this world and the way it works

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the snow stayed off the sidewalks? Well.

There might still come another two inches to cover the grass and turn this into a white Christmas, but I will live without it. In the meantime, I have a particular Christmas song in my head, the only one I know that mentions Saturday Night Live, in homage to my aunt Karen, who loved David Cassidy growing up, and my mother who gamely shared a room with her and tolerated David Cassidy pinups because she loved her sister, and my grandmother who lost both of her daughters but learned to let the rest of us light her up. May your life be filled with sunshine, may your every wish come true, may you find a sweet fulfillment in everything you do. That’s Christmas talk, sure, but it’s Tuesday talk and March talk and birthday talk and it is eminently suited for days when everything you touch turns into a white sidewalk of sloppiness.

The angel on my shoulder says Walk in the grass, then, girl, you won’t melt. Or maybe you will, ha ha! It gets away with anything it likes and has taken to smoking Parliaments.

Christmas doesn’t mean the same when so many of the people who were at your childhood table aren’t there anymore. It just doesn’t. But it means something new, something you don’t absorb blindly because tradition makes it so. It evolves, lets in new family members, glows with LED instead of whatever we call those strings of lights I grew up with. I will spend it doing things I’ve put off, putting the year to rights and then putting it to rest, learning to get rid of the vignetting that comes along with this lens or learning to love it. I will perfect my fig vinaigrette. It might not look like celebrating to anyone who requires decorations to see Christmas, but it is, I promise you, I promise. It is as close as I come to Snoopy-dancing.

dinner by fingers

reverb10: moment

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

Reverb10 prompt from Ali Edwards

@aliedwards

It’s the word “most” that stymies me here. I had several, and alive isn’t the word I’d have used to describe them. Some are too personal to write about publicly, some take too much backstory, and some were fleeting and wouldn’t translate well to the prompt. 

 

There were times I felt I completely inhabited my body; that’s one way of looking at it. Those two days in Toronto when I was on my feet for eight hours or more pounding the pavement in new neighborhoods? Everything spoke to me, my muscles, my bloodstream, my breathing all orchestra members with my brain as conductor. At night I collapsed into bed, unable to fall directly to sleep because I couldn’t turn off the connections between my brain and my other systems. Yoga, too, makes me feel every inch of my organism, unless the instructor’s too whispery—then I just get annoyed :)

And then there were times I felt as though “alive” was not even the right word; I felt like part of something bigger than just one life. Canada Day was a prime example. I love being in Ottawa on Canada Day when the entire country is celebrating. I love being in that huge, relentless, pot-smoking, giddy, noisy mass of people moving up and down Rideau Street. I got caught up in street concerts, displays, and eavesdropping. The core of me almost disappeared while I let everyone else fill me up; I felt shared. At night, instead of heading to our usual spot amidst the crowds at Major’s Hill Park or the lawn in front of Parliament, we found a nook outside a favorite store, shared bowls of gelato, and looked straight up for fireworks. All around us, employees of the various restaurants came out of kitchens and did the same, their aprons still on. I can’t distill a day full of flags, music, shawarma, people, knitting in the street, and summer down into anything smaller than that. It’s a unit for me, and that makes it a moment. 

recycled writing: my own Thanksgivings

If it matters to you, it’s a Litebook, but they haven’t sold this model for years.These days I sit in front of a light box in the mornings. It helps enough that I keep doing it. Angled just the right way and at just the right distance from my eyes, it starts out annoying and ends up almost pleasant. When I stop noticing it, that’s usually a sign that it’s time to turn it off. This will last until the days start noticeably lengthening and the thaw begins in earnest. You’d think the reflected brightness of all that snow would help a little more than it does.

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 I went spelunking in an old diary looking for a piece I once wrote on Thanksgivings, which are of course very different since I came to Canada. There is a Thanksgiving holiday here, but it’s anticlimactic—just another Monday off for most people, not that we don’t enjoy those in this house. For anyone who worked retail all through college, Thanksgiving is the last day of normal life (and normal shift-lengths) until after the gift-return rush in January.

We started when I lived in State College. Mimosas in the morning, Thanksgiving parade tinny and loud, the thumping of a flour-sack towel against a turkey breast, careful salting, calls home to my grandmother, the cozy warmth of an ugly rental kitchen that had always hosted reheatings, not holidays. It was an excuse for me to cook for someone else, and an excuse not to make trans-state drives on treacherous November roads. We would have to work early the next day; if the mall opens at seven, you’re there at six-thirty, straightening shoes on lucite pedestals and making sure the shelves are packed with merchandise. Driving three hours for dinner and three hours back the same day just wasn’t worth it.

Mel wouldn’t touch my stuffing, but she loved my turkey, filling up on it and salting it heavily. (She salted everything heavily, that girl; she did everything with abandon. Any day could have been her last and she’d not regret a thing.) Afterward, we went downtown and caught a movie, covering our ears with out hands, stopping the cold not at all and freezing our fingers. We went to bars where we could skip the cover, dance to Abba, drink experimental cocktails, and pretend the next day wasn’t only hours away.

We kept the tradition for years, even after we left retail. Other people joined us, too, savoring my stuffing and pumpkin pies. In Lock Haven, in another tiny apartment with another terrible kitchen, with Christian helping me peel potatoes and calling me Kimberly. In Athens, in my bright and sunny kitchen, hardly a cloud in the sky. Phil came from Pennsylvania and Dan from New Hampshire, and by that time Mel was already in Georgia, too, all of us hundreds of miles from home and family. And then one more Thanksgiving; in Gainesville, just before I had my last two wisdom teeth removed, I cooked for the gang one more time in her tiny kitchen. Afterward I slept, full of painkillers, in her loft bedroom while they went to the Mall of Georgia to be consumers themselves instead of retail slaves. 

After that year, I went to the reservation, where it’s hard to get excited about Thanksgiving. And after the southwest, I came here. I haven’t had a Thanksgiving that made me feel that good this century, dears. And that’s okay, it really is. Everyone loves their childhood Thanksgivings—over the river and through the woods, and all that—and nothing replaces my grandmother’s turkey, gravy, and stuffing. These on-my-own holidays were different. The food was great, but it wasn’t the point of the day. It was one time of the year we said overtly what we lived the rest of our lives, which was that we were a family by choice, braided together just with love instead of DNA. 

the ballad of the lonely G2 bottle

It’s a good thing “Mad Men” hasn’t started yet, because the next two weeks are a crunch time for me and I’ve got no time for it. It’s a self-imposed crunch, a deadline that will have me finishing all but the last bits of the first part of my book. I’ll be halfway done with the first draft, which I pretty much restarted completely before the first week in April was done. Three months of really glorious work. Being this proud of a first draft is an entirely new experience for me. To hit this deadline, I’m going to have to nearly double the number of words I’ve been writing per day, but it’s doable as long as I plan in advance. After this push, the second part of the book leaps ahead a number of years, so I’ll be leaving the sixties behind for another few months while I finish the draft, except for whatever Don Draper wants to share with me. And he’s not the sharing type.

To that end, I brought myself last night to Inbox Zero. Today I have a few personal emails to send to really clear the decks, but I did it. It took the weekend. I worked the heck out of my Evernote account, filing bits of news, story ideas, facts about medical care and law and what kind of ultrasounds were available in the sixties. (They were!) I watched a documentary online that I’ve been meaning to watch for months on the CBC website, and you know how that could have gone—you go back when you have time, and the thing’s been replaced by something else or expired arbitrarily. Thankfully that didn’t happen, but I’ve got to do better at managing the flood of information into my email box. I don’t mind things hanging around in my Google Reader, but a backlogged inbox is a source of stress every time I open it up.

And amid this scattered posting—the kind of thing that would surely wind up creased and crunched in a deep old desk—the Elliott Brood show. There are three things I want to tell you about it:

• We first heard Elliott Brood a few years ago at Westfest and Myron’s remembered them all this time later, so when we saw they were going to perform for Canada Day we knew we’d be there. Their music is perfect for summer festivals—stylish and crowd-pleasing, with the best kind of energy. It would have taken a lot for us to miss this show—but it’s a good thing we found Oka afterward instead of before.
• In front of us were a small, dark woman in black lacy garments and lots of makeup, and a wholesome, kind of shlubby-dressed guy, both in their mid-twenties. He had the most startling blue eyes and curly blond hair cut short, and she looked bored out of her mind while he clapped vigorously and sang along with the music. She did a lot of texting. At one point she gestured to him with her phone and walked away, outside the pavilion. They both nodded and smiled at each other. She left her sports drink and her bag of chips on her chair. A few minutes later I said to Myron, “That’s the last he’ll see of her.” The poor guy kept looking for her to come back, but fifteen minutes later he picked up her trash and headed away from the concert he’d obviously loved to track her down. Myron and I shared a look, and then we moved into their spots. Hey, it was a big crowd. You move forward when you can.
• The venue was set aside for the Jazz Festival, which was going on before Canada Day.  

EB Canada Day from the deep old desk on Vimeo.

After I watched a heart get—if not broken—then squished a little bit right in front of me, I was healed right up by watching the hip-bumping stylings of this other couple. To the left, you can see the red shirt and jeans of the boy left behind. Like seeks like. The shlubby guy will find a girl who thinks he’s a giant teddy bear and who can’t get enough of squeezing him; the tiny girl will find a man who will never tell her he likes her best before she puts her makeup on. And if we’re lucky, we wind up sharing a moment like this with our best friend when our hair’s gone white. I’m just giving this to you unedited and straight from my eight-year-old camera, but if this doesn’t put a tiny smile on your face, well, I just don’t want to know that about you.