology was she was gauging my speed was why she did it. It was nice she apologized. But what a pathetic one. I just can’t imagine.

Well maybe I can. Maybe she has no ability to gauge people’s speed in the pool visually.
She can’t look ahead. Yet she has a strong need to know by measuring. In which case, just jumping in the pool a reasonable distance after or even before someone so you eventually caught up to them or they, say after a few lengths, caught up to you might not register especially if your inability to gauge speed visually also extended to an inability to gauge speed through your process over an extended period of time. Like waiting a few lengths to find out who is faster.

The way she would be in the world, the way she would need to measure things would be like a human thermometer. Like if you were cooking a turkey you would stick her long slim nervous body with its sore shoulders from doing backstroke - she told me about that later - right in it. You would watch the red mercury line that measures the turkey’s interior temperature grow longer to see if was up to 450 degrees yet, to let you know if it was time to take it out of the oven and rest it on the counter for a little while with tin foil over it. But do you put the tin foil over the turkey while it’s cooling down or is it only for roast beef you do it that way?

Good form

I was taking extra long strokes for my swim today. Just concentrating on form. I’ve always done that. I’ve always swum my best when I just think about form and don’t think about the importance of trying hard and going fast. That stuff will fall in place if you let it. I was thinking that’s all there is to it, to writing, staying on the inside of the form of your experience, being creative with that.

If you were a caveman you might be the one in your group to tell the stories for the clan. It would be okay for you to have a need to express yourself creatively. It wouldn’t be purposeless. Like, when I was in grade two some of the other kids were reading so fast. Denise Pillon, who liked to put a section of her hair in her mouth and suck it making me wish I had long hair and could do that too, read so fast. The words coming out of her sounded so sharp, so articulate. What was important to me, what I felt not only distinguished me from the rest of the class but was a value I would uphold even if it meant I was only going to get to be in group two for the average readers and not group one for good readers, was reading with expression!

So there would be a purpose for my stories in that small caveman group, for my need to be the way I was. But then the world got bigger.

About half way through my swim workout my lane got eliminated. There’s this water aerobics group that comes in and I think the way it works is if it’s a large group they put them in the big pool where us swimmers swim our lengths, squeezing us into less lane space. And when it’s a smaller group they go in the training pool with the adjustable bottom.

I didn’t like how the water aerobics group pressed up against our lane, the mass of their bodies causing the lane rope to push in, giving us even less room within our more crowded lane to accommodate each others’ strokes. Even though the windows of the pool are to the south and the water aerobics people are to the east, they still feel like a heavy cloud, blocking out the light. Like a dark cloud of locusts from a story of a far away land.

Monday morning

We had snow last night. Not much. I was looking at it through Jacob’s window, after opening the blind to let the light in to help him wake up, on the neighbour’s roofs. But I thought it was just frost. Then when I was in the kitchen I looked out the front door and saw some sprinkles on the car and across the street in the part that’s just dirt of Magda’s garden, around her cedar bushes. I said, “Look Jacob, we had snow.”

Going outside to get in the car Jacob said the snow looked like the little Styrofoam bits that come in packaging. It looked fake.

I liked that he said that.

Two fire trucks blocked Yonge Street just before where you turn off to the street Jacob’s school is on. It must have just happened because traffic wasn’t too backed up yet but no one was getting past. The trucks were red. Their lights were flashing. You could see them up ahead.

I pulled over to the left hand turn lane and got off the street. I felt smart doing that. Not everybody has such good traffic-jam avoiding skills. Larry does. But come on, he’s a guy. Different standards apply. I drove around the traffic obstruction and got Jacob to school on time.

Jacob's homework

Jacob is doing a univocal poem for his grade five English class. He’s only allowed to use one vowel for the entire poem. He was going to do “I” but I thought it was too hard. I told him to do “O.” For “O” you can use Yoko Ono. Except I had to tell him who that is. You could use the John of John Lennon and almost the Lennon.

Jacob’s really into cooking lately. We were watching the hockey game last night but it was a pretty boring game. So Jacob was in the kitchen mixing the spices for the next time we make spaghetti. Next time instead of taking the spices from the different spice containers and putting them in a little at a time, you just use the pre-mixed spices he’s already created.

He thought it was a great idea.

Jacob’s univocal poem isn’t making any sense. I told him it might help if he tried to write around a theme. Unfortunately there’re not many “O” words about hockey. That’s his idea. He wants to write it about hockey the same way he wrote his last poem, a fourteen line poem with fourteen syllables in each line, about hockey.

Jacob likes to scoot out of his work before it’s entirely done. He’s driving me a little crazy. I’m telling him to do the poem on his own but now I’m helping him.

Last week his teacher told him he thinks his mother (me) is helping him too much with his homework. It’s impossible not to that at his school, an Arts School where the kids end up having to do oodles of the regular curriculum at home with their parents showing them how and what to do and then maybe influencing them too heavily.

The problem is I get these excellent ideas when I’m helping him and then I tell them and then he agrees. So we put them down. Or I coach him to bring out some of his excellent perceptions only I don’t think the other parents are quite so creative at getting their kids to express the perceptions that are in their heads.

It was very upsetting to hear the teacher thought I was doing that even though the teacher didn’t say it directly to me and what is that all about. Jacob thinks I’m going to hear about it at the parent-teacher interview in two weeks, so be prepared.

Jacob’s univocal poem with my assistance:

The Eclipse of the Moon

World blots
Wolf howls to
Cow hops onto
No logos
Yoko Ono longs for John

Comparing pain, fiction and nonfiction

The thing you never could do living with Larry’s mom and dad was compare pain. That was why they were so much better than you in every way if you were him and always would be. Their pain was the deepest pain ever.

Imagine being born into that. What would it be like?

Should I say it? Would it be intrusive?

….very painful.

**

I was just reading about a symposium at the University of Texas featuring Norman Mailer. They were talking about Mailer's novel, The Executioner's Song, which he had written with the assistance of Gay Talese and Lawrence Schiller.

Unfortunately I was reading it on the Daily Texan Online serving the University of Texas at Austin since 1900 with the flashing advertisements on the side intensely detracting from my reading pleasure.

They were talking about fiction verses nonfiction. I liked this paragraph the most, “The important question is whether there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction and to what degree it matters, Talese said."That's what Norman asks, 'Does it matter?' and I don't think it really does," Talese said.”

It’s not the great Norman Mailer’s opinion, and I mean ‘great’ in no pejorative way, no siree. I've changed. But all the same it stands up so nicely and comfortably and securely and gentlemanly to the challenge of the question of the questioner.

Talese says, “... and I don’t think it really does.”

And, little me, I agree! I agree.

Stepson

The great problem of Elijah who would never ask me to call him that when he was changing over to it, then resent me because I don’t. Full name is Elijah but was always called Eli. Like an eel followed by a lie. I used to call him Squiggly when he was a young boy, for a while. He liked it.

Talks in that big loud authoritative voice in the back seat of the car he always talks in, making it hard to face the road, telling his grandmother he’s signed up to go to Afghanistan in the reserves next winter. Hasn’t told us yet. She’s devastated. He says he’s surprised. One of the main things he does with that voice is make it sound very mature and responsible. His surprise is dignified.

He likes drama and to be the center of attention. It’s his nature. I don’t think he knows it though.

He always feels left out like it’s your fault. Pause. But how is it I’m responsible he’s such a surly angry shit to be around. Larry used to always blame Eli’s mother which is true but tries not to do that any more because it’s also not true. It’s a bad habit.

Finally going to see a therapist. We begged him. Larry did. He doesn’t take anything I say seriously. He’s usually too preoccupied putting up a big cold front for several million reasons in his head. There’re some things we just can’t help you with. My coaching job. You need to go outside of family.

It makes us sick to be around his constant blaming. We’re home sick today. But really we’re just sick. Post-nasal drip. Blech. It’s not his fault.

He’s so hard to be around. He’s getting better; I think the therapist is helping.

Things can get worse for a while when they’re getting better.

New envelopes

It’s hard to write when you’re in the process of submitting your manuscript. That’s the problem.

I drove up to JC Appliance Ltd today to buy new parts for the blender after I dropped Jacob off at school but they didn’t open until 9 so I sat in the car reading Anna Karenina. I’m still at the start. I haven’t met Anna yet.

Since JC Appliance Ltd is right beside a Staples I went in there too to buy some new regular size envelopes, #10 size, because I’m almost out from sending out so many query letters and self addressed stamped envelopes.

I decided to splurge and get the more expensive ones with the adhesive you just pull off when you’re ready to send instead of using the pink foam soaker thing that’s always too wet for activating the glue when I’m at the post office. I also bought a new stapler; it’s pink too - a girly pink, and some whiteout. I wouldn’t want to run out of whiteout one day.

I always hate it when people might be seeing what I want. I don’t like being so vulnerable to their being against me for wanting it. I asked the girl at the Staples if she knew of where a post office was nearby. There was one over at York University. There was one up Highway 7 way. There was one near Bathurst and Steeles.

Forget about the one near the university. The parking’s crazy in there. And about heading way up to Highway 7. She wasn’t sure where exactly the one at Bathurst and Steeles was. She wanted to think, “Maybe in the Drug Store?” It’s so nice when people who aren’t really sure of a thing let you know.

I couldn’t find it. So I went to my regular postal outlet, the one I was wanting to be hiding from and the woman who always sees me there sending off my query letters and manuscript requests served me like she always does and was really nice and not the least bit judgmental-seeming just like she always is.

Even though I’ll probably be afraid to go back to the post office again next time, afraid of being seen, I still tell myself when it’s happening, when I’m sealing closed the envelopes with the too wet round pink foam thing that wets the envelopes in the wrong places, smudges the ink, leaks on the counter then spreads onto my sleeves, “pay attention to how the world around supports you even in the smallest ways.” I just need to learn to let it be.

Time change

I haven’t been writing that much lately because of being all squeezed up in freaked-outness. I think the music I keep listening to when I’m driving in the car is like my secret drug of mothers that they take except for me it’s just the drifting-awayness of the music. I think my son, when I’m driving him, could be looking at me and thinking or not thinking - just feeling and experiencing – the vibe of the drifty freaked-out mother vibe.

The time went back for daylight savings time so we got an extra hour which is making the quiet gray, of the almost November day ending, grow darker sooner.

When I’m feeling this way I just want to stab at it, the darkness coming on, stab and stab like if something inside me could get at it, see things more realer, sweet flashes of red autumn leaves, how much better.

Another dentist visit!

It was Jacob’s turn at our new dentist today. We love our new dentist. He gives this enthusiastic lecture about all you need to do is brush your teeth really well two times a day and do it properly and you shouldn’t even be getting any cavities. Every time he does it, it’s so sincere and fresh. I know because I watched him give it to Jacob plus I got my own last week too. Our dentist’s face is so happy. It’s like a clown face.

He’s so much better than our old dentist. Our dentist is a great man. That’s what you think. It’s so nice to think that about someone. It makes you want to go back and see him for your next appointment in six months. It makes you want to brush your teeth.

Jacob agreed.

But first he was experiencing dental tragedy. Jacob has this kind of a big square-faced head. It’s one of the things that makes him look like me. It’s our family resemblance. Because he’s only ten, lately, his big square head has been looking too big for his body. I think it has to do with how kids grow sometimes, how different parts of their bodies develop at different speeds. Or maybe it’s his hair. I think actually it’s just the way his hair has been growing that is making his head look bigger and exaggerating its squareness.

Jacob’s big square-head face, which is my big square-head face, is graying over as the dental tragedy befalls him. He can’t abide the taste of the toothpaste they use - it doesn’t matter what kind it is - and yes, bad-flavored toothpaste at dentists’ includes cherry bubblegum.

“That’s it?” The dentist wants to know. He moves quickly past incredulity to sympathy keeping pace with the tenor of Jacob’s traumatic situation. Did I say how great our new dentist is? “That’s all you’re so worried about?” And then the square-head face gagging repeatedly, the tears sliding down its boxy sides, the many needed pauses. I smile inadequately at the dentist’s assistant. I smile past her at my beautiful square-head faced boy.

Technical concerns

My poor computer grows senile. It hums and whirs like an old vacuum cleaner with something stuck in it. Didn’t we used to have a pet budgie around here? Larry tried to install a new printer to it. It refused to recognize it. Furthermore it refused to tell us it didn’t recognize it.

The new printer will be more efficient for printing out my manuscript. Manuscript. The word manuscript does sound very magnificent.

What I did while I was waiting for the computer to recognize the printer was nail clip my left big-toe’s toe nail. I get holes in my socks because my big toes are too big. But when I told Larry that he said it wasn’t the fact of the big toes being too big, it was the toe nails not getting clipped frequently enough. I couldn’t believe he thought that about me. Larry thinks I don’t cut my big-toe toe nails frequently enough.

I thought it would be funny to clip the big-toe toe nail while the toe was sticking out of the hole in the sock. It was funny.

Then I switched the socks around. I switched the feet the socks were on because only one of the socks had a hole in it. The reason I switched them to opposite feet was I thought if I did that it would switch the hole that my big toe sticks out of to the baby-toe side of the foot. Then the hole would just be there floating above the toes without the toes pressing their way out of the sock the way they do when it's big toes in the hole vicinity.

While I was switching the socks I couldn’t help but notice all the other nails on the other toes looking perfectly fine, at a reasonable length and in no need of being clipped. Which made me think, is the fact of the other toe nails not needing clipping a kind of proof of Larry being right that I don’t clip my big-toe toe nails often enough? Does the situation of my toe nails suggest that what I need to do is clip my big-toe toe nails twice as frequently as the other toes?

Is it all proof of the point that I am resisting that which is necessary? Yet it doesn’t seem fair or right, does it?

The sock switching didn’t work. It worked for a minute or two but then the toe and the sock worked together mysteriously to produce the same effect of sticking out big-toe on my other foot, my right foot.

It’s because the socks are cotton or a poly-cotton blend. I can get the sock-switch trick to work when I’m wearing wool socks.

What Larry’s going to do is install the new printer downstairs on his system. Then what I’ll be doing is printing my manuscript through the network.

Bird feeder

Jacob’s not that committed to his studies. He tucks projects away and just leaves them tucked. As more of them build up his answers to questions about how things are going at school get smaller, more stubborn, like his mouth. He’s fine, he says.

Larry and I are learning not to wait. We prod with more confidence. We’re alternately gentle then assured where we used to be ferocious. Jacob still denies. He disseminates. Like how he might deal with hungry birds.

It would be nice to get a bird feeder. Maybe for Chanukah. I hate always buying things we don’t need just for the sake of buying something. A bird feeder would be really nice.

The hand that pulls your tooth out

I was kept waiting a while for my new dentist, Dr Klein. Well, first I kept him waiting. He’s actually an orthopedic surgeon. I arrived late. Then my gut was killing me so bad. I had already gone to the bathroom but it still really hurt. I was feeling like things were beginning to go black around me.

So I told the receptionist I needed to go to the bathroom again and phoned up Larry. But I couldn’t talk. Because that’s how I get when my emotions get too big, too big to fit through my voice apparatus. Larry knows me enough, he was waiting. I said I was too scared to do it without him. He’s already had it done before so he told me in his voice, in the voice of Larry, it was going to be okay. I was going to be able to do it.

I was surprised. I thought someone feeling as bad and scared as I was couldn’t possibly continue on alone. But I took his word for it.

My face wasn’t as tear-faced when I went back in the office as it had been when I was telling Larry I couldn’t do it. What I’d planned to do was just walk up to the reception people and tell them I couldn’t do it. I'd come back later. What else I’d planned was just leave and phone them when I got outside of the building at some point and tell them then I couldn’t do it. It went back and forth which one I would do depending on how bad I was feeling.

The receptionist told me they had called for me when I was out. I decided not to feel like a terrible person for not being available right away and inconveniencing them when they called me. Even though I’d already showed myself to be that way by coming late to the appointment in the first place. Just a few minutes. Or ten.

Then they put me in one of the dentist’s work stations and I waited there for a while. A boring view of a mall on a rainy day through slats of blinds. Larry called. He said if I didn’t like the dentist I didn’t have to stay. I could just go. We could make other arrangements. We could call friends and find out somewhere else to go.

Dr. Klein’s style was majestic and magician-like. One of his main people tools was dramatic redirects. So I wasn’t sure how I was liking him especially based on what Larry said, that I could have a choice, because Dr. Klein was all about making you feel like you were so in his distracting hands you’d already made it, you didn’t want to change your mind from where you already were. You liked it in his hands.

I liked that he said his first and last name when he introduced himself to me. Now that I’m a grown up, I always find it very weird calling people by their last names. I can’t get used to it. I’m a grown up now too, right?

He told me it was going to be really easy, take only five minutes. He told me he might break the tooth apart in three sections. He’d see as he went. It wasn’t going to hurt.

I mentioned to him I was very scared. How I had been thinking about maybe just going back home.

I liked when he was freezing me he told me the one in the roof of my mouth was going to hurt. Actually the one he did before hurt too, in the corner of the jaw. My regular dentist was much more gentle with the needle. I thought it’s probably better that someone pulling out your teeth has a firmer touch. You don’t want someone tentative, overly concerned about your every momentary feeling, in a tooth-pulling situation.

He told me the freezing would take place quicker than I could tell a joke. Then joked when I didn’t have one.

I told him I was still really scared.

He explained to me about hearing strange sounds and feeling lots of pressure during the procedure. He pushed his hips up against my body as he started his maneuvering. Usually when people do that I kind of shrink away inside myself. It’s kind of inappropriate isn’t it? In this instance with his hands rooting away in my terrified mouth I didn’t feel like that at all. I just wanted to savor the feeling of his body’s press against mine.

He said I did good when we were done. His eyes looked in to mine really warmly. He shook my hand. That’s my new thing; loving shaking hands, so I was glad he did that. It makes me feel secure when I meet someone new to feel them through their hand. But I didn’t have my other new, “check out the vibe of his handshake” editor on. I was too tired. His hand looked big and fleshy and self-conscious. It had just pulled out my tooth.

Love flock 2

I didn’t get my tooth pulled out. My new dentist Dr. Gwartzman wanted to take an x-ray just in case, just in case there might be a problem, a problem like having unusually extra long roots on your wisdom tooth going up to and running past the sinuses. See those fluffy spots? Those are the sinuses.

Dr. Gwartzman filled a cavity in my other tooth that I was going to be coming back for next week, for something to do with me instead in the time that was booked, the perfect time to daydream. I’m very talented at drifting away. When your mouth is wide open and getting operated on you’re really not under any regular kind of social pressure to engage in relevant conversation. There’s plenty of thoughts I have I can drift into.

But Dr. Gwartzman has this little quick way about him that brings you back to him, like his arm’s incisive gesture is asking you to stay there with him in the room. That’s when I realize Dr. Gwartzman is kind of something of an artist, how easy conversation is with him even though he can be a little insistent and detailed but it’s for safety reasons, he is a dentist. It’s easy because there’s this clean kind of world-view he’s got too, a philosophy. Something about Dr. Gwartzman tells me I could love him if I needed to. Maybe I already do.

My dentist’s face is small featured making him look child-like. He walks lightly on his feet. With his hair there’s a problem. It’s very thin but not balding. Isn’t that strange for a man? It’s more like the way a woman’s hair thins. And it’s suspiciously dark. His skin is very pale, like a mortician’s.

When he tells you what’s the matter with your teeth he keeps you lying down with your head craning back and up to look at him, like a session with a Freudian psychiatrist, but having the pressure to look.

I think he’s the kind of dentist who inspires love. His assistants and hygienists are great. They’ve all been with him for a long time and treat you really nice. It’s like they love him. I think they love him too. I think what’s happening is that I’m being captured into my dentist’s love flock.

What I don’t understand is even if my tooth’s roots are too long, why does he have to send me away to an oral surgeon for my extraction?

Exposing a nerve

Incongruous juxtaposition. We were studying Stephen Leacock in grade six, the great Canadian humourist. How I loved this combination of words. I walked around saying it over and over again - but not out loud - in my head. Then I could feel the words moving around in there like the perfect high grade oil on starving pistons and gear mechanisms.

I wasn’t the type either who collected big words, please don’t think it was anything like that, and not because I wouldn’t like to portray myself that way, who wouldn’t? It was the first time I ever worked at remembering a big word, in this case two. Incongruous juxtaposition: Leacock: slay me with your words.

**

Shawn Green used to play baseball up here in Toronto with the Blue Jays. I didn’t notice him so much then. He looks better now, more scruffy, his right eye off, bending to the right when the camera studies him and looking bigger than the other one. He’s frayed, lost meat, from constant nerves reacting to the moment, like the moment of the ball colliding with the bat. Of making it do that; always less than perfectly: the game of baseball.

Most of the other players defend by getting bigger, fleshier. They hold their bats like toothpicks after eating too much dinner. With Green you think how close the other bones are to the flesh, the hip-bones underneath his baseball pants. You will him to be careful, when he makes his next pop-up slide to second.

**

I’m getting a wisdom tooth extracted in a few hours. Larry says it’s not going to hurt a bit. They’re going to freeze it up with Novocain and I won’t feel a thing. I guess it’s just the imagining of the extracting that hurts.

The tooth broke when I was eating a cookie. Then it broke again. Then a few weeks later - the pain - from nerves exposed and dieing. Not so bad at first, then worsening. Things to do for the pain: hold your chin with your hand; it sooths. Hold your temple with your hand when the pain spreads up there. Hold your head with both your hands when it’s feeling all over the place. Puff out your cheeks by blowing air into them. Eat soup. Don’t chew on things. No cold things. Blow out your right cheek only, the side the pain comes from. Don’t clench your jaw. Always keep the top teeth away from the bottom. Take aspirin before bed.

Sleep on the couch when the aspirin’s not working because you can’t sleep, to stop from keeping Larry awake part of the night too. Go back to bed when the pain calms down.

**

Did you know that back in his time the great Canadian humourist, Stephen Leacock opposed women’s rights? That his father was an alcoholic and left? I wonder what made Leacock think that way about women. Kind of an incongruous juxtaposition.

Running shoes

This morning I walked by two ladies carrying running shoes. They were chatting. You could tell by what they were wearing and how they were walking that they were finishing up their morning exercise routine which wasn’t a very vigorous one. They were both fairly overweight.

They were wearing running shoes too. I looked up and down from the shoes on their feet to the shoes in their hands several times. They were wearing running shoes and carrying running shoes. White running shoes. One of them had a running shoe in each hand. Actually she had them so her hands were in the running shoes like the way you put your hands in socks after you’ve sewn buttons on for eyes and red felt for lips, when you’re using them for puppets. The soles of the shoes were facing out, towards me. The other woman had tied her running shoes together by the laces like you do with skates. How she was holding them was by looping the tied-together laces over one of her hands.

I was on my way to the variety store to buy some lemons.

Backyard

I must be getting good at making love because my head doesn’t press up hard against the bedstead anymore.

We had two blue jays visit us this morning. We could see them through the bedroom window. Military-looking, their shoulders puffed up like a soldier’s army coat in winter and their defended heads pointing in both directions, frontward at the beak and backward at the crown.

I’m grateful for the trees in the backyard of one of our neighbours. Improper weed-like trees, excited by the wind, happy like a girl twirling a hula-hoop. They had been hammering something in behind them all summer long. I hope they won’t decide that it’s the kind of something we all need to see.

Because I like the trees. Every day I look out at them and tell Larry. I like the sky the birds fly away to, exit points from the square plots of the neighbours’ squeezing in. I know they have to be too stupid to notice; how enticing the grey sky is of fall.

Our neighbours turn their corners on the populated streets and parkways just as we do. I know they have to be too stupid so there’s a place to go to be with you alone.

Things not alone

The problem with me is that I’m not alone the way I thought. The way I am is like a boat in water not able to make sudden stops and turns when I thought I wasn’t like that. I thought I could slip through things cleverly like without attachments. I am like a school of fish. I can’t just go somewhere alone without the rest of the school. We’re all together, one mass of body. I am like a peacock, with a tail, even if it’s not up and regal, I have to be dragging it behind me. I’m not alone. I am like getting married the way a princess does, pulling a great long train of my importance behind me.

Things are attached to me like flying a kite on a windy afternoon on a nice day in fall. I used to think I could snip it free. But that wouldn’t change it’s a part of me.

**

A bird was sitting itself on one of the Echinacea plants in the flower bed in front of the porch. Only a few of the flowers still had a touch of pink left to their bloom. Echinacea is also called purple coneflower. They still look nice but brown and barren like witchy things look nice when their blossom’s spent in fall. The bird was using its beak to eat the flowers, digging it into the furry cone head part which on Echinacea looks like a big round globe rising from out of the petals.

That was a month ago. He would grip his feet around one of the flower stalks but not necessarily get a good balance. So fly over to another one. Try and settle in there.

From what the bird did, some of the withering coneflowers now have large triangular chunks missing from their round globe coneflower heads. They look like they have mouths. The mouths look like they’re grinning and talking to each other.

Belonging

The way I used to do it was just ignore the feeling and barge hard. It was the feeling of not belonging. I had graduated from university but didn’t know what to do. There was nothing left to do. So I signed up for another year at another university. I shouldn’t have really because I was kind of sick of writing essays about poems and writers. Kind of sick of proving how smart I really was never proving anything.

It was my home town. First I was going to university in another province far away. Then I was finishing up those credits at my home town university because I didn’t get them all, the way I should have. This time I was going to do it for real, push the hardest ever, prove to everyone how brilliant I was, try super hard, hold nothing back, wow everyone. The feeling of needing to succeed so much was at a pinnacle, at the pinnacle of a hill; which conveniently was where the school was too. You could sit on the front steps of its important beautiful entrance, look down and see a big expanse of lawn. And a little concrete path going down in between the grass that you couldn’t see the rest of anymore at a certain point of slope. Nobody was going to keep me out of where I didn’t feel like I belonged, of where what I wanted wasn’t going to be okay.

Today Larry’s cousin Sharon’s turning 60 and her daughter’s having a dessert party and Larry doesn’t want to go. His mother’s calling. His aunt’s calling. “Don’t break the family up.” “Come on, get over it.” “We all want what’s for the best.” But what if he just doesn’t feel like he belongs? Does it have to mean all those other things?

I wonder if I would feel like I belong in writing grad school. I know I want it desperately. Do I want it just like I wanted it before, to bang my head against a university wall of how I don’t belong, how everything about me is all wrong?

It’s nice being at the top of a hill, because you have the view, especially when it’s a big open space. Except if there were to be predators there they could see you easier too.

Stop signs

Our neighbourhood is a combination of four-way stop signs and two-way stop signs and old Jewish ladies whose husbands have passed navigating both in the reverie of what used to be their husband’s oversized Oldsmobile’s they can’t let go of.

These reveries sweep and are ranging taking full advantage of any streets that bend. Walking your small child to school on streets without sidewalks, be sure to keep to the grass.

The problem with a husband’s being dead is his not keeping up with the times. It makes him insecure not knowing about four-way stop signs and the protocol. So when his voice whispers through the ventilation and the windshield wipers and the ripped area of the ceiling over top the passenger seat, the lack of knowing makes him act a little bigger, “Mildred, for heaven’s sake it’s nothing,” he crackles into ears a little waxy and stuffed up from maybe a grandson said something different but it seemed too complicated, that kind of care, a lovely boy.

There was a time when there weren’t so many four-way stop signs, just free unfettered passage through the meeting place of the two streets. It wasn’t all gummed up.

I almost went through one this morning, a two-way stop sign, without waiting for a garbage truck to scoot by. I was thinking he was going to stop, that it was a four-way stop sign and was already starting up my car slowly rolling forward to go, for when he did.

The guy in the garbage truck was wearing orange coveralls. Well, not all orange, partly. He gave me a stern look for my corrected mistake, then when he could see my friendly waving contrition his brown eyes smiled.

Action meanings

I’m at the Dominion again. In the car. It’s Wednesday, Jacob’s drum lesson day, so I’m here. I was going to do it a little different, walk over from parking behind the drum lesson and just get a few things but then it started to rain.

I don’t want to go in because of the fish counter guy. I have a bad feeling about him and don’t want to have to see him and what I think his brain is thinking. I’m always feeling uncomfortable around people I don’t even know, taking their actions to mean something too much to cope with.

Like today, in this particular Dominion the aisles between the vegetables are narrow, and this lady is walking right down the middle not leaving any room for me to get in, so I’m generously waiting for her to exit and she does. But couldn’t she even be polite about it, acknowledge me and what I’m doing for her? But everybody’s different. Maybe that little hum combined with the glance over my left shoulder without looking at me means “thank you” from where she comes from.

So I did make it into the Dominion. We don’t need any fish this week anyway. And if the fish guy’s there, behind the counter when I walk by I’ll just…. maybe I’ll just quietly hum and look over his left shoulder.

But first I'm still deciding in the car in the parking garage which is not a very nice one; dark, underground, very stuffy feeling. I’m listening to music. A lady, finished with her shopping, is walking towards her SUV with her maybe six year old. They look efficient, slim and properly middle class. Her vehicle shines even in the dark.

Oh, oh. If she sees me lurking in my car in the dark in the garage not going anywhere, listening to tunes, avoiding the fish guy she’s gonna think it, that I’m the one who’s the stalker. Me. She already saw the fish guy when she was shopping. The fish guy was fine. It’s not the fish guy lurking in the parking garage.

This is a case where you have to look with enormous intention away from her and her son, look in the direction of the shopping cart return area, look like you are doing some very serious and important thinking business that simply can’t be put off one second longer.

One purchase I made last week when I was shopping at the Dominion was raisins, Sun-Maid raisins. My mom used to give these to us when we were small in little cardboard boxes on the back stoop in response to our pleading to get let back into the house on sunny cold spring days. These ones are in a big plastic container you open up the top of and scrunch your fingers in to get a handful, then seal the lid back on. They’re so good Larry and I gobbled them up in a week with a little help from Jacob. Raisins are healthy too.

I wouldn’t have remembered to pick them up again. They’re in an aisle I don’t usually go to and they weren’t on my mind. But then a box of them, one box, appeared alone, towards the end of an aisle and in amongst the rice crackers. Jacob eats a lot of rice crackers. Like a peculiar case of divine intervention.

Dangers of music

Last night when I was dozing off I dreamed there was this entire extra house next door to us that belonged to a friend of my mother-in-law’s. She had given it on loan to her. We went inside of it and it was filled with more things we have no use for like all the things she gave us that are in our garage that we don’t need and have to have a garage sale for one day when she’s not paying attention to our ungratefulness. In the dream we were responsible for these things too, an entire extra house of old things we didn’t want to have to look after.

Then I woke up, suddenly, heavily, burdened with it. I was beginning to be afraid I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. When I realized it wasn’t true. There wasn’t this entire extra house full next door.

Jacob was very excited about going on a class trip today to Forest Valley. What was particularly exciting was the level of independence he was going to be experiencing, separated into an adultless group of four other guys from his class. You’re supposed to do mapping from station to station but Jacob says he already knows how to do mapping. What he would like to do is just wander around under the trees wherever it takes him. I probably should have said something to him about that.

I don’t get sending a litterless lunch. Jacob said that means I have to put everything in plastic containers instead of saran wrap and plastic baggies. I said, look, just put the plastic baggies back in your lunch bag when you’re done with them, the same as what you would do with a plastic container. But according to him, that wouldn’t be the same.

Rain boots is another problem. When do kids need to wear rain boots these days? I had some for him about three years ago. He wore them a few times.

I was sitting in the driveway after I came home from dropping Jacob off; listening to this beautiful local band called Broken Social Scene Larry just introduced me to, the rain rippling on the car window so beautifully. No wonder they always take that shot in movies. I was so stupid when I was a teenager. I didn’t understand anything. The beauty of being that way was in the music listening. Back then I would never get sick of songs I liked. Now I have to be so careful.

I was listening to this U2 CD in the kitchen preparing dinner for a few days in a row. I was gobbling it up. But now I can’t stomach the thought of listening to it again. When I hear Bono on the radio, any Bono, I have to change the station. And I think terrible things about his earnest visions. I think the worst of him. Don’t talk to me about it because I’m malicious.

Sometimes the passion of the music would sweep up so high it would meet and then obscure the sound of the heavy rain on the car roof. Then the rain slowed down so you could see the separate dots of it on the car window like a hundred different dimples breaking out from smiling or like being in a kind of speeded up time that allowed you to see from the inside the craters getting formed on the moon.

Panthers and Leafs

One time Larry was playing hockey. He was on defense and his fellow defenseman passed the puck to him around the net. It came back high up along the boards and hit him in the shoulder. It hurt so much. He got a bruise that hurt for a week.

Toronto is playing Florida tonight. Florida isn’t a contender. So it’s too bad for Todd Bertuzzi that he got traded there. Gary Roberts is there too. He’s really old for a hockey player but everyone respects his work ethic and his toughness. Gary Roberts used to be on our team. He used to be a Leaf.

The camera pans on Gary Roberts because of how interested we Leaf fans are in him because of how hard he played for us and what he used to mean. He looks quiet. He looks like he wishes he was still a Leaf, still a contender. The camera pans again for us on Roberts. It pans like an old lover who can’t stop stealing another illicit glance and trying to decipher if what it thinks it sees is true; if the look of regret on Roberts’ face is ours, if its true, if it still belongs to us.

For Thanksgiving dinner Larry made a stir fry. We paused the hockey game because we have a new technology on the TV that lets us do that then skip over the commercials. Sometimes the kids miss the commercials though. We were all thankful for different things, some personal and some worldly.

What Larry gave thanks for reminded Eli of a story of how one of his buddies who used to be in the Reserves with him but is now in the Regular Forces was put on casket carrying duty for the dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. It was because of all of his previous experience in the Reserves the army felt he could be counted on to take on the extra responsibility. Eli’s friend made a joke about it, giving the regiment he’s in, The Royal Canadian Regiment, a new nick name, The Royal Cemetery Regiment. He’s just new to the Regular Forces. He’s getting used to it.

Todd Bertuzzi is the ex-Canucks player that checked another player from behind in such a hard, vicious and dirty way the player’s neck was broken but fortunately not the kind of neck break that causes paralysis but he did suffer permanent damage and sued Bertuzzi in the court of law and still can’t play. Our family all still felt sorry for Todd even though he shouldn’t have done that.

Jacob’s going to bed. He has school tomorrow. What we can do for that is pause the hockey game between the second and third periods and watch the end of the game after one of us finishes reading him his bedtime story, after he falls asleep.

Subway trains

Larry likes being on the subway platform when the trains come in from both directions at the same time. Or sometimes one gets in just a little before the other and its wind whoosh. Then it leaves the station first too, not waiting, busy, committed to its procedure; yet heavy, like an aching. The other train goes. The stale subway air fills itself back in.

Then the people from both sides of the tracks go up the escalators at the same time and it bunches at the bottom waiting for each other.

Grocery store

Now that I’ve been blogging for a few days I’m getting this little narrative voice chasing me around my days. I’ll be standing in line at the grocery store and it will begin its buzz in my ear, high pitched like a mosquito yet conversational and maybe clever, pressing its narration on the moment. I suspect it’s a wannabe and not the real thing.

The real thing is more just observing things in the quiet with no noisy buzz. Like looking at the guy behind the fish counter I never look at. At the grocery store. He wears this big white fish coat over top of his clothes with the buttons done up at the top but not at the bottom. You might also call it a lab coat. If he worked in a lab it would be a lab coat. It looks like he’s very fat around the middle under the coat but slim in the arms and legs and face. He has soft brown skin and ears that stick out, droopy bleak eyes. He’s younger than I thought.

The problem with looking at people more is they notice. The guy behind the fish counter, his eyes keep hooking back into mine with big question marks jumping out of them of why am I looking at him the way I am? Is there something wrong? Then when I walk away, contemplating the cuts of meat in the meat refrigerators, I can feel his eyes still on me, subtle, impossible for anyone to see like a fine clear fishing line. I’m pretty sure he’s checking out my butt.

Coming out of this I pass an older man. White hair, thick glasses and taking those small, older-person-with-thick-glasses, “I’m looking around and up and feeling very lost” steps. He looks at me and speaks. So I think I must know him. He kind of looks familiar, maybe kind of like a man I know from my son’s baseball league. I say, “Hi,” because I really am the kind of person who forgets people I’m not supposed to, forgets people I should know. It freaks me out I do that. I’m sorry.

But he was just talking to himself. We didn’t know each other. He was saying how he’d forgotten something. I guess the going back because of forgetting went with his being old too, which drifted back to me, what he was saying, as he went by, a stream of misunderstanding becoming understanding, like when the wake hits from a boat that’s passed.

I was thinking about how it’s easier to read the faces of people the same age as you. When I was young an older person’s face was like a mask to me, indecipherable. Now that I am that age I used to think was so old, all the wrinkles and black bags and funny weird moles make sense. They invite. And young people’s faces seem flat and impenetrable. I was thinking about Joan Rivers and all her face lifts to make her look young. I was thinking how it makes her face look empty, sterile and waiting like a neatly folded hospital bed.

Couch seat cushions

Apparently it’s the time of year a lot of people purchase new couches. The reason I say this is because there’s a lot of old couches being put out by the side of the road. I am surprised how many people put out their old couches without the cushion part that you sit on attached. Because what good is a couch without the cushion part?

What I think it is that they don’t want anyone to get to share their old couch with them. They want the usefulness of the couch to end with them. It’s their couch and no one else’s. Like not wanting to share things when you’re a kid just for the sake of it, because it’s yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. Even when you don’t need it any more.

Maybe it’s an intimacy thing. Like you spend so much time sitting on your couch you’re afraid that if other people sit on it too, then if time were to shift just a little backwards it would be like they were there with you in your living room watching the football game too but what if they were cheering for the other side? What if there were uncomfortable disagreements?

When I see a couch like that by the curb, the couch back exaggeratedly long from the lack of sitting cushions I think of murder. I think of bloody dripping cushions stashed somewhere away out of sight, evidence. But it would be a couch that the body was somehow awkwardly able not to be touching the back of.

Or an incontinent granny also stashed away but sneaking out so she can sit stubbornly on it, the couch, but then unknowingly leaking too many times on the seat cushions to the point of there’s nothing you can do to fix it anymore. All that’s left to do is glare and put the sofa out. Fill garbage bags with the cushions. Put them out on separate garbage days so no one pieces the awkwardness of it together.

A neighbour down the street from us actually put two couches out, included the cushions and covered them both with thin clear plastic. Talk about consideration! Wherever did they find sheets of plastic the perfect size to fit their couch? Some people are so organized.

What’s ideal about covering them up with plastic is that if it rains before someone finds the couch and decides they want to take it home, the couch doesn’t get ruined. Except I looked closely at these couches and I don’t know who would want them. They were in very bad condition. The fabric was all splitting, bursting open along the seams of the cushions.

Honey and Apples

I would have liked to have gone to synagogue for Yom Kippur but I wanted to get the new futon couch out of the living room and down to Larry’s studio. It’s been sitting in the living room for over a week now, okay more like sprawled all over the living room like a teenager surrounded by various junk food options. Because there’s three parts, the futon, the sofa frame and the flat wooden slat part the futon lays on top of.

First I was putzing around the house waiting for Larry to be ready to start the operation. I was preparing the kitchen table for breaking the fast in the evening. On Yom Kippur you go all day without eating, turning deeply into yourself and discussing with God how things really need to be for the year ahead. The table is supposed to be ready already because you’re not supposed to work you’re so busy concentrating on praying.

I’m not so good at those kinds of things yet. I’m not a good planner because of making last minute decisions a lot. Like should we break the fast over at one of Larry’s relatives on the other side of the family which is what we usually do, or not. Should we concede once again how everyone on that side of the family is right that the way we are Jewish isn’t good enough, or not. For example moving furniture wouldn’t be considered as properly suiting Yom Kippur. In fact for most people it would be very hard to even fathom how moving furniture might be considered spiritual.

I love moving furniture around. Larry’s skeptical. Also it kind of upsets him how crazy I am for it, how eager I am to get in his private work studio, roll up my sleeves and rearrange to better accommodate his needs. What was very spiritual of me was how I really listened to his concern that I not barge and take over all over the place, be respectful of his space. What was spiritual of him was to explain in detail how he was feeling to me and not expect me just to know and not freaking out on me when I acted how I said I wouldn’t by accident a few times anyway.

Then Eli even joined in. Downstairs is Larry’s studio and Eli’s apartment. Eli heard us clearing out the space for the couch which is so when Larry feels like it he can just sit down and relax and draw and not be all cramped up in front of his computer. So Eli couldn’t help but do some work cleaning up his place. (Thank God) What I'm saying about Eli joining in is not about one of my subtle little observations. It’s what Eli said, that he felt compelled.

What I would say is that he felt spiritually compelled.

So poor Bubby, who is really not my Bubby but my kids’, was left to her own devices all by herself at synagogue. Not really all by herself, because she goes with her sister. And everyone at the synagogue is her friend and thinks she is so wonderful. She graciously greets them all, teeth, face, hair, clothes, all perfect. She’s so much that way that when you’re with her you don’t want to be because it’s like she’s not with you or maybe at most you feel like a daughter-in-law prop. Or whatever it is you are in relation to her.

When I called up Leslie’s house to let them know we wouldn’t be coming, her husband was home. They’re having the “family” breaking of the fast there. They’re doctors but he’s not Jewish. You’d think that his not being Jewish would suggest what a liberal family we really are. But the reason he’s acceptable is because of the subsection about being respectful to new family members with prestigious jobs. He’s home and he picks up the phone. What a pretentious goody-goody jerk. It would be better if he was Jewish. If he was Jewish I could have counted on him being in synagogue so I could leave a message. I’m telling him how sorry we are we won’t be able to make it. He’s got this kind of pompous voice so he’s signing off saying, “May your fall be a good one.”

That’s his substitute for Shana Tova or Happy New Year or “I hope your year is terrific,” which is the Jewish custom. I can tell he’s been thinking about the right thing to say to perfectly meet the level of the occasion but maintain his position as the “not Jewish guy” in the family.

I should be nice to him and not bitter. I should be sweet to him like honey and apples for a sweet new year.

Spacing out

We stayed home today. For Yom Kippur.

The night before last we went out for Nuit Blanche. It was so amazing. There were so many people. Usually it's just us it seems, trolling the gallery scene. We went to bed so late.

Then we had to get up right away the next morning to go to a ceremony for the Zaglembie society. Every year the day before Yom Kippur we do this. This year was special because they got a new monument to commemorate the people they commemorate every year. There's maybe six of them in a semi-circle in black, only not a full semi-circle more an eighth of a semi. You feel like they're these spirits leaning up and over top of you. It's kind of a nice protected feeling. In between them are smaller stone units to hold the commemoration candles.

There were speeches. I was just in the mood to space out for the speeches today. Maybe I was listening a bit. My son, Jacob, came up to me at a certain point towards the end of one of the speeches. He was getting bored.

I think kids need to be bored more. He was being bored in a big open field with some trees, admittedly more would have been better and a ton of gravestones. He's never even been afraid of creepy things under his bed. I think it was a good place for him to be bored.

It was during this distraction that Larry exclaimed to me that the guy saying the speech just urged the crowd on to vengence for what happened. (Larry = husband) Then I wished Jacob hadn't interrupted me so I could have heard it for myself. But really I'm not sure if I was listening at that point myself anyway.