cribchronicles.com

days slip by and it’s like there’s nothing i can find to say…as if all the threads of narrative got wound up like dust bunnies and shoved behind the furniture, hidden by the bulk of everyday living.

but under my skin, my busy, moving skin, i am here. wanting to speak. wanting to be heard. wanting to find space in the riot of routine to make words.

i wrote poetry when i was a kid. never reams of it, but terse, crafted experiments with rhyme and free verse and the siren song of rhythm…odes to stormy weather with titles that mortify me now, and efforts to rework what i thought of as the sheer literary perfection of Duran Duran’s “Hungry like the Wolf.” there were early forays into themes of becoming, too, and a few pieces half-remembered that i wish i still had, that dart across my memory taunting me with the idea that my career as a poet peaked at fourteen. it was like alchemy for me, this writing, a spell cast with words and ideas, woven on scraps of paper but always intended, secretly, in my emo-kid heart, for the world.

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i grew up listening to the poetry of Bob Dylan on my mother’s Joan Baez albums. we were not a radio family, and the years of 8-track passed us by. we had a big old streamlined veneer turntable left behind by my father, and a collection of perhaps a dozen records that i figure he deemed too lame to bring with him when he went away to find free love: John Denver, Anne Murray, Roger Whittaker, The original Sound of Music Broadway recording, Simon & Garfunkel, some Salvation Army lady singing hymns, and the cream of the crop, Kristofferson and Baez, two albums each. the anti-establishment soundtrack of my oh-so-ironically-conservative single parent home, where middle-class respectability was the heighth of aspiration. yet i grew up singing along to “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “Hard Rain” and my mother wondered later where i’d picked up my iconoclastic strain. she is not a person overly inclined to listen to the words.

i was well into my teens when i discovered that it was Bob Dylan who’d written half the songs that had held me rapt with their stories and their power on those scratchy Baez albums. i developed an acute case of hero-worship. i threw myself headlong into the canon of post-folk Bob, meandering through the intro-level cool of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the rest of Greatest Hits Volumes 1 & 2, progressing to Big Pink and “Isis” and “Brownsville Girl” and “Tangled up in Blue” over a period of years, different rambling tales enthralling me as reflections of my own love stories and wanderings and at the same time as universal, the only universal i ever really believed in.

the one thing i ever wanted to be when i grew up, all those years, well into my twenties, was Bob Dylan, bard. it is a sad, even silly thing to long for a voice that is already taken. i wrote derivative bits here and there, but was contemptuous of their obviousness, their sub-par Dylanesque parody. i ached to be wise, prescient, conduit of a generation. but while i could see, on an instinctive level, the rawness around me in that strange early-90s recession world on the cusp of grunge, i could not speak. i wanted to reap what i could not sow. my poems shrivelled and died. i turned my back.

i learned to play guitar, instead. badly. i sang folk songs, and i made a joyful noise of other’s words.

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i come now, with age accompanied by hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, to the realization that i am ill-suited to bard status in any case. even if i were able to shed all the extraneous responsibilities that eat my time and my internal narratives, i am not that type. i am no loner, no prophet. i like company, particularly in my misery. i hate being misunderstood. i fear offending. and i always fail whenever i try to frame things allegorically. but it isn’t just temperment and talent keeping me from my original life’s goal, oh no. it’s drive. i dabble. i am not courageous nor focused enough to master the craft of poetry and metaphor, to speak broad truths in permutations unending, to be the mirror of society that people quake to see themselves in. even if i could, i wouldn’t. i’d chicken out, over-analyze, get distracted by the laundry piles and fail to practise. i would assume that vocations come with no assembly required.

this doesn’t make me sad like it would have if i’d been able to see myself in this place some twelve or fifteen years ago. because i do speak, here, even if sporadically, even if sometimes only of diapers and songs i wish i’d written and themes that get repetitive after awhile. i speak as an editor at heart, the studied one who stints out her words and focuses on minutiae and details, small truths. but i keep making myself come back and speak, trying to learn my own words, to get back to that magic of alchemy that i tasted at fourteen, and keep the furniture from taking over completely.

but i marvel at those whose voices are bigger than they are. and i wonder if the opus unborn lives in all of us, somewhere under the clutter and the words we carve out from our days, or if these collections of the mundane are enough, are opus in themselves in these ether-bound rooms of our own?

we leave tomorrow for five days, off to Blighty for work, both of us. without Oscar.

i am excited – any chance to travel is cool by me, especially to historic parts of Britain previously unvisited by my Anglophilish self. even if they do make me work while i’m there.

while we took Oscar with us when we went to England last spring, i’m not entirely sorry he won’t be accompanying us this time around. the flying wasn’t a gay old time, to say the least. i also wasn’t working on that sojourn, just tagging along on long-saved airmiles so O and i could wander the streets of London with our transplanted friend Elise, which was grand. that first trip, though, planted seeds that have recently blossomed into this work trip, and since i’m officially part of the work bit this time around, the whole deal would probably be somewhat less effective and productive with the charming ankle-biter along. i’m still a little amazed (um, read, frantically ill-prepared) about this journey really happening…certainly two trips in a year to England is the sort of thing i fantasized about throughout a childhood when i very literally never went anywhere.

but i have these monsters that live deep in the cellars of my heart. i keep them muzzled most of the time, but the upcoming trip has unleashed their voices. weak voices, but shrill, insistent. they’re nothing special, i assume, these monsters, nothing that any of you who aren’t parents or even just children of parents yourself wouldn’t recognize. and they’re tamer than many…but they scare me. i don’t worry about my boy in the loving, generous care of his grandparents while we’re gone…in that i am blessed. but i fear planes falling out of the sky. i fear terrible, random horrors.

i fear not coming back.

i cringe in shame at the half-finished will kit in our desk drawer, given up because the complications of trying to sort out the proper language for bestowing custodial rights to others on our own. i kick myself for not having made that lawyer’s appointment to clarify precisely those things, now that it is too late to do so. mostly i stick my head in the sand and mutter the quiet litany of “we’ll be back soon, love” over and over in my semi-conscious, willing it to be true because really, the stark truth is that Dave & i want to be here to love and raise our child and we’ve been too chicken to contemplate any other possibility in all its naked, monstrous ugliness.

and yet, you can’t hide from living because there are monsters under your bed, or in your heart. it is as true now as it was when i was six.

in her less touristy and far more courageous way, Whymommy has been staring down those same monsters over the last seven months, since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in June. she’s been fierce with them and their terrible whispers of weakness and statistics. she’s looked them straight in the eye through months of chemo and nausea and pain, and refused to look away. she’s been fierce because she too is unwilling to contemplate any other possibility than being here to see her two little boys grow up.

tomorrow, while we drag our bags to the airport, Whymommy goes to the hospital for a double mastectomy. she has spent nearly the last three weeks counting down to this surgery…day by day, staring the monsters straight in the eye and telling us all why she’s looking forward to an event that in itself would scare the living bejesus out of most of us…and many, many of her reasons come down to two primary, precious things: her boys.

i wish you godspeed in healing, Whymommy, friend, and the continued strength to keep fighting. with each day, you not only beat cancer, but doubt and fear.  and i thank you, for your fierce hope, your reminders these last many days of all the things that make a life rich and joyful and worth living.  for the grace and honesty you’ve shown us all as you face the monsters down.

may Sunday bring us both safely home to the boys we love.

i used to live in the Arctic…north of the tree line, north of the Arctic Circle, on an island in the storied Northwest Passage.

if you look at a map and find Winnipeg, and then keep a finger tracing north until you hit the archipelago of ice and islands way near the top of the world, you will find the little Inuit settlement – a hamlet, formally, which caused my English-teacher self no end of amusement – which was the site of my first real, full-time teaching job, my own class, day in, day out.

i stayed only for two years, which in the Arctic marks me as one of those thousands of expendable white folk who come in and out of the landscape like the caribou, seasonal and interchangeable, running past in search of adventure or escape or just steady work, but not one who stayed long enough to be a colourful character the way so many of the longtimers are, memorialized in legend, at least by their own kind. i don’t know even if my students would know me now, more than ten years after i left…i don’t know if my name would ring bells for them, or if they know that they cross my mind, that i wonder about them, their kids, that i remember names and faces, that i still wish i’d done a few things differently. i was young.

and they, in some ways, were not. i taught high school, grades ten and eleven, English and social studies and computers and gym – laugh on, oh gods – and was the regular ‘chaperone’ for the youth drop-in centre and tried to run a drama club. i was twenty-three when i got there, and most of my class were only a few years younger, with a few who stripped me in years. Lucy was twenty-nine. almost all of them were parents, even the youngest ones, fifteen and sixteen, ripe with bellies i spent the first months trying to pretend weren’t there because i had no frame of reference for a people among whom teen pregnancy was just a fact of life, no frame of reference for a people for whom school was only a thirty-year-old intrusion – a colonial intrusion in which they saw little reflection of themselves, no matter how progressive I or the system tried to be – rather than a reason for being. i spent the first year angry, i think, half at them, half at me, deep in the grips of a culture shock more gutting and destabilizing than anything i experienced in Korea or anywhere i’ve globetrotted to since. in the second year, the anger faded and was replaced by something far more complex, but i realized – with some shame – that once my student loan was carefully repaid i had no interest in spending the rest of my twenties in a town that had only a hockey arena and two small grocery stores as public venues, even if that made me just another itinerant carpetbagger from the south. and so i bolted back homeward, back to the Atlantic coast i’d yearned for with its bars and fiddles and some small chance of occasional anonymity and belonging.

but it was stark, there, and beautiful, and just so fucking big…like the sky had stretched out because it was the top of the world. when the midnight sun faded into the slanting days of autumn and the early snows, the land shone, golden, for miles unending. i have never since seen light like that. photographers eat each other for light like that. and then, it goes. and for months, there are only stars. the town sits so far over the curve of the earth that even the northern lights were dim in the frozen sky, those winters, the town a little white curve of electric light nestled around a natural harbour, everything else inky blue-black out to infinity.

the first winter, when the dark came at Hallowe’en and the last threads of noonish dusk faded from the sky by the first week in December, i trudged confused and busy through my days in the unrelenting blackness, only to waken late every Saturday morning and cry myself back to sleep. i felt like Alice, toppled down the rabbit hole, on all fronts.

but the second winter was remarkably easy, when the dark came on. i was easier in my skin by then, and happier, and i hibernated without rancour and got engaged that Christmas to the one i’d dragged up to that godforsaken outpost of civilization, the one who nested in the dark with me and kept me warm and semi-civilized myself. in a place where they only cancel school at -65 degrees, warm matters. and civilized…i thought that mattered a lot. we left, eventually, because we thought it mattered so much.

but i remember the day i glimpsed it, that thing that the north has that makes people crazy and wild, that gets under their skin and makes them unable to ever be contented anywhere else on the planet. it was early January, and we were back at school, and it was an ordinary morning, maybe working on To Kill a Mockingbird or Midsummer Night’s Dream or one of the other ambitious things i tried to re-cast in light of Inuit culture that year, and only half-failed. and somebody was at a window, gazing out into the blackness, probably wondering when lunch would come, and then the hint of it crawled up over the heretofore invisible horizon and suddenly…there was light. a sliver, but light.

and my entire class crowded to the row of windows, me included, all of us pressing against the cold glass like paparazzi, our mouths open but silent, watching the oldest thing in the world: the sun, flirting with us, announcing.  it was one of the most beautiful things i have ever been part of, that minute or two, before we all went back about our business.  nothing much was said – not much was ever said up there, in the way of commenting upon the obvious.  and yet, with our gaze we bore witness together, me and those kids, those un-kids, enacting a ritual that i suddenly understood was as old as their culture and yet utterly spontaneous, unpredicted, unavoidable.  drawn like moths to flame, we were for that one moment in my teaching career all truly captivated,  mesmerized by the turning of the earth, by the promise of light.

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i noticed, today, in spite of the four foot (and still coming down!) snowfall, that the days are beginning to grow longer, to inch their way back to the light.  and i remembered.

it is Thanksgiving weekend up here in the cold lands on the Atlantic coast.  harvest season, frost touching the air, leaves beginning to change.  pumpkins – les citrouilles – are perched on door stoops and smashed outside grocery stores, thus providing entertainment across the generations.

Oscar discovered, this weekend, that pumpkins roll.  he also discovered that they make fine pie.

Dave painted our shed this weekend, and i painted the rusty and peeled bits on the trim of the house, so we’re all perked up around these parts.  we had waffles, this morning, that my dad made, with all my half-siblings around like a big, wild clan of coffee-drinking, waffle-dining pleasantness, and O played Lincoln logs with his older cousins, who were more patient with him than i knew six- and seven-year-old boys could be.  tonight, he and my mom danced in her kitchen to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” and all was high theatrics and i couldn’t tell which one of them was having a better time.

i don’t have much to say, for once.  i’m in a quiet place, a lull of very little brain…i got some sleep this weekend, finally, after weeks of crazy work and crazier early mornings with little Herr Morning Person and his cough, and the luxury of rest seems to have left me soporific and slow.  or maybe that was the half a pie i ate.

either way.  we have shelter, and family, and food, and more than enough of all of it.

i am thankful.

happy Canadian Thanksgiving to you, wherever you may be.

the incomparable Slouching Mom offered interview questions. like a fish to bait, i bit. i’m a person who’s always found minds attractive, and Slouchy’s mind – from what i can piece together from the online personae she unmasks for us – is fascinating, and intuitive, and friggin’ brilliant. i wanted to know what she’d ask, so bad that i actually promised to answer. if i can’t sit down and have coffee with Slouchy and her generous, curious brain…then this virtual exploration will have to do.

but she does have an open invite to visit PEI.

1. Offer your high-school self a piece of advice you wish she’d taken.
oh lord. just one?

i reel a little when i try to get a sense of who i was twenty years ago: a part of me feels like that girl was older, in her certainties, than i’ll ever be again, and another part of me feels slightly mortified that she ever existed in the first place. i was so earnest then, and so confused – a total sponge for input and information, yet so completely abstract, without a compass. all i knew was that i didn’t want to be like anyone i knew, that i didn’t want the adult lives i saw in front of me. looking back, i feel a narrative connection to where i was then, in my life…ie. how i got here from there…but no more. like Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” that young me is a painting on a wall, which i can dissect in detail, even with warmth and sympathy…but ultimately, i killed that girl, traded her in for the new model(s) i’ve become in the interim.

however, for the sake of pain avoided on the road to here, i would happily sit down with that younger me – that much younger me – and say two things. first, for god’s sake, little girl, no one is expecting you to have your entire life together by the time you hit eighteen. it’s okay to be unsure. it’s even okay to start again if you find yourself on a bad path. time isn’t really wasted, especially if you learn from it. stop being such a perfectionist – you’ll only disappoint yourself.

two, you’re not fat. it’s hormones, and not worth hating yourself over. pluck your eyebrows and get out of those awful unflattering ’80s clothes and stand tall: there’s beauty in there, and someday, someone will come along to reflect that back to you, thank jeebus. for now, it would be good if you could believe it yourself.

2. Describe the most vivid memory you have from your early childhood.
i always struggle to come up with answers to “most favourite” or “most vivid” or “most whatever” questions, as they make me feel vaguely deficient for reasons i’ve never quite explored. like i’m excluding too much from the package, perhaps. but i do clearish-ly remember the first day of kindergarten, wherein i launched myself into the classroom and proceeded to show the teacher how i could count. to one hundred. i have no firm recollection of whether or not she actually let me go all the way…i really, really hope not.

3. What would we be most surprised to learn about you?
that depends, erm, on what image you’ve constructed of me from reading between the lines of this blog.

i imagine you’d all be shocked, for instance, to learn that i’m a little neurotic. :) oh no? you knew that. hmmm….

whiny? nope, that too.

tone deaf? ha. you can probably hear me humming from where you are, and it probably hurts your ears.

okay…how ’bout i have a paroxysmal fear of large dogs but send Oscar to a home with a bull dog in it, all day long every weekday. Bruiser is rather like a coffee table with a tail, really, but still…he has teeth. tell me what that tells you. please. ’cause i don’t know if it’s surprising, but i do know i don’t know what to make of it and could use the feedback.

4. Tell us what books are on your bedside table right now — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
by “bedside table,” do you mean strewn about the bed, under the pillows and stuffed down the side stuck up against the wall? good. we’re working on a collection that includes the most recent Harry Potter, which i believe Dave can now recite aloud, a Keegan history of World War II, Proust’s “Swann’s Way” (which i open at random, glory in about two pages of, and then promptly fall asleep. works like a charm. i have never finished the book and never hope to, but start it afresh every year), a biography of Mark Rothko, a Richard Scarry chewable book, and Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden.” sex fantasies of the seventies, oh yeh.

5. You were an only child. Oscar may end up without a younger sister or brother. Using your own experience as a frame of reference, what about being an only child do you not want for Oscar, and why?
ah…ah, great question. and carefully framed, which touched me. i don’t want O to grow up an only child in part simply because he was born a second son, and i feel bound, almost, to honour both him and his brother by having him grow up with a sibling. but i don’t know if that makes any sense or is just a vestige of grief, and therefore about me rather than O. but i wonder if he will have his own grief, someday, too…even just in the form of wonder and wistfulness, and i’d like him to have someone to share that with, someone to whom it belongs just as it belongs to him.

that sharing of memory and identity is really the key for me in wanting to raise two, even had Finn not been a part of our lives. it’s less about practicalities or even the supposed socialization benefits of siblings than about the weight of carrying an entire family legacy on one’s own shoulders.

there is, for me at least, an urgency to being an only child…and a loneliness, but i wasn’t lonely as a kid. it was in transitioning to adulthood that i realized i was leaving behind a whole world that had no existence outside of me, no narrative outside my own. there is no one but me who remembers my Nannie as a grandmother. no one but me who will remember the names of the dolls i loved, or recall the narrow hall of the apartment i lived in with my mom in elementary school through the eyes of a child.

i live in an odd and privileged limbo in the sibling department, as i do have half-siblings who live me near me now in our respective adulthoods, and while i don’t see them much i do like knowing they’re out there. there’s something comforting to me about them. and yet i know that so much of who i am and how i see myself is a near-direct result of having grown up as an only child, and i don’t think it’s a terrible thing, just not one i would choose for O if it turns out to be within my power.

we shall see.

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and on that effervescent note…if you haven’t fallen asleep or slit your wrists with the palpable maudlin angst, and would like to know what questions MY mind would blather out if we were at virtual coffee, you may, erm, beg in the comments. even though i’m late to this and you’ve probably answered fifteen people’s questions already.

’cause i really will ask odd ones, i promise.

i been one poor correspondent
and i been too too hard to find
but it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind
– ‘Sister Goldenhair’, America

dear self,

please take the following notes and file them under “Parenthood, week of September 19th-24th, 2007.”

1. it is a Law of Nature that any time you plan to go anywhere or do anything special, your dear offspring will, promptly, get sick.

2. if that something special happens to involve travel and/or a Very Big Occasion at work resting entirely on your shoulders, the onset of said sickness will be even more rapid and dire than is usual.  if you have the temerity to try to schedule a wedding in another province and two elephantastic work thingies all in one week, Bubonic Plague will erupt posthaste.

3. if the eruption of Bubonic Plague (or other, usually respiratory-based illness) makes you think you should take said offspring to the Emergency Room, just go.  stop second-guessing yourself, self.  you’ve been down the respiratory-based illness road enough times that you now actually CAN judge the state of your child’s oxygen sats by the sound of his breathing.  and you know shit about Bubonic Plague, so better safe than sorry.

4.  it actually is possible to have your child seen, treated and released by the local Emergency Room within a mere and almost pleasant ninety minutes, replete with xrays.  all without paying a dime, bless socialized medicine’s addled but generous – and sometimes even efficient – little heart.

5. it is NOT possible to stay home with treated and released – but still sick – child for two days the week before the two hugenormous work thingies and actually get any work done.  (or blogs read, alas.)

6. two missed days of work equals three non-existent but totally necessary days of playing catchup trying to get mammoth-rific conference thingies organized, during which out-of-province travel for debauched nuptial festivities is not recommended.  you will attempt to conjure these make-up days by calling on a latter-day miracle.  do not hold your breath.

7.  having had your child seen by the local Emergency room will make you giddy and cocky enough to think that you should, nonetheless, travel out of province for debauched nuptial festivities, as hotel has already been booked and presents have already been purchased, and the miracle of make-up days for work will not appear to be forthcoming.  some part of this reasoning is delusional – self, it would be helpful if you could figure out which part.

8.  if you do decide to leave the province with Bubonic Plague-riddled offspring and a crapload of unfinished emails (let alone poor neglected blogs gathering dustbunnies) trailing out behind you, it is unwise to drive directly into a construction zone traffic snarl in the heat of the afternoon in an un-air-conditioned vehicle during your child’s forty-minute spastic and relentless coughing fit.  this will be unpleasant for Child and will cause Stress between parental units.

9. it will be particularly unpleasant and stressful if you have a wee case of PMS, self.

10. next time you leave the house for a weekend that involves ten to eleven hours in an un-air-conditioned car with PMS and a sick child who does not particularly enjoy car travel in the first place, check and bring more than three CDs with you.  because AM radio sucks donkeys and neither you nor your partner can get past the fourth verse of an accapella “American Pie” without beginning to croak like a tone-deaf frog.

11. go anyway.  the grandparents will love seeing you all, and the offspring will love seeing the grandparents.  and will gradually shed most symptoms of Bubonic Plague and serious respiratory ailment.  and will discover the joys of the tambourine, showing more musicality than he has any genetic right to.

plus the kind grandparents will babysit overnight while you and partner go make spectacles of yourselves under the disco ball at a wedding dance with old, beloved friends.

it will all be worth it.  and the drive home will have moments of its own, like a hay field in September, somehow more weighty than those eleventy-billion things you need to do for work.

p.s. – get the $&*#^ back to work now, self.

i love my bed.

i love it with a visceral, limb-splaying, full-body passion, so much that Dave will attest what a piss-poor job i do jumping out of it in the morn, even when it’s bright and summery outside and there’s a sweet laughing Oscar to play with. i live a terrible struggle, friends, between two temptresses…my child, beloved, and my bed, neglected. in my fantasies, my delicious boy decides that nothing is more fun in all the world than to stay in bed and cuddle with mama, and then i have to give up my day job and just parent from Fortress Mattress.

suffice to say i am the Queen of lying abed, and i savour every second.

i am not, however, faithful to a single bed…oh no. i do admit that the big, cushy, quilted boxspring and mattress we bought when we moved back to Canada has been a quality investment, and that my love of the State of Bed is enhanced by the fact that i happen to be lucky enough to have nice pocketed coils enhancing that state for me. but i lived a long, bohemian life of indiscriminate bed-loving for years before we purchased said mattress, and whether on mat or cot or futon, my lazy ass has found a way to celebrate them all.

and as with old lovers, it is sometimes pleasant to recall these beds of the past, their heyday moments, the watersheds they represent…the versions of myself they once cradled and shaped. i read Jen‘s list of ten beds that shook her world earlier today, and was captivated…she borrowed the idea from Jennifer, whose blog is a brand-new delight for me…and even though i’m not a Jennifer or a Jen, i want to play too. :)

these are some of the places i’ve slept that shaped me.

1. a saggy iron college cot in Sackville NB, 1989. i propped the cot up between the window sill and the school-issue desk, and had my own tiny loft, five stories up. and my mother, bless her, couldn’t tell me it was dangerous, nor see any of the things i managed to do in that teensy space. like skip all my 8:30 classes that year.

2. the bar car on a Via Rail journey from Moncton NB to Vancouver BC, Thanksgiving weekend 1994. my ex and i and our best friend were three fresh Maritime kids moving across the country with our last few dollars in the midst of a recession, seeking the proverbial better life. we left our seats to go cop a smoke in the bar car and ended up with no seats to go back to, because the train was so crowded. we slept in the bar car/smoking car/bubble car for six straight days, us and an old guy named “Ra.” we think it was really Ray, but he was too drunk to finish his name. the whole time.

coming into the Rockies in the blackness of three am with Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” on my walkman…one of those beautiful moments i’ve got stored away to chew on, when i’m old.

3. an upper bunk in a generic hostel dorm, Oban, Scotland, 2000. it was my first hard-won long-awaited trip outside the North American continent, but i was stressed out and insomniac, my marriage unravelling on another continent. i’d never felt so lost as i did lying awake and bug-eyed on that top bunk my last night there, desperate to quiet both my mind and the ungodly snorer half-way across the room. about four am i finally lost my temper, climbed down the bunk in the dark, grabbed a random shoe from the floor, climbed back up, and flung the shoe straight across the room and (i like to hope) into the head of the snorer. pandemonium ensued, with much swearing and turning on of lights. i smiled sweetly at everyone and dropped off to sleep. and realized in the morning that perhaps, really, not sleeping wouldn’t actually kill me…but that random travel companions might if i didn’t chill.

4. a bathtub in an unidentified garret belonging to an expat bar owner in Prague, also 2000. i had gotten over the insomnia. it took longer to get over sitting up alone in a tub ’til morning, wearing goggles and trying to read Catcher in the Rye whilst on acid. walking back into the old city the next morning, still coming down, my eyes tricked me into seeing the mirage of an ocean behind MittelEurope’s spires, sun-glinted and fairy-like. i forgot, in my wonder and my haze, that Prague is landlocked.

later, it dawned on me that the misperception was an apt metaphor for that whole strange interlude, brutal yet magic-tinted as it was.

5. a hard double bed in a private room in the Orient hostel in downtown Istanbul, early 2001, within sight of the Blue Mosque’s minarets. the call to prayer at dawn is, for an infidel who’s been up all night, one of the most compelling sounds in the world.

6. a Western-style double bed in Busan, Korea, spring 2001. my own, alone. in my own apartment, which was provided and furnished by my work and represented the first time i had lived alone in more than seven years. except that it was replete with pet cockroaches the size of my pinkie finger. one of whom dropped from the ceiling onto the pillow beside me one evening.

i slept with a can of Raid under the bed.

7. a Korean yo, or sleeping pad, thin as a yoga mat, in Dave’s apartment, Busan, Korea, summer and fall 2001. i had known him for five years already, at that point, and six since, but even now when i call him to mind – his soul self, the part that matters most – i see him framed by that space, by the green walls and yellow linoleum of that apartment, his face naked. another memory saved away for when i get old…love, recollected in tranquility.

8. room with fan and balcony, Khao San Road, Bangkok, 2002. me quite unclothed on the balcony, eight floors up, looking out over Bangkok at the coming dawn. quite entirely certain, in that moment, that i had lived.

9. the last available bed in Munich during a festival weekend, 2002, after Dave and i had flown in from Bangkok, slept in a park in Frankfurt upon landing in Europe, bought tickets for Prague, and gone to sleep exhausted on the train only to be rudely awakened by a German border guard at 3 am explaining that actually we hadn’t got the right visas and were being expulsed from said train NOW. in the middle of nowhere. huddled outside locked railways station until morning, got tickets to Munich, where the closest visa office was located, arrived to discover the city was overrun with tourists and entirely booked, and walked – carting more luggage than any backpackers have a right to have – around the city until we found a hotel with a room. we spent over 100 Euro on it, which was more than we’d spent in three weeks in Cambodia the month before, but we hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in almost ninety hours. it was worth every penny.

10. a rubber-sheeted, squeaky loud hospital bed with adjustable head and feet, IWK Children’s Hospital, Halifax NS, 2005. i slept in this monstrosity for the nearly three weeks after i was airlifted to the hospital until Finn was delivered. the night he died, when we finally made our way back upstairs from the NICU in the almost-light of morning, Dave crawled in and slept on it with me, holding me.

11. a huge swanky bed in a huge swanky hotel overlooking Tianamen Square, Beijing, 2005, three and a half months after Finn’s birth and death. i was alone, travelling for work, and jetlagged and overwhelmed with the strangeness of the familiarity of being back in Asia after all that had happened. it was here, on downy comforters embroidered with ideograms, writing in my journal late, late into the nights, that i came to terms with the fact that scared as i was, i was more scared not to try again. we conceived Oscar the week i got home.  we were amazingly lucky.

and then i got to spend another two entire months in that same craftmatic hospital bed. for someone who likes beds, i still don’t like bedrest.  but…that’s another story.  and it was worth it.

now…your turn. tell me your bed time stories. please?

ponyboy

we interrupt your regularly scheduled stream of silence from the crib to announce that we are still alive. the houseguests left this morning. tomorrow is a local holiday.

praise be.

so we went to the fair.

more accurately, we went to the annual midway – locally referred to as “The Exhibition” – which comes to town for two weeks every August, lighting up the skyline with neon and the thrilling screams of human beings flying through the air in shaky, garish metal cages thrown together in mere hours.  the place is loud, hopped up, full of hawkers and discarded candy apples and cigarette smoke and a disembodied voice from the Bingo tent calling O-seventy-nine even above the peals of tinned music emanating from the omnipresent speakers.

when i was a little girl, my mother and i lived only blocks from the fairground, and for these two weeks in summer i lay awake beside my open window, at dusk, listening for the magical sounds that signalled the fair was on, the season was magical, the horses were racing, and other kids were staying up later than i was.  never having known Disney World or Canada’s Wonderland, i lusted for The Exhibition.  in the sheltered innocence of my one-horse-town childhood, it was a thing of beauty, all lights and whirling fantasy.  i lived for the day when i was old enough to go on the Big Rides.  i had not yet discovered that my stomach has all the fortitude of a pansy, nor that the guy who dropped out of school in grade 7 to drink for a living and let all his teeth fall out would grow up to be the guy who screws all the Big Rides together every year.

pushing Oscar’s stroller up to the gates of that same fairground these many years later, i felt like that kid again, racing to The Exhibition with my eyes wide.  anticipation surged when the Big Rides came in sight, like a map reading “Here Be Thrills”, and i quickened my step and then laughed at myself, because i know that the fairground is really only one block square, and that i actually loathe cotton candy, and that i am no more interested in going on the Zipper at this point in my existence than i am in taking up amateur tracheotomy as a hobby.

we circled the tiny fairground, drinking in the smells of sugar and grease and dirt and vomit, watching the lights begin to blink awake as the suppertime sky darkened with the threat of rain.  we navigated hordes of teenagers straddling the chasm between euphoria and apathy, out for the night at a site they are only just beginning to discover is small and provincial and seedy.  we waved to the men selling games of chance.  i declined a few offers to win Oscar a variety of stuffed animals sporting beer or cupid hearts…Dave declined the opportunity to show his manliness shooting duckies and banging the strongman scale with a hammer.

it is a sad place, The Exhibition, stripped of its glamour by my adult eyes.  naked, it is shrivelled and dirty, skanky even..expensive, for this local economy, but cheap and hard and crass in its lure and its delivery.  it made me feel old and sorrowful, Jackie Paper gone looking again for the lost Puff the Dragon only to find him a carnie, sucking smoke and calling Bingo numbers for the rubes who pass through looking for magic.

but a thing of beauty is a joy forever, i once read.  and magic is in the capacity for wonder, not the source of it. there was some magic still to be found on the fairground, in Oscar’s face, and in his imagination. we only went on one ride, he and i, because even the little circling boats and cars that i remember from a lifetime ago are gone now, replaced by faster cheap thrills machines that draw an older bracelet-buying crowd…but there is still a carousel, a merry-go-round.  and from the moment we chose our pink pony, his eyes were bright and full of wonder and possibility and amazement and the oppressive feel of the place lifted for me and i could hear the delight in the screams of whirling children and see the flashing lights as beautiful and strange and the scabby gold paint of our steed as gilded and perfect.

i think O enjoyed his first ride, his first trip to The Exhibition.

i had, for three minutes, more magic than i’ve allowed myself in years.

i was gonna make a pretty post showcasing all the kitschy stuff i’ve gathered and inherited and scored over lo, these many years, just because Mad asked…but then i remembered the yard sale i had when i left the country, and the flood that devoured the boxes stored in my mother’s basement while i was gone, and the divorce, and i realized…i don’t own that shit anymore.

alas.

the ceramic fish i painted in grade seven art class during my brief affair with the colour peach? gone to Jesus, fisher of men.

the gigantic red and white ashtray commemorating Canada’s centennial that i haggled relentlessly for at a flea market during my college years, because squishing roaches out on the faces of Canada’s early prime ministers was just too much fun to be passed up? now lost to history…though i suspect a long-ago ex-boyfriend of having snuck it into his box when we split at graduation.

the clown cookie jar that sat leering on top of the fridge all through my mother’s childhood and my own? crashed to the floor one day, finally, having outlasted its rightful life span by about four decades in a family this awkward.

the streamlined bowling shoes, circa 1962, Jetson-style, that i kept wistfully when my grandmother could no longer bowl because i secretly hoped my feet might shrink? given to Goodwill with good wishes, when i eventually came to terms with reality.

oh my treasures, my beautiful treasures…i miss youse.

i am the only child of an only child, and my home is filled with old things handed down, but few of them – to my surprise, when i really took stock and looked around – are nearly as kitschy or bohemian or just plain funny as i’d thought they were.

except, perhaps, this.

it’s a very, very old vase, about eighteen inches high and repaired in many places, which currently sits at the foot of our bed (safely on the floor, kinda). Oscar likes to drop things in it. Dave likes to hope it will shatter and disappear, leaving less garishness in its place. i just like it. it was a wedding gift given to my great-grandparents when they married in 1901, from the old couple across the street, who had been given it at their own wedding some indeterminate number of years before…apparently regifting ain’t new. my grandmother kept it in a place of honour, on a table at the foot of her staircase, for many, many years…where her many, many cats repeatedly knocked it from its perch and into pieces on the floor. it’s worth little, monetarily, despite its age…and yet i value it. i find it cheerful, and odd, and kind of beautiful. i will carry it with me through my life, if i can, and bestow it upon Oscar or some sibling of his like a noble albatross some day, even if he comes to see it with his father’s aesthetic eye.

i wanted to show it to you…but i know, it really isn’t kitsch, per se, except to Dave and his philistine ilk.

on that front, unbelievably, i got nothin’. if you’d only asked ten years ago, Mad…oh, i was rich, i swear! but time, the devourer, has eaten my kitsch.

i got to get me to some yard sales, clearly.

so, i live in a bubble.  an occasionally glamourous bubble, filled with plague and exciting hospital visits, true, but a bubble nonetheless.

i didn’t even know BlogHer existed until people started announcing they were going last March.

in my naivete, upon discovering this fascinating tidbit, i turned to my fellow bubble-dweller, and squeed, “there’s a conference!  a blog conference!  for hers who blog!”

and my beloved said, “yeh. BlogHer.  you going?”

i felt quite exposed for a few, brief seconds…horribly exposed and unwanted and hapless, like a flashback to that moment in junior high when you realize that not only is there a party you haven’t been informed of or invited to, but even your mom has been in on keeping it from you.  i shrank.  Dave knew about BlogHer.  was he going, for pete’s sake?  was i really the last person alive who didn’t know it existed?
turns out Mr. “I Livez on teh Internets” just has his finger on some weird pulses.  and in one of those odd glitches that occasionally occur in our house where two very close people have busy and extremely interconnected lives, he’d just assumed i knew.  (that or he was testing me to see if i track his online activity like a wife bloodhood…but…he knows how lazy i am, so i doubt it.)

so i got all squee-ish again (despite the usual self-doubt that comes with any consideration of actually stepping outside the safe confines of my bubble, but that’s a whole other narrative) and i leapt on the computer and googled BlogHer.  and gazed upon the conference date.

and my bubble burst.  or at least my delusion of venturing outside it did.  because the fine people at BlogHer – for some inscrutable reason which i cannot fathom – scheduled the damn conference for the last weekend in July.

clearly, no one consulted my social calendar.  which is reasonable, i suppose, given that it’s usually stark empty…and no one at BlogHer would know me if they tripped on me.  but people, i live in what is politely termed a “vacation destination.”  a tourist trap.  a mecca for summer holidayers.  barely anyone i know actually stays here year round…they’ve all fled for places with, like, work and stuff.   but they all come home to visit, every last one of them, these near and dear family and friends who connect me to places on the map i once went and now like to imagine from the pleasant vistas of bubble-hood.  they all come home, invariably, during the last week of freaking July.

so, while i  probably would have had serious trouble justifying the cost of the conference and the trip to myself, especially when i wasn’t earning any money, and i would be genuinely intimidated by meeting half the blogosphere face to face, however big i talk, the absolute, unavoidable reason i’m not in Chicago this weekend is that my great aunties arrived last night, and my childhood best friend the night before, and two of my dearest peeps from university are staying here tomorrow night, and then Sunday there’s a party for a friend who lives the rest of the year in Kuwait…and i’m not even sure when i’m going to hang with the lovely folks who’ve descended from London and Korea and Vancouver.

because by about the 9th of August, i shit you not, because that’s the official start of winter here in Canada, they’ll all have fled again for another year.  and i love them all (well, all the ones i’m actually trying to squeeze into my house and/or schedule) and it fills me up for all the dry months, this having company, this visiting with friends.

of course, that’s kinda what blogging does for me too.  so BlogHer, how about a November conference next year? nobody visits then, i can promise ya.

and you…you there reading, presumably NOT from a swank hotel in the Windy City.  you there, not sharing mojitos with fellow blogistas?  what’s your reason?   tell me your story.

i really want to know.  i got to have something to entertain Great Aunt Myrtle with. ;)