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Daddy, by Oscar

Valentine’s Day embarrasses me.

it’d be too much to say that i hate it. i don’t hate it. i like chocolate too much to expend any energy actually hating prefabricated holidays. but it makes me blush and freeze up, confused.

i avert my eyes. me? nah, you can’t be talking to ME. just toss the chocolate on over the fence and be off.

for me, Valentine’s is like a door-to-door religious proselytizer, calling me out to love Jesus. i mean, Jesus is a perfectly good guy. we could hang. but whatever he’s got to do with that nasty eternal damnation scene they’re selling in their handy magazine escapes me: i do not accept the premises. i could talk faith, hope and charity all night long but a fundamental philosophical black hole would still gape across the doorstep because – at the core – we do not speak the same language, and they do not know how to call my name.

Valentine’s is the same goddam thing. it stands there, smiles perky, looks me up and down. instead of being blindly judged as a sinner, i feel like i’m being nudged to go trim the hedge, already, write a sonnet, and then frock up in some weird drag parody cross of June Cleaver and a Playboy Bunny. sex? obligatory, says the spectre of culture parked on my threshhold. never mind that there’s absolutely nothing more sexless than obligatory sex. you will Like It. didn’t you get roses, after all?

i’d like to put V-Day over my knee and pull its hair. let me tell you how you got love wrong, i’d say, and the words would come.

now take those poor wilting flowers and get out of here. come back when you can surprise me. leave the chocolate.
***

these are the words i think i’d steal, for the occasion. for Dave. who calls my name.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay – 1931

it’s been in the bottom of a drawer for years.

a little black notebook, scuffed and coffee-stained, with seemingly random pages bearing notes, lists, traces of stories. some pages are torn out. i imagine their scraps handed off like gifts, late at night, to people i’ve mostly never met.

when i first knew him, the notebook was omnipresent. i can tell you his face then was thin and young and old and earnest and cloudy, long-ish hair hanging across his eyes, but the full picture escapes me. if i try to conjure him up, i see his hands, gesturing, and his handwriting scrawled across the lines of the little book.

he was younger than me. we were both of us spoken for; there was no foreshadowing of the life to come. we knew each other only peripherally, then: a casual kinship forged over ideas and writing. i knew nobody else who had a journal, even if my hardbound art book with its lineless pages and consistent trails of black pen bore little resemblance to the record of entropy and energy he kept rolled up in his back pocket. he had written a novel of sorts that past fall, in the lines of a similar notebook.

he had a way of roping people into things. there was a literary magazine waiting to be born, he and another twenty-three year decided late one night. i had worked with him on his book – i was appointed editor, all of us swimming well over our heads. i worked for them for four months, juggling three jobs. we went national, then folded. they forgot to pay me, for awhile. it was two years before i saw him, after that.

but he was my backdoor into writing. he was one of the first people to ever take seriously whatever gift i had for words. he sat with me at a rickety table with that notebook spread wide open, and dared to ask, ‘do you think this can be better? how? and then he listened, took me at my word. sometimes. he was the very first to show me by example that just doing it – just working away, writing – was the way to build one’s craft.

he was a finalist in the Canadian Literary Awards that fall. a short story about his father, and their boat. no copy exists anymore, unless CBC has one trailing around in the bowels of an office, somewhere.

the idea that our children will never read it makes me sad. the idea that we have children – that reckless, storytelling boy and i – makes me smile.
***
respect, like writing, is a complicated art.

today is the first day of Canada Reads 2011. for ten years, it’s been an annual CBC radio staple: five books, five semi-celebrity champions making the case for their chosen tome. CBC, basically, goes a long way in Canada towards making those of us who actually give two shits about the written word feel like valued members of society. the CBC reflects Canada back to itself as a literate culture: they run the Literary Awards, they run shows where people talk about books, sometimes in depth. and they run Canada Reads.

like all broadcast media giants, though, CBC is scrambling and struggling to establish a social media presence. which ought to be – from where i stand, as someone whose writing has found an audience through the web – a glorious thing. instead, it’s awkward. Canada Reads’ selections this year were based on a massive voting campaign that Box 761 has slyly dubbed The Hunger Games: a Survivor-esque circus whose tone and lack of depth forced the authors into a travelling-salvation-show-style pimping of their wares and stripped the discussion of depth and dignity. Inklings has interesting commentary on how the cult of personality that has been foisted on the previously-congenial competition makes any real critique difficult. we are no longer evaluating novels, she claims. we are evaluating their author’s social media personalities.

i’m chiming in to note that the issue goes beyond Canada Reads. i entered the Canadian Literary Awards this past fall, for the first time. mostly because of Dave. his parents have his finalist letter laminated and tacked to their office wall. i figure my mother needs something purdy for Mother’s Day. ahem. or maybe i’m just still trying to learn to be as brave as he was, way back then.

but i note, from the date on Dave’s distinguished letter announcing his finalist status, that the deadlines for assessment of the submissions have been pushed waaay back since 1997, people. which i’m sure is a wonderful thing, reflecting the many fine pieces of writing clamouring for judges’ attention.

except that in the interim, they’re pushing us for more content. cute little contests, replete with excess of exclamation marks, dot our inboxes. share more stories!! you might win a Sony Reader!! we might publish your story online!!

my hope is that CBC is trying to create a vibrant web community around writing. my hope is that their intent is to showcase some newer writers’ work in with that of established authors, and perhaps build spaces for discussion and sharing: an online literary salon of the highest order. i like that idea.

but they’re doing it wrong.

i mentioned on the theoryblog the other day that social media is a produsage-based economy. creativity and consumption merge, and reputation is essentially built in the context of community. when it works well, it showcases work while creating strong ties and mutual audiences between people.

these contests, though, do little of the sort. instead, they take a captive audience of hopefuls and treat them as show ponies to build free content for a CBC books site that exists to feature established authors. worthy luminaries, a number of them – and i am not being facetious – but there is no produsage here, no fostering of shared community or flattening of hierarchy.

the real authors’ work is linked, to profiles and homepages. whether they control their own publication on the page isn’t clear, but it’s unlikely that their postings are random. check back every day, Joseph Boyden!! today you might see your own 250 words on the screen!!

the Literary Awards hopefuls – whose chances in the actual contest may or may not be impacted by their participation in these little games: the issue has never been addressed – are different. no links to external pages or profiles, nothing to build name recognition. no chance to pimp their social media personalities, for better or worse. and since the site appears built to showcase rather than dialogue – comments are sparse, because it is nobody’s personal space – even hopefuls who wanted to use it to comment and connect would appear odd, too keen, inappropriate to the context.

the Literary Awards themselves are useful arguably because they ARE a chance to build some semblance of profile as a writer. the pats on the head and the chirpy tone of the contests that appear to come along with participation, though, only disrespect both the writers themselves and potential of social media to be a part of their journey.

they need more Daves masterminding CBC online, i think, roping people into things and making them believe their words can matter.

all the Sony Reader prizes in the world won’t do that.

once, i thought we were a matched set of shoes, toes pointing together.

the bloom is off the rose. he is a cowboy boot, i see it now. or maybe a brogue, stitched and sewn in ways that will never match my own. but still i admire the curve of a heel, the shape of something different and curious.
***
he approaches every new thing as if it is the first, the only.

i noticed it first in our early, lazy days, expats with too much time to kill. drinking and smoking and sex are exquisite hobbies, and talking into the night is an art form we perfected. but when a pair only work fifteen hours a week, they are eventually forced back on their resources.

i taught him to play Scrabble.

i thought of Scrabble as a delightful way to share the pleasure of words. i liked to coo over my competitor’s seven-letter accomplishments, work together to see if we could make the board a patchwork of poetry. he read the two-letter-word list from the dictionary and was kicking my ass within a week.

when he takes to something, he goes at it heart and soul, to win. that took me aback, at first: i took it personally, his ethic of competition. i did not grow up with that. but then neither did i grow up with the ethic of self-application, of intentional effort. i did not know that what did not come easy could still be gained.

he has taught me.
***
he is learning guitar.

i grew up a folkie, my Bowie fetish aside. i played dolls to Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson, branched out to Dylan and Guthrie – father and son – in high school. John Prine was a legacy i inherited from my father and stepmother, Janis Joplin who i wanted to be when i grew up. i knew all the words to everything.

i got my first guitar at almost 23. first Christmas far from home, in a smoky basement apartment on Davie Street in Vancouver. i didn’t even know how to hold it, didn’t know a chord from a carburetor.

it was the first thing in my life i ever worked at.

i played by ear, and from the small book of chords that came with the case. i eked out “Leaving on a Jet Plane” first, with full stops in the singing where i had to change chords. then “Me & Bobby McGee,” a signature Kris/Janis blend that made me puffy with pride. i learned to pluck a string or two for “Wish You Were Here” and “Friend of the Devil,” but that was the apex of my vocation: i never got much past four chords and a simple strum. it never entered my mind to master, just to make a joyful noise. along the way, i taught myself to sing. i found my key, and my voice, and i was happy.

my calluses have faded over the last few years, though two guitars sit in our living room. at Christmas, Oscar’s grandparents bought a wee one for him. it came with an instructional CD, way over his head, but apparently quite entertaining for his father.

because suddenly, he plays.

in a month, Dave has learned things on guitar i never will. he’s working on a fingerpicking riff that sounds remarkably like “Dust in the Wind.” fifteen times or so a day. he’s taking lessons, now.

i do not mind being left in that dust, this time.

my children watch him, and learn that if they work at something, they will get better. i watch him, and pick up my old guitar, and try to catch up.

maybe it will last, this music…my slow plunking a balance to his passion, a reason to keep going. it’s hard to say. i tease him that he is part crow, drawn to the next bit of shiny.

and yet, he is still here.

and we walk together, not matched as i once thought. but maybe better.
***

do you think likeness matters, in a partnership?

our first Christmas together, he bought me the hat.

i never wanted diamonds. or perfume, or whatever was supposed to make me feel cherished.

those proper things always made me feel inept, party to an exchange that was somehow utterly unrelated to any of the things i valued about myself.

but a patchwork velvet top hat that called up Dolly Parton songs and Alice in Wonderland?

i think i smiled at him with tears in my eyes, that Christmas morning.
***

i turn 39 today. he got me the leather satchel he told me he’d gotten me last year but then, erm, forgot to order. it is beautiful. it looks like a refugee from 1974. i am told it will be here Friday. of THIS year.

he also got me a steamer thingie so that we can give up any pretense of me ever picking up an iron again in this life. a partner who can embrace one’s peculiarities, even the prosaic ones, is a keeper.

then he took my picture.

he starts a new job, today. or at least a new position, with a right official title: Manager, Web Communications & Innovations, UPEI.

a “real” job, my mother would say. she and i, who’ve both worked all our lives, have never quite had one.

i’m going to call him “Guv’nor.” or just “Sir.” i think the hat makes him look extra respectable.

i flew home from Korea six years ago today. we were wanderers, itinerants, de-coupled from any of the systems that make this culture run. we had no place in the order of things, no niche. he was a bad boy sort, a 3 am philosopher trying to leave the cigarettes in the dust. my mother asked him point-blank how he planned to support me. i told her i had no need to be supported.

i was wrong. i didn’t know. but he’s held me up, through my rage and sorrow when Finn died. through the sleeplessness of two babies with colic. through this through-the-looking-glass adventure into academia, which owns me and strains me and makes me feel small and brittle too many busy mornings. we have scrambled, these six years, to establish some kind of a place here: to belong, to become embedded in the structure of the place. to see whether we could succeed.

it’s him who’s done it. six years in, and we are finally and for sure no longer staving off another junket as expat English teachers.

and i sigh with relief, and gratitude. because i needed to know it was possible: that even if the American dream is pretty much a sham, and no success ever means security, that sometimes, still, the good guys do okay.

even if my mother still thinks of him as ‘the bad boy.’
***

what does it mean to you to be ‘supported’?

…i think he’s wondering how he got here from there.

on a May night almost ten years ago after a copious quantity of liquor, i doubt he looked at me and thought, “now, THERE’s a woman i can play dolls with early on a Sunday morning ten years hence. before we even get any coffee. RAWRRR. i wonder how she looks in a ratty bathrobe.”

let this be a warning. none of us ever quite know what we’re getting into.

and we protect what we’re in. it is the unwritten rule, for most of us out here. we don’t write about partners, at least until the bond is falling apart or gone and they are relegated to the dead letters file of mere stories.

a relationship is an impossible thing to put into words.

but this year, i want to put it into pictures. because in some ways, it’s slipping past us, the time we once spent fostering and celebrating this messy, lovely, human thing between us eaten alive by early mornings, latenight laundry folding, the pull in a hundred directions of duty and career-building and responsibility. and yet in there, somewhere, under all the dolls and the grimly contemplative face, i see him, still.

he suggested doing a 365 of some sort this year, the two of us, a collaborative project. i reminded him that – child-rearing aside – our creative collaborative projects always involve at least one miserable evening of me sobbing “we CAN’T WORK TOGETHER!” and taking all my toys to the other side of the playroom. it was ever thus, and ever thus shall be, right from the first time i edited his book waaaay back when god was young and visions of a Sunday morning piled under dolls sounded more like a Warhol film than a shared future.

i do not have the headspace for a 365 commitment right now. but once a week, here, i’ll post a shot chronicling THIS commitment, the flesh-and-blood foundation on which this little house stands.

the home project.

not our home in any domestic glory sense, but he and i. the part of him that is my home.

he said he might even take a picture of me, some Mondays.
***

if you have a somebody, and you want to play along, any Monday, i’d love to see who you love, in his or her house-muse humanity. #thehomeproject on Twitter.