Temperamental

This guy I was talking to at work on the phone today did this thing, this thing I think is a guy thing. It made me so angry. I had to keep putting him on hold to try to get control of my temper.

Towards the end of the call he puts his kid on the line to take down an address I’m telling him to send information to because he can’t write and before he puts the kid on he asks me to cooperate with the kid like the way I’m acting with him isn’t being that way and has everything to do with me and nothing to do with his feeling so damn comfortable subtly taking control of our conversation because of my natural social deference toward him, alternating with my outright frustration in the face of how he’s managing to maintain the conversation on his own ignorant terms when he knows fuck all about fuck but is acting like it’s me not him when its him not me.

There’s a new QAA (Quality Assurance Advisor) sitting across from me temporarily, a guy, and he is so low key and so receptive I’m starting to get self-conscious around him. I’m starting to notice myself wanting to act ways that I think he would like so he’ll like me.

I have to keep putting the guy driving me crazy on the phone on hold. I’m telling the guy temporarily sitting across from me what I’m doing. He’s being encouraging. I’m telling him this guy on the phone is making me so mad I can’t function. I’m telling myself it’s good I’m telling the guy sitting across from me temporarily this because I don’t want to act like I’m someone I’m not for him even though I also do want to do that so he’ll like me. But I also don’t want to do it because on what basis would I be acting? I would be out of control. I would be in a fantasy of what I thought he thought was beautiful.

In reality what do I know about what he thinks is a nice way for a person to act? I only know what I think. I only know how close or far away I am to being the way I want to be, like even though I feel embarrassed for having this problem with this guy on the phone I can tell who I am by the ugly unfortunate issue I’m having with him acting like he’s the sweetheart and I’m the problem when he’s not the sweetheart.

On my bathroom break I look at myself in the bathroom mirror when I’m washing my hands. I’m wearing a nice pink necklace I got at the beach which makes my skin colour from my sun tan from being at the beach look pretty but it’s also drawing attention to the stringy, up and down wrinkles on my neck that look like the way a chicken’s neck looks. The QAA sitting across from me looks young. How could a guy like that like me when I’m so old looking? I’d have to fool myself pretty hard to see a young looking face looking back at me. My nice hair cut helps though.

This morning walking into the mall, which I walk through to get to work, a man opened the door for me. I couldn’t understand why he would open if for me. I don’t act the way men want me to. I don’t act the way they think is beautiful. So why would one open the door for me? But then I see this woman walking towards me who looks like a regular normal woman, with regular prettiness, and I think he would open the door for her too. I look normal enough just like she does. Why shouldn’t he open the door for me too? It’s something men do sometimes for women, for regular women. How it’s actually easier to open a door for an older woman who isn’t beautiful anymore. How it’s also easier when you’re an older woman to have the door opened for you.

Men

No idea really how to talk to men. Not just talk but develop relationships with. My girlfriends talk to them.

Actually I can and do talk to them. Actually I’m married to one.

But I can’t handle the going into the abstractness to deal with the opposite sexes of ourselves between us. It’s not that I’m not smart. I’m smart enough. I just can’t remember who I’m supposed to be when I’m acting like that. I’m sorry.

I’m okay if I have something to discuss. Work. The workiness of our workingness together is a good subject of communication, isn’t it? But look! Behold my girlfriends. They are having much more interesting conversations with them. They look like they’re enjoying themselves. What are they talking about? How are they doing it?

I think it’s technical. I’m squinting my eyes so I can focus in on and study their moves. I’m making better friends with my girlfriends too. We have more in common than I thought. I should have been appreciating them more before. Now I am.

No title yet

First we saw Richard. He was looking across the street at the parking lot of the plaza. He had this wild and excited look on his face. There were other kids too running toward him bigger kids. He didn’t look like he was scared of them so I was wondering if it was a game they were playing, like tag. Like Richard, they were also turning around looking at the parking lot. The way they spread out together in one flowing motion was like they were some kind of spawn brought in by the tide. They looked like the characters running alongside Tom Cruise in the War of the Worlds remake about the future that are being chased down by mechanical robots with guns from outer space.

We told Richard that Jacob was over behind Chat, the Hebrew Day School with two tennis rackets if Richard wanted to go over and play with him. Richard had sweat on the back of his head hairs at his collar. He had sweat on his bangs. Richard always hangs around the park getting in on every possible game he can.

Richard said, sure he was going to do that. He said there was a fight over in the parking lot. He walked toward it to show us where it was happening. There was a guy on his back down on the ground. He was moving his limbs but staying down. Larry was asking Richard who the kids involved were to find out if the guys involved were the same two kids who took Jacob’s baseball glove in the spring because Larry’s still planning to call those kids to task when he gets the chance. Richard stared over at the movement in the parking lot and answered Larry’s questions.

I was calling Jacob on my cell phone to let him know Richard would be coming over to play with him but decided not to because Richard didn’t look like he was ready to go yet.

The kid who was lying down stood up with some of his friends around him. Larry and I started walking toward a girl standing near the outfield foul territory of the baseball diamond. She said she knew the guys who were fighting. We walked past this other kid who was standing straddled over his bike watching the parking lot. A guy playing left field was trying to get his attention because someone had just hit a fowl ball right beside this kid. He was trying to get the kid to throw the ball back to him so he wouldn’t have to walk all the way over to the edge of the field to get it himself.

Larry called Jacob to tell him Richard should be coming over to play tennis with him soon, to stay where he was and not to come over to the park because there had just been a fight but Richard would be there soon.

When we were a few blocks away part way down the hill that goes to the valley Jacob called us from the park to tell us the kid who we had seen lying down had been stabbed. Larry told me he had seen something red on the kid’s back but he just thought it was just his friend had something red in his hand. I told Larry I didn’t notice anything red on the kid’s back. The police were coming and the two kids who had done it were hiding behind the Irving Chapley Community Center.

Larry called Jacob back to tell him if the police ask him any questions to not tell them anything because Jacob didn’t see anything first hand and it was up to people who saw things first hand to let the police know what they saw. Larry said to me Jacob has a do-gooder tendency that could get him labelled as a snitch.

We were going to walk along the path beside the river but right away it was way too full of mosquitoes. I told Larry I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed to turn back. We were running. It took a while for us to lose the mosquitoes even though we were way past where they had first started to bother us.

Sleepover

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob and Spenser giggle a lot.

Dead things

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

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

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

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

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

- My dad.

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

Ching-Mei

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

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

I didn’t realize how much I missed her.

War cry

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

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

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

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

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

Ships at sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My sister's favour

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

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

I feel helpless.

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

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

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

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

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.