84-Ageing

My friend and I have an age difference I don't always appreciate. She's only a few years younger than my dad would have been, were he still alive. Occasionally she talks about some health problem or other, and I busy myself with gentle teasing. Here, in North America, one does one's best to stay young, and then if people lapse and act their age and worry about it, you provide them with excuses and denial. "Pas mal bon pour ton âge" we say in French, when our 83 year old mother-in-law does anything that surprises us. My friend is much younger. She's of the age when, were she to die, people would say that she died young. And since I am twenty years younger myself, I have poor perspective on the subject. Therefore it came as a surprise to read Mary Oliver speak so gently about ageing in her essay “Building the House”:

There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad - people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging -  of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different - which is the beginning of descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one's time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

I realize now that I must try harder not to impede the grace and attentiveness of people who know themselves to be ageing.

How I came to appreciate menu planning

I didn’t think I could write about menu planning without sounding officious until I discovered that it was the method I used to teach myself how to cook. The officious part is about how, over a period of years, I became a person who has a printed binder full of recipes. Food is ubiquitous. Eating is this necessary thing and then feeding a family this other necessary thing booby-trapped with fussiness and your own culinary shortcomings. An official menu plan only came out of the anxiety of having to face the quintessential “what’s for supper” question, and I typed and printed 52 weeks’ worth of answers before my children could talk. The following is how it started and what it taught me.

A menu plan has levels of complexity. I don't think people talk about this enough. Planning meals in advance is the kind of thing that requires work. Eating requires no work. Having an appetite is taken for granted. Having money to feed yourself – also taken for granted. Menu planning therefore addresses itself to people lucky enough to have the leisure of thinking creatively about food. If you have time, you are lucky. If you have choice, you are lucky. Menu planning begins with a calendar, and an aversion for the panic caused by that supper-time question. To begin, all that is required is the jotting down of the meal eaten last night. Then, the meal to be had tonight. Write down the one for tomorrow night. Keep writing down the meals eaten. Forget, remember, catch up, delay, ask your partner, "what did we have that other day?" Rate the meals with stars, take notes, or don't. Write down two meals for next week – it makes shopping easier. If you eat the same meal twice or allow for leftovers to be transformed the next day, there are four days of the seven taken care of. Take a day off to remind yourself what spontaneity feels like, order in, use the BBQ, and voilà! One week is done! Commit it to the calendar. This is the beginning.

On the podcast Spectacular Failures, in an episode called "Blue Apron wilts, then rises to a new challenge", a guest comments that women want meals to be effortless, delicious and to "have the moral value of home cooking". "The thing that home cooking delivers that none of these other things do is that it satisfies, I think, what we all feel as the moral imperative to cook. There's something that just doesn't click in when the thing comes in from outside." A service like Blue Apron, the guest, Laura Shapiro argued, is less about cooking and more about assembling. "They kind of fool you into thinking you're cooking whereas real cooking hands-on cooking, knowledgeable cooking, has to do with cooking day after day, doesn't mean you're making fabulous, elaborate meals, day after day, even if it's the simplest possible thing; that's cooking." It’s that moral value that makes it hard to talk about menu planning because in the end, it’s like saying, I flossed every day last week. Nobody cares. And it’s expected of you. You benefit. Your neighbour doesn’t benefit from your menu plan, your friends don’t. Your circle of influence is the family. The glow of 52 weeks of recipes categorized by month and season is uninteresting to most people. 

But here’s the thing, in spite of all the discomfort of writing about one’s organizational habits like some amateur Martha Stewart, menu planning taught me how to cook.

I came into marriage young and inexperienced. I used to tell my friends that all I needed to do was learn how to cook and learn how to swim, both of which I though could be resolved in some classes, and then I’d be set. Let life begin. In fact, I shied away from cooking classes because none suited my desire for anonymity, and despite the swimming lessons, I was still afraid of water and could not master a front crawl. Instead of cooking, I started baking. Baking has delicious outcomes and does not involve meat. Baking has finicky instructions I like to follow and that attention to detail has its rewards. I applied the recipe-following I learned from baking to cooking. To ensure a satisfying end product, I picked recipes with consistent five-star reviews from the Food Network website. By following enough recipe instructions, I started to learn cooking terms. Cookbooks with pictures were also handy. One of the first that I purchased was Best Summer Weekendswhich I used it in winter too. I started to be able to associate words with tastes and textures. All this took years. Another thing that took years was gathering enough recipes we liked to span a year’s worth of week day meals. Finding inspiration is fun, but there is that dissonance between cookbook idea and everyday reality that has to be contended with and the only way to wear it down is with practice. Practice eventually accumulates and becomes experience. 

The work for the home cook is a sort of translation. Does this recipe suit our family’s tastes? Does it suit our schedule? How much are the ingredients? Are they easily available? In what season? Often, I think, regular home cooks are sold on ideals of delicious outcomes, or timely delivery, when really, cooking is mostly dull and repetitive. Even so, experience eventually yields an appreciation for the simple task… Good cookbook authors can convince you that if you do put in the work, you will eventually feel the reward. And they’re right. My favourite guides have been Nigella Lawson, Jenny Rosentrach and Deb Perelman, not to mention the Canal House ladies and Canadians like Ricardo, Anita Stewart and others. 

The last level of complexity in menu planning is to loosen your grip on menu planning. Eventually, accumulated experience and experimentation leads to a repertoire and a familiarity with sides and pantry items that allows for a little more spontaneity. If at first I couldn’t understand how fridge items could be their own source of inspiration, now I do. I can make salads, or flavour rice, or see if I have enough time to peel those layabout potatoes. I can count on having an idea of what to cook next week, but also a reassuring feeling that if I want to try something new, I can.

I think maybe this is why I like talking about menu planning: it was the key that unlocked my understanding of food, that made me experiment and learn. It was a long, perhaps un-ideal way of teaching myself time and budget constraints and our family’s taste palette, but I would know about none of these things if I didn’t first buy a calendar then look for recipes to fill it with.

082 - pause

I like entertaining. I like planning meals and inviting guests, baking dessert, sharing a new recipe, and going with the season. I like dressing up, if only just a bit and talking with guests in the living room. I like being the hostess and slipping away to the kitchen to move the supper along. But do you know the best feeling of all? It's peculiar and I think it only favours the introverts among us... it's when there's a reason – just before the meal, or maybe after when the kitchen is full of the clamour of dishes – to slip outside into the summer evening air even if only to put something in the garbage, where there is no one... You leave the noisy house and close the door and it is like a brief palate cleanser for the brain, from noise to nature, from performance to uninhibited calm. Notice the sound of a cricket, or neighbourhood kids in a game that doesn't concern you, or the blue of the sky, or the stripes on the moth's wings as it rests against the stucco.

081-School

School has started. In this case, the sentence should have an asterix. School has started.* And then the asterix would detail the provincial guidelines and then how those guidelines were interpreted by the division and how the principles then made plans for their school, and how the teachers took those plans and put them in place in the classroom. It's like a line forming to pass buckets from the well to the fire, each bucket sloshing a little on the way over to the fire.
In grade three, our teacher taught us how to play telephone, where she whispered something in the first student's ear, and then that whispered thing made its way, student to student up and down rows of desks in a 24 student classroom before landing back in the teacher's ear at the other side of the class. I thought the point of the game was to distort the sentence and so I added a phrase. It was something about Santa Clause coming, and I added that he'd be wearing black boots. And then, when it was time to repeat aloud the sentence we thought we'd heard, one student at a time, backwards from the end, I realized my mistake and was embarrassed. The student I'd whispered to said that black boots line aloud, and I did not, as though they had invented it, rather than hearing it from me. I was teacher's pet in grade three and did not want to risk losing that special feeling. I liked to seem smart, as when I answered a question about when one might have bad posture, and I offered "when sweeping" as an answer and was praised.
So school has started.
When I write about something in the present, I feel hamstrung. I don't know what to say about it. My opinions are half-formed. We bob along like players in a game of dodgeball.

080-RIP dear e-Book

About five years ago, I had an idea. I thought it was brilliant. I wanted to gather into a single spot all the businesses that were local to Winnipeg. I’d research these businesses, find out when they opened, who were their owners and what made them unique. I settled on a format: an e-book with links and descriptions, but no pictures. 

An e-book has the quality of being semi-permanent, semi-concrete. I could update it yearly, I thought, almost like a magazine. It could leave its electronic confines and become a printed document. Online, it would link to businesses: click on the link and there’s the business. For this, I’d charge a few dollars.

I collected over two-hundred businesses and fit them into four neat categories: things to buy for your baby, for your home, for yourself, or as a treat. There were subdivisions too. Home included antiques, furniture, pottery, and plants. For yourself included accessories, jewelry, beauty products, clothing designers and vintage clothing shops. Treat sources included cookie makers, chocolate artisans, candy stores, coffee shops and local honey producers. I wanted it to be as comprehensive as possible. I wanted the reader to feel as if they could recognize small business owners and be familiar with craft sale vendors. For this, an e-book seemed uniquely placed to do the job: it did not require accounts to be followed on social media, and it was more immediate than write-ups featured in the newspaper. To create this feeling required research, and research was something I enjoyed. 

Historians are sometimes hired to sleuth through documents that provide proof in legal cases. A lawsuit against a school division can send a historian deep into class attendance lists and correspondence in cursive blue ink. Accumulating clues that fill in a picture for a specific person or place is incredibly exciting for a person like me. And so, it is not surprising that I used the same approach to fill in the individual portraits I painted for each business. I liked this. I liked learning about each business. Accumulating details with whatever was available online in newspaper archives, blog posts, magazine interviews and social media made me appreciate each entrepreneur’s story. Entrepreneurs, after all, have courage I don’t. They can sell a product and I cannot.

I involved my friend’s mom in the editing of the e-book. She is a grammar whiz, and I asked her to keep me accountable. Between December 2018 and March 2019, I would send her a few pages of the writing I had done for one category or the other. Summer 2019 was busy. My brother invited us to his wedding which became the reason for a road trip to BC where we camped and spent time with family. In the fall, I made some revisions, and then, determined to ship this project that had been occupying my mind for so long, published the e-book on Amazon and notified a portion of the business owners who were mentioned in it. Surely, they would be delighted by my thoughtful words. Word would spread. Who knows, I thought, maybe I’d be interviewed on CTV morning live.

I received some positive responses, but it wasn’t long before some glaring mistakes were revealed. And then, the thing that sleuthing historians are good for became a quality not all business owners appreciated. Some strongly preferred anonymity. Others were rightly annoyed that they had not been consulted first. I’m so sorry, I wrote. I’ll fix the mistakes, I wrote. 

In a Q&A video on her vlog, Ariel Bissett once described how the hardest thing about freelancing is the uncertainty around self-made projects. The e-book was very much a self-generated project. I wanted to produce something useful and perhaps earn some money as well. Earning money would be a form of validation. However, when a project isn’t a success, when it meets obstacles, self-doubt creeps in and takes up residence. The comments were not so much negative as they were instructive. If I was to honour the idea I had for this project and satisfy the people who were its subject, I would need to devote more time and care into ironing out the flaws - on top of what had already been done. For every day that I delayed, I accused myself of losing my nerve. For every sad thought, there was a slap in the face of my own hubris and naiveté. I wanted to prove I was neither too sensitive nor too lazy. Worrying over the time it would take to execute the corrections, permissions, and revisions that were in order might be construed as laziness. For the winter of 2019, I put the e-book aside and concentrated on school work. It so happened that the number of classes I took and the tutoring job I had, filled my plate. I did not feel guilty for prioritizing these things.

In the beginning of 2020, I reasoned that I would have more time. I procrastinated awhile and then the pandemic arrived and I felt absolved. No one was going to be shopping. But shops re-opened and I told myself that small businesses could use support. I tried mustering up the courage to dive back in and yet, every time I thought of the e-book and the work, and the ever-changing landscape of small business, I could not envision dedicating all the time and effort the idea deserved. 

Today, August 26th, I was again thinking about the project, and for the first time I felt my attachment to the idea loosen. This e-book was a good idea, I had good intentions, and it was well-written. The resources the final product would require, however, are too much for me. So I’m letting it go. I’m also releasing myself from the shame I have felt for failing my own idea. 

One thing this project has yielded is a gorgeous e-book cover. I asked my sister Anna to design it, and she did a brilliant job! Thanks Anna! And thanks to everyone who understands the folly and infatuation of following an idea.

079-Grandma's purses

Purses are that feminine accessory, useful for stashing Kleenex and cash, that can offer a parenthetical comment on a person’s taste. In television shows, they are often meaningfully chosen; a character named Rita, for example, is a rebel, and rather than have a purse, she has a soft cloth tote that magically produces the thing she needs while always looking light. In real life, women can choose purses without considering character implications. But gathering snapshots of purses over the course of a woman’s life can say something about them and about the style periods in which they lived.

In the 1950’s for example, Grandma chose tiny purses. 

Perhaps the most novelty shaped purse Grandma owned was a box bag. (A similar style was in this 1953 Sears catalogue.)

In this picture, her friend also has a box bag.

She wasn’t tied to rigid designs though. Here is a soft gathered kind, and while the fifties were a decade when style guides encouraged matching accessories, Grandma preferred not to get hung up on details.

Even as a new mother, Grandma had a small black purse.

Then, as her family grew and her children grew, so did her purses.

One of her purses had a floral tapestry design, like these ones in a 1961 Sears catalogue.

Grandma seemed to have a fondness for black purses with metallic embellishments.

But there were brown purses, and cream and beige purses, and very slouchy purses too.

And I noticed, combing through a few hundred pictures, that sometimes Grandma didn’t want her purse in the picture, so it was put to the side, or to the front. But those purses would sneak in anyway. She noticed this too, because on the back of the last picture she wrote: “best picture of my purse.” She was in on the joke.

078-the name of a thing

How perfectly delightful is it that this Manitoban school has named the protective plexiglass shields, positioned on students' desks "sugar cubes"? Surely, it is in the realm of a baby’s gummy smile and of floppy-eared puppy paws.

077-Politics

Did you know there's a political scandal going on here in Canada? It involves our prime minister and the WE organization and their for-profit arm called ME to WE. I always suspected something bad would come of their neat displays of colourful office supplies in a special section at Staples. I'll not write more about it here though because it's tiring to write about. If you want to know more about it, I'd recommend Jesse Brown, because he's not bored with it. He likes politics and then, of course, it must be exciting to be the under-dog journalist that breaks the story. 

I have a flaw which is that I don't care about politics unless they've aged. The saga of-the-moment, the actors on stage right now, they don't matter to me except superficially. I vote mostly un-enthusiastically. The present state of things is too near. I'm psychologically short-sighted. 

In an episode of Canadaland, Jesse Brown reflected on whether or not the scandal would mean anything to Canadians, whether it would bring down the prime minister or whether it would be passed over. 

I lived with a woman who was constantly attributing meaning to things. It reassured her that the world was ending but it made me distrustful of her interpretations. 

I recently went out with a friend almost 20 years older than I and asked her wryly if the world was ending. She scoffed and said there had been far worse before. She’s from Europe, I thought. Our New World problems seem like insignificant prefaces compared to the multi-volume major events that have happened on her side of the ocean. It is confusing right now to be caught between these two poles, one which declares that all is doomed and the other which counters that all these events are but a bump in the road.

On The Daily podcast, there was an interview with a reporter named Zeeshan Aleem who remarked that Twitter, like other social media platforms, "rewards absolute claims (...) simple sort of black and white, good and evil allegories and binaries and strong declarations of truth that leave little room for interpretation." 

Historians, in contrast, love interpretation and context and nuance. When the world has forgotten what has happened today, I will, with all my grey hairs, emerge from an archive, and revive for them the context. In the meantime, in this present in which I can't be bothered to care much about our prime minister, I’m busy instead with the immediacy of household tasks.

076-Nature

I am reading Mary Oliver's collection of essays titled Upstream. She writes with such meticulous word choice that it makes me want to write about similar subjects just to see whether or not I would be able to paint similarly beautiful tableaux. I'm transported into countrysides, where she guides me into watchful observations. From my chair in the garage studio I see foxes, ducks, turtles, trees and flowers. 

Then I am startled by a fly that drops from the windowsill it was knocking against and lands with the noticeable weight of its iridescent blue body on my knee. Its exhaustion has made it sticky. 

When I look up to the ceiling, there is a square-bodied spider the size of a push-pin sitting immobile next to its torn and dusty web. One of those pretty bugs with a body the shape of a teeny-tiny tear drop and antenna that curve gracefully in front of it, bumps into the spider in its meanderings. But the spider doesn't move, supposedly uninterested in this kind of bug. 

Mary Oliver writes about being vegetarian by contemplating our need for food, and by extension, all animals' need for food. In one scene she describes unearthing some turtle eggs and eating them for a meal. Her descriptions create such a sense of intimacy that I worry she might see the queasiness on my face.

The bug presence in the garage sometimes makes me feel like one is caught in my hair, or crawling along my temple. I've been raised in sanitized environments. I wonder sometimes where all the nuisance bugs are in Oliver's nature rambles.

075-Docu-series

I've just begun listening to the Netflix series by Latif Nasser called Connections. Watching it reminds me of the feeling I had watching another documentary series on the same platform a few years ago. Information is all neat and organized and bite-size. I’m happy to see other people at work in other parts of the world; a woman who specializes in pre-historic human feces, a man who collects weevils in nets, out in the forest with his yellow notebook. 

I feel inspired by these people who have carved for themselves a little space and brought something to our attention. 

On the reverse of this awe, is also despair. Look how we are just beginning to understand the connections between the actions we take and their effects on nature. Nature! Our small human endeavours uncover facets and phenomena while climate change is happening and things feel irretrievable. What have we not already missed?

074-Journey

Perhaps like most people, I feel both envy and admiration for those who practice the same craft I do. In a self-pitying mood, I recognize the tendency toward over-simplification. Take Craig Mod’s road to authorship for example. It looks like magic from here. But no. In an interview with Offscreen Magazine he says: “I wouldn’t wish my journey to that point on anyone. It was a pretty shitty (a self-imposed kind of shitty, an of-the-own-mind kind of shitty) journey, and in hindsight, there were definitely easier roads which I chose not to take for whatever reasons. It was not an overnight success story.”

The boys are talking noisily outside because they’ve been given the task of getting the dog to pee by the apple tree. They are amused and a little afraid of his unpredictable puppy antics. One of the boys tries to entice him toward the tree by crinkling an old water bottle in which the dog is completely disinterested. He pees but not at the tree, and now there is an eruption of squeals and laughter, because, I suppose, he’s decided to run around in the backyard. 

This is the life our house is bursting with right now. I struggle to remember even five years back, or ten years back. My brother and his wife are buying an exer-saucer for their son and I was startled to realize that not so long ago it was a permanent feature in our downstairs bathroom, so that one of us could take a shower while the baby was entertained. 

I read an essay by Daniel Mendelsohn titled “Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in which he compares Mrs Dalloway (the novel) to The Hours (the film adaptation). He writes that in the film, one of the characters named Laura “decided to abandon her family after the birth of her

second child” only to move to Toronto to become a librarian. He concludes that it’s an example of the women being strong, “who choose life, who survive.” But I don’t believe him, or rather, I don’t believe the film-maker’s idea of women being strong. After all, Mendelsohn writes, “what the makers of the film are doing, it occurs to you, is exactly what Woolf worried that men did in their fictional representations of women: [they are] seeing women from the perspective of men.” 

In a podcast interview with Ann Patchet, the hosts get into the details of a novel this author wrote and finished and discarded because she knew it was bad. “How?” they asked her. She answered: What I realized is that women can't be forgiven for leaving their children for spiritual reasons. (...) I was operating from an intellectual point of view and not an emotional one... and not thinking 'what would this actually be like'. (26:15 minutes in).

I am writing from here. My view contains family. And each time I’m tempted to write “excuse the family; excuse the mess and distraction and noise” I have to stop. It’s not fair to the family or myself.

073-We talk

We talk about her husband in the care home, about how she found another resident's robe and shirt and shorts and socks in his drawer because he and this other resident have similar names. She talks about how he was being served meals in his room, how they put two heavy chairs in the tiny space and scuffed the edges of the black tv table she had bought. She talks about how two frames - one their picture as a couple married 60 years now, and the medal that was his mother's - were found under the bed. It means, she says, that they hadn't vacuumed there in a week. She says she talked to the social worker there and said all kinds of things and that the social worker took notes. He should not eat alone, she said to her, and I told the aid yesterday and today he’s still eating alone. It’s like they don’t listen, she tells me. They always say they’ll write it down, write it down, and nothing changes! And they washed his pants with his wallet in them! All the pictures of the kids, ruined! They washed the other wallet, and this one was new, and they washed this one too. They don’t think to check the pockets? 

She’s tired from having voiced her exasperation to them earlier.

If I won the lotto, the sweepstakes, she says, I’d hire a nurse for the nights and use homecare for the day and he’d stay here. The nurse would be for nights because I can’t help him if he falls, she says. We talk about the nuns in the olden days when care was better. I make a joke about an imaginary file, six inches thick with notes. We hug goodbye because we can.

As I leave, she calls down from the balcony, aren’t the flowers nice? Yes! I say. Beautiful!

072-Bigger

The other day I took our puppy for a walk at the park across the road in order to tire him before supper. Walking a puppy begins with the idea that the activity will be fun and will proceed well, but not five minutes in, you remember just how frustrating it is to walk a puppy. It has nothing to do with walking. It is interval training with fast and slow speeds, it is the twist and shout with leash tangles and leave-it commands. It is investigative discovery where smells hide far over to the side of the pathway. It is shadow tag with other people walking where you catch up, pass, and then fall humblingly behind because your puppy who was walking well 10 seconds ago has decided to become a puppy-mop braced so firmly that there are skid marks behind him as if to say "it's all too important to continue with this pedestrian exercise".

That day a crowd had formed and my determination was to walk the puppy discreetly. Instead, the puppy was a little center of attention, eliciting comments and pettings and ruining the efficiency and quiet I had imagined. We reversed course when it became obvious that the pup and I could not outpace the people. Alone we took a meandering path full of smells and looked at the river glide by. People stress me and I deal with that by hiding or by outrunning them. A puppy puts the kaibosh to such plans. 

At the park entrance there was a table with two frames of a tiny baby in his parents' arms. He looked fragile like a bird in a nest before its eyes open. A pile of cutout stars had handwritten wishes on them. The crowd was a memorial one, a supporting one... The couple I passed with a teddy bear in her hands, was a grieving one. I felt guilty about according importance to my story when theirs was bigger.

071-Grandma's hats

It was popular in the 50’s and 60’s to wear hats, and Grandma, first as a young girl, then a newlywed, then a woman away on a busy farm with an increasing brood of children, wore hats until they were no longer popular.

Here, she’s travelling with a small, light-coloured hat.

All the women have hats. (The man is like, shoot, I forgot my hat in the car.)

Accessory hats are also applied in winter. Hats and gloves match.

Here is Grandma looking smart. The hat looks like a wreath of leaves stolen from the tree.

Grandma is a new mom here with very fancy hair. There’s a hint of a dark hat with a polka-dotted decoration.

Grandma seems to like polka dots, because here they are again, only bigger.

Grandma passed along her love of polka-dot hats to her children.

Here, the polka-dots went from the hat to the dress. This hat looks like a small white cake.

The small white cake hat was a favourite.

Even when it was windy and the veil blew up.

Even when visitors had larger hats.

Here is one of Grandma’s winter hats.

Here’s another, with a feather. The feather pokes fun at Grandpa who finds the weather much colder than Grandma.

Here are some of Grandma’s light-coloured hats.

This one has a flower.

Sometimes, Grandma wore a scarf.

Do you know who liked large hats? Grandma’s mother-in-law.

This may be an informal visit, while men are working on a roof, but Grandma’s mother-in-law will keep her hat on.

See? Besides a large hat, Grandma’s mother-in-law is also the only one with sunglasses. Grandma refuses to be outdone though… she’s wearing a bright red necklace.

Here, Grandma sets the limit on her hat size.

070-Puppy diaries

I don't want to write about my dog, but the dog is on my mind. I've googled, just to make sure, something about puppies and work and so I have mentally found commiseration for the thick slices of time that disappear in a day. Look, right now, while I type, my husband has brought the puppy out to pee and descended into silliness, congratulating the pee-on-grass and la-de-dahing "Joy to the world" while hopping about, eliciting a bark from Enzo who has woken up from the nap he takes during our supper. This is what a puppy does to you: it makes you silly. It can also be infuriating. I don't know why dogs like clumps of mown grass, but they do. Piles of mown grass hang about on city lawns like big temptations. Enzo strains at his leash just to get a mouthful. I attempted to make a lesson of it, held him back, gathered a clump of grass and took out treats. I was saying "leave it" in French while two women walked by pushing a stroller and I was crouched down, entirely focused on his brown eyes, repeating "laisse" to a sitting puppy in front of a clump of grass. He behaves for treats, but as soon as the lesson is over and the treats are put away, a mouthful of grass is his immediate quest. Far down the path, I tried this again, with a compacted clump of grass that resembled something like a brown grass cookie. My timing was off, or the leash was a bit too long, I'm not sure, but puppies have incredible speed and are dumber than children, and so he swallowed a bite faster than I could remove it and I had to aim my restraint toward my temper because it flared with all the glory of my Irish ancestry. Dogs are dumb, I tell myself, but they're also smart enough to learn how to manipulate the humans that ambulate around them. Enzo knows how to whimper pathetically for attention.

We go for a morning walk everyday. Some people look at this puppy and melt and say all kinds of sweet-puppy-dog things. Some people count us as another nuisance in their morning routine, and I tend to sympathize more with the latter. People can make you feel inordinately proud of this thing you've added to your life. The other day a man, walking with his wife said "that's the puppy I was talking to you about! He has beautiful markings..." The compliments make me feel strange because while I thank people, I am confronted by the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do with his appearance. I bought him the way people buy tools and accessories. I didn't even pick this puppy... the breeder picked it for us. Yet how many compliments I get for him. Did you know that a beagle won the Westminster dog show one year? Her name was Miss P. Enzo's breeder was contacted for comment on the story and she said, somewhat derisively, that her pups were bred for hunting rabbits, for running for 12 hours, and that Miss P. would probably be ill-suited for the job. The Krpan's who've been breeding beagles for 45 years don't care about looks and I appreciate their dismissal of the superficial. Still, Enzo's markings look beautiful in the morning light.

069-Pom-poms

It was a neat trick years ago to accordion fold eight rectangles of tissue paper and cinch their middle and delicately tease upward and downward sixteen pieces to make a pom-pom. The large rectangles of tissue paper make for impressive statement pieces, hung around a room like un-poppable balloons.

I made these for my mother-in-law’s birthday, in white and pink, and again in multi-colour for a welcome-home party and then just recently I revived the craft like a back-pocket trick for my son's seventh birthday.

I remember being so nervous in those early years when I hosted parties. I was unsure of things and pored over suggestions and decoration ideas and narrowed them down into lengthy to-do lists. I think that early anxiety was necessary purchase for today’s confidence. 

Just last year I threw a party in winter, so people could gather and eat baked cookies and drink a cocktail. There is always work involved, but I get a craving for having people fill the house with chatter and laughing. The memory of it warms me and reminds me that for all the goings on about solitude, I get ravenous for connection too - big simmering stews of it. 

I'm not sure when the next party will be. Getting together is done now in little pieces, here and there, limited by number, duration, location. It's summer right now, and so the lighter diet is something I don't think about so much. But winter will come and then, I suspect, I’ll struggle to sustain myself on pom-pom memories.

068-succumb

I have succumbed to the fatigue of day's routine disrupted. Come, sit with me here in the silence where there is only the hum of the freezer beside me, a dog barking in the far distance, and my fingers on this keyboard. In fact... let me just stop the fingers moving now... (In breath, out breath, in breath…)

067-Puppy diaries

People say that beagles are tricky, they say it over and over again as if our family had chosen a particularly big challenge.

I don't know dogs very well. I used to look at dog owners with their dog-poop bags and pity them. It is a task among others that you do out of love, I know. I just didn't love dogs. And now we have one, and some animal form of love grows like a curious outcropping. It's still a dumb dog right now... our expectations of each other don't always meet: too much or too little, and so the rhythm of our interactions is off and we look like clumsy dancers.

A beagle is small enough to carry in one arm, like a slumpy handbag. A beagle has long dangly ears like comical accessories. I'm teaching it to sit and lie down and stay and leave it and drop it, and it seems to like to learn. When people say beagles are tricky, I start to doubt myself as a trainer and think, “maybe I should be having an easier time with this.” But I've seen different breeds of dog who have no puppy-age excuses for their bad habits and inattention. Which makes me think that somewhere a false cliché was established and that the intricacies of this breed were condemned rather than praised. Part of me enjoys this challenge. On good days, I say to beagle belittlers: “watch me”!

066-Pottery

I’d have to double check this difference between pottery and ceramics, but if you hold in your mind that image of a mug or a plate shaped from clay, fired in an oven, and glazed and fired again, our idea meets in contemplation of this crafted thing, although craft seems to diminish its importance? Craft. There's another word. Associated with art, it is child's play. With writing, it is a life-long pursuit. Pottery-makers have their own designation too, they are potters. They manipulate their pieces in multi-step processes, making something useful out of a fragile material. Paul in a letter to the Corinthians wrote: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels…”

Pottery, like so many hand-crafted items, represents a disconnect between value and price... It is made of base material, requires the use of a specialized high-temperature oven, and for all that, can break just as consistently as glass. Its production requires skill and artistry. I'll have arrived one day when my kitchen cabinets display a complete set of dining ware sourced from local or next to local potters. The local scene abounds in talent. Uppercase is producing an encyclopedia of ceramics!

065-Music

When I think of music, I think of proficiency, not the playing kind, but the familiarity kind. I always feel deficient in this area. 

When I was young, the story goes, the Chinese herbalist my mom frequented recommended she play classical music for my stressed little spirit. I grew up to CBC radio 2 and still find it the most comforting of background soundtracks.

In her memoir, Joyce Carol Oates writes: “‘Do you listen to music while you write?’ This curious question is often asked of writers. The more attentive you are to music, the more distracted you are by hearing music while you try to work. For music is an exquisite art, not white noise. It must be a fairly modern custom to ubiquitously pipe-in music in public places. When did this custom begin? And how will it end? Can it end? There is something offensive in having to listen to music, particularly serious music, as if it were but background noise, or a film score. For music exists in and of itself and not as an accompaniment to anything else. Music is the supreme solace because it is so much more; it is the spiritual counterpoint to the world’s cacophony, essential as a heartbeat.”

Sam Anderson in the acknowledgements section of Boom Town thanked the Sunbathers whose album he listened to on a loop. I don't know why I was expecting something calming, for 30 seconds in, I felt like I was being audibly hosed in a jet of cold water. 

Then again, sometimes a hypnotic beat is comforting. It was on a cold October evening when we squeezed into a car to make our way to a funeral. Emotions were loose and the only thing holding tightly together was the beat from Deadmaus. 

When I need to get through writing, sure, I play music and my taste is of the romantic and emotional kind: Bach, Chopin, movie soundtracks. But I prefer to do creative writing in silence, like Oates, sitting in the garage, feeling thoughts as though they hover in a liminal space. I’ll profess that there is a purity to silence that music interferes. 

As I was saying, my musical repertoire was limited. It still is limited. I have to remind myself to listen to new music, to expand my catalogue of soundwaves. I associate proficiency with the ability to pick an album to suit a mood. I am far from that which is why I must listen as an exercise. Often I am surprised by how enjoyable it is to listen in the way Oates describes, taking any album and treating it seriously.