cribchronicles.com

we nearly bought land yesterday.

late Saturday night and we play the what-if game of MLS, of possible worlds. our dreams are tame, these days.

he wants land, insurance against a food supply falsely propped up. i want water, the tracks of sandy feet on summer grass.

seventy-three acres, near a picturesque harbour. twenty-five minutes from our house, just off the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. old trees. in the photos, the cottage takes my breath away. a loft, panelled in wood. tongue-in-groove. a wood stove.

we send a midnight message to the real estate agent. too good to be true, i whisper as we fall asleep.

the agent writes back Sunday morning. you can walk in, he explains. it’s been abandoned, vandalized. the owners live far away. they don’t want to fix it.

for that cottage, on that much land, in that location, the only way we’ll ever lay our hands on it.

snow to our waists as we hike in. there is an apple tree off the wraparound deck. abandoned three years, maybe four, it is no more than ten years old.

it was somebody’s dream cottage. left unboarded, the door has blown in and snow sweeps across the hardwood floor. the bay window is green with mold, its wood frame sagging. insulation is scattered across the floor. someone has tagged a wall in periwinkle paint. an animal – perhaps a human animal – has taken a dump on the floor of the upstairs bathroom.

i stand in the loft, under a ceiling of perfect pine planks, watching warily for raccoons, and i realize. MY dream cottage.

but not to beggar ourselves for. too much pig in a poke. the land a strip too hard to parcel and sell, under restrictions for eleven years. it does not make sense, and i know it.

too good to be true. but i am tongue-tied to explain what it is that makes me so terribly sad.
***
we go home and he builds a snow fort in the yard, with tunnels for the kids. we have supper outside. he makes stew, roasts the coffee beans himself. in the fading winter light, with a mouth full of turnip, he is sweaty and laughing, as happy as i have seen him in years.

this is not how we live, not really. he takes tiny steps towards self-sufficiency. i watch, appreciative but disbelieving. because tomorrow we will wake up and grind our way out the door leaving dishes for the dishwasher. we will be low on butter and catfood. the parking violation will need to be paid. these will be my jobs, and they swallow all the hope i have of a truly different life.

i complain about the STUFF, all the goddam stuff we accumulate in spite of ourselves. if we had a summer cottage, it would be more grass to mow, another fridge to clean.
***
late Sunday night and we watch the old Fahrenheit 451 – the one from the 60s, with Julie Christie – and the end comes and i am in tears.

not for the books, not because either world portrayed is the one i want to live in. not even because the story seems so prescient in these crazy, angry times and i wonder where our satirists are and if there is hope yet for this fractured culture that seems to have dissolved into a shouting match.

i cry because at the end of the movie the Book People – the ones who have fled – huddle in railcars on the fringes of society, and i realize i have no vision anymore of that kind of escape from the rules of property and propriety that govern us.

i cry for the waste of the little cottage, hand-built, all that wood left to rot.

we could not fix it ourselves. we would be fools, by the rules of the game as it is played. it is not a Good Investment.

but it sits there abandoned when twenty hands together could make it livable. a different kind of life. that gap between me and imagination of real difference is where the tears come from.

we live in a world where property is sacred. where dreams are bourgeois and tame. i have grown tame. i no longer know my way out of the lab rat maze that is my culture, my role as mother, daughter.

we were far more suited to be hippies together, he and i, than domesticated middle-class partners. i rail at him to shut the cupboards while he dreams of planting vegetables, building with his hands.

he might survive, in a squat in the woods, in a snowfort, in some different vision of our lives. i am the one who split from the program.

but when i sit there late at night staring into the void between my choices and my sense of what makes sense, he takes my hand.

and i am less lonely, and a little less tamed.

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

she is almost exactly half his age.

this occurs to me as they are going to sleep. bedtime is a bit of a cacophony these days, punctuated by singing, bouncing, and shouts of Mamaaaa!! from the smaller one.

we made a mistake, one night, a month or so back.

we broke the cardinal rule. we went IN when shouted for, because one had been sick and we were weak and foolish. o ye who hear the words of my mouth, take note: IF you have a cardinal rule, whatever it is, do not break it. because then your ass is forfeit. ahem.

our wily daughter has not forgotten. for awhile, her brother egged her on: they share a room. but it got tiresome for him, the chatter and howling of his sister’s newfound nighttime rebellion. the Oscar, hey buddy, hey buddy Oscar are you SLEEPING?!? hey OSCAR!! makes me shake with laughter as i stand outside their door, my voice a melllifluous drone of uber-calm. but it gets to him eventually and then we have two of them shouting, back and forth.

jolly good.

they are both on the cusp of a whole new frontier of emotion these days. Posey’s is wild abandon, fury expanding outward. a plate was broken. tantrums are thrown. one night, we were woken at 1 am to the shrieks of a small child raging in her sleep. we lifted her from her crib and tried to bring her into bed with us: she leapt free and – still asleep – wailed the shit out of our laundry pile before suddenly subsiding hotly in my arms, a limp and sweaty bundle.

Oscar, too, is dealing with anger, but directed anger. even at two, he never tantrumed. for him it is not sheer limits but perceived injustice – disappointment – that cannot be suffered with equanimity. last week, after a speech therapy appointment at an unaccustomed time, we took our ritual trip down the elevator to the snack shop, anticipating our ritual snack. the shop was closed. apparently they board up the place at 3pm.

my boy was beside himself, almost literally. i watched his mind ping and pong from possibility to possibility, and as he came to terms with the fact that the locks were locked and there was nobody there, he exploded. like a small, righteous rhinoceros, he lowered his head and glared. he stamped. i saw the shout build up in him like a steam piston and it blew over me and my ears rang. this child, who’d never shouted in public in his life. and i took him by the arms and looked straight into his face and then, i couldn’t help myself, i laughed.

not unkindly. with full recognition, because he is so much like me sometimes it pains me. Oscar, i said, i’m sorry, buddy. i’m sorry they’re closed. i know you’re disappointed. but you CANNOT shout at me. you cannot shout just because you don’t know what else to do. i wish i could tell you what to do with it, all that fury, that frustration. but you need to find a way not to take it out on other people. can i help?

he glared. then we practiced stamping our feet until we felt better. i showed him what his face looked like when he was made like a rhinoceros. he laughed. then we went elsewhere for a snack.

we abide. it all will pass. someday i will say, lay your head on your pillow, honey, and Mama will rub your back and behold! my girl’s small body will prostrate itself. i believe this. someday, maybe, my boy will look disappointment square in the face and do better with it than i ever have. i hope this. we are learning together.

still, last night as i listened to the fading protests – the last burst of energy from Posey as she bounced up and down singing O My Darling Clementine, which she believes to be about our cat – i realized, she’s a big girl now.

and cribchronicles will soon be without a crib. perhaps tantrumchronicles.com is an available domain?

Dave’s father is building Oscar a twin bed for his birthday in April. if bedtime returns to a dull roar by then, Posey will inherit his toddler bed.

it’s time, past time.  they both seem so big.

when we brought her home from the hospital, tiny and wizened, barely six pounds, he was the age she is now. his was a quieter two, less verbal, less bouncy. yet in both of them, a strong, strong streak of sweetness at this age. i remember how huge his hands seemed suddenly, when he held her miniature fingers. i remember how he patted her and giggled, how i wondered what they would be to each other, how i hoped.

last night, as i heard the last little hey Buddy, night Buddy! peeps from through their door, and his world-weary but gentle goodNIGHT, Posey in return, i thought, we’re doing okay.
***

what’s bedtime like at your house? how do you help your children deal with anger?

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.

we were rushing our way through the half-abandoned mall to Oscar’s speech appointment upstairs. he was fifty feet away at the coffee shop table, his white shock of hair sticking straight up.

everyone has a visual imprint, a way of walking or sitting, the cock of a head, the way a hand punctuates speech.

my grandfather, even at ninety-one and shrunken and far less mobile than he’d like to be, still lords over his lunchtime newspaper, shaking a paw at the ridiculousness of the world.

the boy and i ran up and greeted him. hail fellow well met and smiles, gentle hugs.

my grandfather manages lunch on his own these days, mostly at this coffee shop at the old mall. it is just down the hill from his house. his hands are shaky, the driving worries me, but he manages.

i seized the moment. do you have any dinner plans?

i do not see him enough. he has a nurse – a crew of nurses, really, headlined by a stunner whom he adores – and my father and stepmother drop in nearly daily. but not me.

well, now, he began, and this is an old deliberate routine between us, dating back to the years after my grandmother died when i’d come home from college and call him up. were you looking to ask me out, young lady?

he and Oscar and i made plans for all of us to meet at one of his usual dinner haunts that evening. lately his short-term memory’s been poor, and phone calls to make dinner plans haven’t worked out so well. but i figured that evening? was only a few hours away. i hugged him, and Oscar and i dashed away to our appointment.

love you, Grandpa! i threw over my shoulder.

from the open stairs leading up to the speech therapy clinic, i watched him rise and fumble for his cane, sunlight glinting off the white crew cut grown shaggier than he’d once have tolerated.
***

my grandfather’s ancestors down the Stewart line sailed here two hundred years ago or so, when their Highland glens were cleared for sheep and politics.

they came with the Selkirk settlers, three boatloads in the summer of 1803. hardy and self-reliant, destitute but proud and canny, the lot of them are said to have landed in the virgin forests of PEI barely knowing how to wield an axe. today, this island is as green and bare as their Isle of Skye, and far more tamed. waste not, want not, ran the strain of steel through their mantra. they wasted not an inch or a branch of the place, the lot of them.

apparently the stewardship my clan were named for did not necessarily extend to environmentalism. rather, they expanded, prospered; became respectable, if still a wee bit fey.

my grandfather had an Uncle Dan who was apparently legendary in local horse-trading circles for two things: his fits of temper, and his punctuality. you could set your watch, legend has it, by when he’d start shouting.

and my grandfather’s Great Aunt Mae, at the end of her days, was given a room of her own in the nursing home for throwing her cane at her roommate. her roommate happened to be Great Aunt Maud, my grandmother’s equally cantankerous relation. the fact that Mae & Maud’s young family members had married apparently did little to assuage a lifelong bloodfeud.

the cane my grandfather uses these days? is Mae’s.

my whole life, my grandfather has been five minutes early for everything. he can be touchy, yes, if his particular code of propriety is breached. yet with his dirty jokes and his upright resilience and his fierce loyalty, he has been, for me, a sort of rock, a stability in a family tree long cleaved by separations and silences.

my mother came from a different line of Scots from a different island in the Hebrides, who landed here on this small isle within twenty years of the Stewarts, give or take. McNevins who somewhere became MacNevins, to hide their Jacobite roots and grow more staunchly, dourly, acceptably Protestant, i assume. my mother was the last of that line to carry the name. we gave it to Finn, his second middle name. it died again, with him, and i did not have the heart to try again.

and so Oscar is Oscar Charles Stewart Cormier, with the nod to Bonnie Prince Charlie hidden there in between his Acadian-sounding proper name. on one side and the other, his heritage falls almost entirely on the losing side of England’s burgeoning eighteenth-century imperialism. Culloden and clearances and expulsion, with a stray Irish Catholic thrown in now and then in the line for good measure.

and his mother tongue is English. och aye, o ye winners of history.

but last night, as i drove him home sleepy from his first Robbie Burns night concert, i told him the Stewarts were once kings.  i told him of the Charles Stewart who lost his head to Cromwell, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie the hapless, and i sang speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing, like i have since he was a baby.

if you are going to identify with people who have lost, then you’d better know how to make beauty out of sorrow. waiting for the once-and-future king only sounds romantic in songs.
***

he stood us up the other night.

i bundled the kids from school and we picked up Dave and rushed to the restaurant because it is not right to keep a 91-year-old man waiting. and there was a bit of a line and so we bounced the kids and sent Oscar on a scouting mission and even before we got a seat i had a sinking feeling and i called. i got his message machine.

and so the four of us sat at our table for six and ate, all the while keeping an eye on the door for a white head and an heirloom cane.

we drove up the hill after, just to make sure he was okay. and i was relieved. his nurse’s car was there and the lights on, and i assume they went elsewhere for supper, as they do sometimes.

we didn’t go in. there is no need to remind a person of failings he can no longer control.

it isn’t the first time, but the fourth or the fifth in these months or so since he came home from the heart attack and his long hospitalization. that he is home at all is a victory.  that i keep making this mistake is my own damn fault: my failure, not his.

i need to change my strategies, start calling immediately before, or making our dinner dates through his nurse and not through him.

i know this. i accept it, and i will do it.  because then there will be dinners with all of us present, and that is what i want.

but every time i see him, and his eyes light up, and he says were you looking to ask me out? i am sure, entirely sure, that he will be sitting there at the table five minutes before our agreed-upon time.

and i wish there were a song that i could sing to Oscar, to explain.

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.

i am lying on the couch, nestled up against my laptop, as usual.

the almost-white light of a January morning spills in and floods the room and i stop and turn to it. i shift onto my back and stretch my spine. if i could purr, i would.

i seldom see this room, though my waking hours in the house – especially when the children aren’t home – are mostly spent here. the walls are a yellow i can’t quite describe…somewhere between butter and the Provence kitchens rendered by Impressionists.

i’ve never seen a Provence kitchen. i barely see this living room. but it is pretty, in the light: white wood trim and patches of colour from the stained glass. old things and cherished things and cheap blond-wood Ikea chairs. pictures of the children. Dave’s childhood Encyclopaedias. plants, clinging hardily to life in reproach of my perpetual neglect.

i look towards the window and a black and white painting – mostly gray, really, a painting of a black and white photograph i never saw – nods at me from its silver frame. it has sat there for more than five years, now. i have owned it for at least thirteen.

i am startled by it. by its constancy, its reassuring presence. this painting had a history once, a vaguely unpleasant taste in my mouth. i kept it as a trophy, i think. a talisman, though i cannot say of what.

it is a scene of two men at a roadside, by a ditch rich with black and white blobs that i assume, romantically, to be flowers. one man crouches over the wheel well of a rounded, 1930s-style pickup truck, straight out of Grapes of Wrath. the other man stands behind, bent over, presumably dispensing advice. a discarded wheel lies forlorn in the foreground, and a telephone pole rises from the field behind the men.

the painter, in mid-life, had decided to be an author. i, an aching quarter century, wanted to be an editor. or anything, really. just something discernible that i could set my self to.

a first novel, only my second as an editor. long conversations, structural shifts. recompense, and a dinner with both our spouses.

i chose this painting from his basement gallery of hundreds, many bigger and flashier. but the scene reminded me of the Farm Security Administration photos of the Great Depression, and a palette knife had drawn texture through the paint, and it called me.

the man in the back, it’s X’s grandfather, you know, he said, referring to a mutual acquaintance my own age, a friend of my husband’s who’d never liked me much. business vs. art, X and i; oil and water, silly children.

i nodded. has he seen it? i asked. the painter shook his head no.

like a raven with its shiny thing, i edged closer to the painting. yours, he said.

there was wine, too much of it, and this middle-aged man grew proclamative and then belligerent. his theme? how to be a man. and by extension, a proper woman.

i watched his wife grimace, my husband politely try to extricate us. the politeness made him suspect.

sealing that deal, i waded in, as subtle as a twenty-five-year old who was studying Master’s-level feminist theory could be.

you’re not a real man, he bellowed at the boy i’d married. i felt violated, as if we’d been taken apart and misconstrued by a worldview that lines up the world in black and white and misses all the humanity in between.

and i felt ashamed, because i wondered if he was right.

the painter who fancied himself Hemingway bashed us all soundly while we sat, pinned like butterflies to our dining chairs. i belched at one point, loud and gutteral, a red wine symphony. it was all i knew how to say in the face of his breach, his betrayal of the social contract.

do unto others, they taught me in Sunday school. be good, be kind, be polite. be on good terms with all persons. and i do, i do, i try. i know no other code, for all i find this one lacking, sometimes. but when the contract is broken, i am righteous.

it is mostly a stupid way to be, this reactive defensiveness. if i perceive unkindness to me and mine – unkindness i cannot speak to, the kind of unkindness and dismissal that comes from a clash of worldviews – i will up that unkindness, sometimes loudly. it is not a particularly effective strategy, i admit. i am a bird, squawking and pecking over trampled eggs, or trampled feelings. the display does nothing to resolve either wound. it creates its own.

and yet i do not know how else to speak when i feel small and powerless.

except that one time.

we left the painter’s house, my husband and i. his wife stood sheepishly at the door while the painter sat in his socks in the room we’d vacated.

i put on my coat, put the envelope with my editing pay in the pocket. and then i picked up the painting. mine, i said. i thanked his wife, and left.

and i hung the damn thing. even if it should have been X’s. even if the night had gone to hell. even if he was right about my marriage. it has hung until i no longer see it.

when i look, i notice it still calls to me. but all that it says, i only wish i could explain.
***

do you have a concept of the social contract? how do you react when yours is breached?