My sister's favour

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

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

I feel helpless.

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

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

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

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

Spring Saturday Morning

Jacob is making pancakes. Larry is down in his studio making art. Jacob wants to know how much milk, how much baking powder, how many blueberries. He argues for one banana not two because he doesn’t like mashing the bananas. Different arguments. One is time based. He and Larry are going out in two hours to the park to play hockey. He doesn’t have time to mash another banana. Not a very compelling argument.

Larry went to bed alone last night. Left the bed alone this morning. Said nothing. During the night sometimes moved away at my light touch. Sometimes didn’t. It’s our first beautiful spring morning. We have one nice view from our house. It’s from lying in bed, gaze shooting part up, part over, looking through the third window pane, the one on the far left. Tree branches. Every other view shows some form of cold suburban innocuousness. I like curling up alone in bed in the mornings under the red down comforter and looking at the wind moving the branches.

I like them even now when they’re bare. After Larry and I make love on Saturday mornings I always ask him to open the blind on the third window pane so I can curl up by myself for a while and watch the wind in the trees.

M-in-law returns

I didn’t want to go visit Larry’s mother last night. I put my shoes on and sat on a chair in the living room waiting for Larry, Eli and Jacob to get ready, dreading; also hoping that without my encouragement everyone else would take so long that by the time they were ready to leave it would already be tomorrow and it would be too late.

Jenny looked nice when we got there. She had on a shimmering pink top, a pearly kind of pink, like the pink in Japanese paintings of magnolia trees in spring. She had a tan from wintering in Florida and her face looked tight and young and smooth. She had a trim fashionable hair cut.

I settled into fixing up a salad. Larry talked loudly to Eli and me about movies we’d recently seen in an attempt to avoid his mother’s dominating him for the entire evening. Jenny spilled some frozen peas on the floor and on the kitchen mat in front of the sink which I was standing on then didn’t tell me she was pulling the mat up even though I was still standing on it. Larry lectured her for not letting me know. I made a joke about it, pretending Jenny was like a magician doing the table cloth trick. You know the one where the magician pulls the table cloth out from under the table setting and the table setting doesn’t get upset but stays in its place.

You see how visiting Jenny is tricky?

Sure we can agree that Larry acted correctly by being direct with Jenny about pulling the rug from underneath my feet. But what about his initial actions? What about his discussion with Eli about movies? If he’d paid a little more attention to Jenny at the outset would she have felt the need to disrupt the discussion by spilling the frozen peas all over the place?

And what of my actions? Why couldn’t I have just finished making the salad at home the way I usually do? Why didn’t I consider that with Jenny only recently returned from Florida she might not have a critical ingredient such honey available for the dressing causing her to endlessly make hard to pay attention to suggestions while I was also trying to listen to Larry’s entertaining banter, about other possible sweetening alternatives even after I’d made my decision about what to substitute?

Never mind my ludicrous joke comparing Jenny’s inconsiderate actions that might have knocked me off my feet to magician’s doing tricks with table cloths. We’d been there a mere ten minutes and clearly my mind was already seriously in escapist mode.

About my dad dying

Larry’s blogging again. Now I am too. The last one he did was about my dad dying.

Larry actually drew a picture of my dad on his death bed. It’s a beautiful picture even with the oxygen tube snaking up from a pillow like place at the right side of the page to a clear mask covering his nose and mouth.

One piece of supporting medical apparatus at a time, in keeping with my father’s wishes to not be kept alive if there was no reasonable chance of survival, the tube was eventually removed.

Driving back and forth from London for the two weeks we thought he might be okay then was going to die for sure we got into stopping at various Starbuck’s locations for Carmel Macchiatos with soy milk. We don’t usually drink coffee. Drinking all that sweet, soothing, milky coffee was a really nice thing about my dad dying.

The nurse wasn’t sure how long it was going to take my dad to die. It all depended. She was sitting outside of the room. At a certain point of progress, one of the other support staff had turned off the machines in the room showing his vital signs. I think the idea was to make it less macabre. What we didn’t realize, but which of course makes sense since watching over my dad dying was her job, the nurse was looking at an entire other set of machines showing his vital signs at the end of the hall.

She was being really nice but still being vague about the time line and it seemed like we were in a lull and might have to hunker down for a while so Larry went out to get some more excellent soy Carmel Macchiatos for us plus some regular coffee for my brother and sister.

I didn’t want to go in case I missed anything. Then it turned out my brother, sister and I all wanted to be able to see the vital signs so we had the nurse turn the machines back on. Which is when we noticed the heart rate numbers dipping really low which is when the nurse told us, yes, she’d noticed that happen a few times already and thought he might be going but that he’d fought his way back. Which at first made me think he’d fight his way back again but then he wasn’t.

I wished she’d said something earlier about this before Larry went out for the coffees.

The heart monitor was going down but then it stuck at the same low number, maybe thirty. I was looking away from it so I heard the nurse saying it first - that he was gone - before seeing the number zero. But then a few seconds later he breathed again, a big full breath, making me certain the nurse was wrong, my dad was still there. He was on his way back again. He was charging back. But the nurse said, no, that the big breath was just the death rattle.

Second Seder

For second Seder we went over to the Dolgin’s who do a really big one, like over fifty people. We know them through Jacob who is best friends with one of their sons. We went last year too.

Even though the Dolgin’s are so nice and make you feel like their most special and welcome guest I was going through some periods of feeling extremely alienated throughout the ceremony. It would have been better if Larry was sitting beside me and I could touch him like he was last year but this year he was across from me.

It’s just there’re so many things that are part of the ritual that I don’t know. I could learn them, but I don’t care to. So you see where that puts me? I would say it puts me in one of my usual positions, that of feeling like a child who has no choice, like a victim of my circumstances.

I was thinking, what was I thinking, converting to Judaism? I was thinking how it was just another one of those things I could say, okay, sure no problem, I’ll give you this, to. I’ll embrace this whole entire religion with rituals and a different language with different letters. Why not? What’s the big deal? Why wouldn’t I add another way to feel overwhelmed and alienated from the world? What’s the difference?

I was crying, thinking of my mother. My father told me recently that when he met my mother she pretended to be Jewish. She did. She did it because her mother cleaned houses for Jewish people and my mother got it in her head that being Jewish was better. Can you imagine my converting all equaling some perverse way for me to please my mother I could never please? I didn’t even know.

Escaping from Egypt is a story that lifts you because it’s a story. Sometimes I think all stories are lies. I was thinking about the ritual of it, of the parallel between that escape and escaping from the lies of pretending to be what I am not, an inherited tendency from my mother, my mother who I don’t talk to, because she expects me to be something I’m not, rejects me when I won’t.

I didn’t used to like Passover so much. I was more a fan of Rosh Hashanah, about planning, looking forward, the power of living inside a metaphor with a productive God-driven purpose, how the Moon is always in the same shape and the same place in the sky when you’re going to break the fast after synagogue on Yom Kipper. I found Passover too much about looking back, too bitter. All the plagues.

For first Seder we did it at our house. I couldn’t bear to go to my mother-in-law’s again. Her place is always so stuffy. You feel like you can’t breathe. And Larry hates all his cousins. We couldn’t go to one of their houses. They act so superior.

I made a really nice meal. It was a lot of work. Jenny, my mother-in-law brought the gefilte fish. A ton of other things. Larry’s brother Mike came from London with his wife who didn’t convert and didn’t want to read from the Haggadah, “no thanks.” She was sitting beside me at the end of the table like after her it was just the emptiness of infinity.

Thinking of Magnolias

I let Jacob sleep in because he couldn’t get to sleep last night. I didn’t feel like getting up either. But then I was just lying in bed. It was thundering. Thunder is so special this time of year, like it’s the frightening secret behind what makes things blossom, because there hasn’t been any for a while.

Jacob pretended to be much more tired than he was. The grey outside to go with dark clouds in the sky to go with thunder was getting in the house.

I put the windshield wipers on the fastest. Jacob sat in the front seat which he didn’t get to do before because of air bag safety. “Where does your air bag come out of?” he asked. I pointed to the area in the middle of the steering wheel. I asked where his was. He showed me a spot above the glove compartment.

Jacob said the windshield wipers looked angry with each other. How they were taking turns attacking each other. I told him I could see that. I told him, no more chocolate before bed because it makes your body go all - and I made this zapping jolting spasm holding my arms out spastically too of my body - and then you can't get to sleep. Jacob observed an especially big splotch of rain fall on the windshield just as I was doing my imitation monster of Frankenstein. He noticed how it was the perfect dramatic finale of my contraction.

The rain fell harder and the rain drops spread bigger on the windshield despite the angry wipers’ efforts to get to and at each other. They look like mini-bullets from a helicopter, Jacob said.

Than I dropped him off late at the school where last year his French teacher suggested he might have a learning disability because he doesn’t pay attention to the dumb way she teaches French which is just about rote and facts and she would never think of how when there’s a story behind something it makes it that much easier to understand.

When I think of her saying that it makes me feel like an angry windshield wiper trying to get at something but instead only able to wipe away the tears that are also the rain.

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.