Reading

Last month I picked up Peter Taylor’s A Summons To Memphis to read in spare moments during our road trip West. Taylor’s writing floats the reader along a lazy river of attenuated events, such that the book was done before the visit was over. It begins genially enough but soon, as Francine Prose writes: “discord [in the family] will turn out to have less to do with property and real estate than with resentment, revenge, power, the inability to love, and the impulse to control and destroy one another’s lives.” (p 102) (Maybe that’s why I felt a little let down at the end? I get duped by seemingly-optimistic tones at the beginning of things.)

A passage I liked from the book reads:

During the days and weeks that followed Holly and I talked of almost nothing by our two families and of the problems of looking after old people - of looking after aged parents in particular. Holly was meanwhile receiving letters about her father’s discontent with the ‘retirement home’ that he had been moved to. Any my sisters begin writing me about the new onset of Father’s neuropathy and his senile diabetes. In both cases - mine and Holly’s - we were urged to come home, if only to help cheer the patients. We neither of us considered going, but we went on talking about our fathers. If one could not bear to be with them, if only because of temperament, then how was one to offer protection and care? We were like a couple that finds itself bringing up children when there is no natural liking for children in either parent. (p 156)

Another book from the reading list done!

Emotional intelligence

Previous to watching this short video, I’m not sure I could have explained what co-dependency meant. Having watched it now more than once, and recognizing that it is a tendency I often had in the past, I’m relieved to see that age and maturity have, first, given me the awareness to notice it, and second, the security to move away from it.

In her latest newsletter, Mckinley Valentine writes about a distinction between use of the words “trauma” and “conditioning” that I really liked. It can be found under the heading “Unsolicited Advice” and I would be doing it a disservice to copy and paste only a part of the (already fairly short) section.

Relatable

Sometimes you hear someone else say something you yourself have felt but never expressed. It’s like that person got in your head and delivered your opinion for you. This week, it happened while reading Leandra Medine Cohen’s substack The Cereal Aisle. She writes:

I think the greatest insight from this vantage is that I max out at like, ten days of not doing anything. 5-6 days is the sweet spot for a recharge. Day 10 is when the direction of the slope changes — like the peak turns towards valley. You know what though? While in the past I’ve convinced myself that this difficulty bathing in the blankness has meant that I am addicted to productivity like it is a Very Bad Thing — the function of my free mind’s possession by a culture gone terribly awry, I am more convinced now that it more likely reinforces the idea that purpose gives us meaning. Getting up everyday and having something to do is a blessing in and of itself. Loving what you do is practically euphoria.
There’s a freedom in recognizing this, even more in actually articulating it because now I know: every time that lazy voice comes out to be like, “But I don’t wanna!,” there is another voice to challenge it from right around the corner being like, “Lol, yes you do.”

And indeed, making supper for the family after a four-day hiatus, getting to sit at my desk and resume mundane projects make me happy!

Celebrating a birthday

We celebrated our newly 11-year old’s birthday this week with a first-time visit to Winnipeg’s Vertical Adventures.

We all stepped into a harness and after a brief demonstration, attempted climbs according to difficulty. It was a relaxed, novel way to spend an hour or so together.

Being on the opposite end of the city was a little like being a tourist and we stopped at Buffet Square for supper and visited Young’s Market in search of an ice-cream treat I’d seen described on TikTok.

(They were out! But it was ok… everyone was still full from the buffet!)

Eating

This week we tried the latest from Deb Perelman’s website, a Grilled Chicken Salad with Cilantro-Lime Dressing, and wow! A real weeknight treat: easy to make, unexpectedly delicious, and, if you lay it out “composed” style (i.e. each ingredient piled separately), the kids can choose what they like. In fact, Christian suggested we make it a second time for his family on Sunday.

Guest Adam Roberts on the podcast “The Dinner Plan” has three rules for hosting: 1. Never let them see you sweat. 2. Pace it out so that it’s not rushed. 3. Don’t skimp on dessert. While I’m still working on rules 1 and 2, I must say the third has never once been a problem for me. I love dessert. Sometimes it’s the first thing I think about. My son requested brownies, and so I went all in with a classic; Ina Garten’s Outrageous Brownies. And they were perfect!

Postcards

I’ve been taking walks in the evening, and am loathe to bring my phone along on hot days when I’d prefer to make my way as lightly as possible. I think it’s one of the aspects of summer that is so enjoyable… you can up and go with pants and a t-shirt and little else. Scenic pictures are therefore lacking. Should we do the dog instead, in a funny stair-case posture?

Or our friends’ cat, that is a breed called Ragdoll? (So soft!)

Or my favourite penguin, since spotting it at the Calgary zoo? (It’s called macaroni penguin!)

(Thanks to MH and Anna for sharing Enzo and penguin pictures!)

Wishing you a lovely week ahead!

It’s Friday! It’s Friday! That means I plan a menu for tomorrow’s shopping and tonight Christian and I might mix a drink from gifted bottles of Vermouth and Campari from his birthday and settle down to watch the latest episodes from the shows we’re currently watching: Shrinking, Bad Sisters, and The Empress. Meantime, let’s clear some of the flotsam from my head…

1 Deep thoughts

Consuming a variety of media from a variety of free sources sometimes has the happy effect of creating a cohesion of ideas. It’s like media consumption can be a stroll in the garden, and I come back with a posy and put it on display here.

First, there are these thoughts on care from StevenScrawls via Dense Discovery. He writes that care cannot be scaled and that this fact elicits “a sense of insufficiency” because “it is tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant.” I am familiar with this feeling. I meet it anytime I have to peel myself away from a project in order to volunteer time somewhere else. It’s humbling in a way, which leads to the second flower in this posy… Brian Doyle’s words on humility via The Marginalian. He writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. […]
This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

I find these words consoling. The same way that StevenScrawls ends his post with the words: “But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do. There’s something oddly comforting about that.”

Care, love, kindness… There’s a third flower in this posy from podcasters’ discussion on the subject of Vasily Grossman’s book Life and Fate in which they quote a passage they find very moving. It is this:

The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is importent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human being has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

Care and love and even the more elementary kindness, come from humility, are acts of humility and if they do not scale, if recognizing that it is so brings some comfort, Grossman is convinced it triumphs.

2 Vignette

I’m at a table with older people eating a catered lunch of meat in a bun, plain salad on the side. They’re talking about a church that’s been repurposed as a hall and transported from one community to Miami. I’m a conversation participant. Transporting a church sounds impressive. A man formerly in construction sketches how it’s done. I ask, “It was cheaper to transport the building than build a new one?” Oh definitely they say. I ask how far the town was from Miami. Just a little over an hour to the East they say, one providing the highway, another the towns along it. Perhaps my face is more expressive than I mean it to be, but someone catches on that I only just understood that there’s a town named Miami in Manitoba and I’ve made everyone laugh.

3 Relationships etc.

I recently finished I’ll be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamara, the audiobook, which makes time spent baking cookies fly by. I particularly liked the autobiographical chapter in which she writes:

My mother was, and will always be the most complicated relationship of my life. Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother and I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

Later, reading the Paris Review interview with author Sally Rooney, there’s and idea of hers that seems related. What happens in real life that is sometimes so hard to describe, is something authors like herself explore in the creation of a story.

Everything you’re describing felt like the very questions I was working through in the book. Families get stuck in certain roles, but what becomes possible when one of those roles is suddenly absent—in this case, because of the death of a family member? There’s some guilt and discomfort in realizing that new family formations are possible because this beloved person is no longer there, and the space their absence leaves—maybe you don’t want to fill it?

I think it similarly fascinating the difference between the real-life criminal person you “meet” in I’ll Be Gone In the Dark, and the fictional Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. (Omg! I finally finished reading this book. See here.) Crime and Punishment is an artistic rendering, it’s an author imagining what went on inside a young man’s mind that made him commit a crime. In I’ll Be Gone In the Dark the criminal is only viewed from the exterior, never the interior. I like feeling the contrast.

4 Recipe recommendation

This week, I made cabbage rolls. I made them only once a decade ago and we didn’t care for the recipe and it took me until now to make a second attempt. I chose Ina Garten’s “Stuffed Cabbage” wanting to serve my grandmotherly guests something that felt old-timey. Even with only regular cabbage, this recipe was very tasty and abundant. I look forward to trying it with Savoy cabbage when it’s in markets in the fall.

5 Changes in the landscape

There’s a scene toward the end of “Perfect Days” in which an older man pointing to an empty space asks Hirayama “Remember what used to be here?” Hirayama looks around a little startled and the man smiles and turns away, saying “That’s what growing old means.”

Around me, the city changes. I walk, year after year, this loop with its particular segments. The St. Mary’s interchange came up to one of those segments, and from May to November I had to modify the loop while constructions workers changed the road. What used to look like this: