046-McClung

There are a handful of biographies about Nellie McClung, including her own two volume biography. McClung was born in 1873 and is considered a Manitoban hero for her involvement in the suffragist movement. In 1914, Winnipeg held a mock parliament as a fundraising event. This had been done in other cities, as early as in 1893, and it consisted of a role reversal in which Parliamentarians were women deciding the fate of men. It was a lot of fun. On this particular occasion, in Winnipeg, a delegation of women had been to the Parliament to demand the vote, and then staged their play the next day. McClung had been particularly attentive to the premier Roblin’s arguments and mannerisms, this not having been her first political encounter with the premier, and her impression of him made the play’s renown. 

The fact that McClung was such a prolific writer overshadows her talents as a speaker, and it is a pity that only a measly recording of her voice is left, a few seconds of an acceptance speech many years after this period. Writing gave her the authority of being a published author, and therefore a ticket to being a public speaker, but it wasn’t her talent. The fact that she is so often singled out for credit in getting the women’s vote to pass in Manitoba is unfair to the other women who were also involved, but attests to the popularity of her speeches. She made people laugh, and she passed a message while doing so. This was instrumental to the women’s cause and it made her name recognizable. In turn, this helped the sale of her books, 16 all told. 

She wasn’t a woman of great depth though and nothing illustrates this quite like the 1919 Winnipeg Strike. By that time, McClung was living in Alberta, but she continued to receive speaking engagements across Canada and the United States. The Strike which ran from May 15th to June 21st was peaceful when McClung decided to stop in Winnipeg on June 6th. McClung attempted to understand the issue at stake, interviewed a striker, took notes for a manuscript that was never published and left with an unfavourable view of the whole thing. In fact, she tended to agree with a conspiracy that posited the laborers were being directed by Russia. 

James Shaver Woodsworth’s attitude and actions are an informative contrast. Woodsworth and McClung were both Methodists, were born within a year of each other, and had both been involved to greater and lesser degrees with their church’s social movement, most prominently embodied at the All People’s mission in Winnipeg’s North End. Woodsworth left Methodist ministry and subsequent a very public stand in favour of pacifism in 1916, he lost his job, moved to Vancouver, and could only find work as a longshoreman. Notwithstanding the humiliation, the wage of a laborer was, he discovered, insufficient to support a family. His own wife and children could barely afford necessities in food, clothing and school supplies. He eventually joined a union and began advocating changes to the economic system. His understanding of the problems at stake earned him an invitation to speak across Canada in favour of the labour movement. He was scheduled to speak in Winnipeg on June 9th. According to Woodsworth’s biographers, the Winnipeg Strike made an impact on his life. Not only did he become personally involved in its events (he was briefly jailed as a result), he worked for years to undo two legislative amendments (one allowing for the deportation of immigrants, and the other involving free speech) enacted at the time that were unfair, successfully repealing one in 1927 and the other in 1936. Woodsworth, having lived the experience of a labourer understood their situation in a way that McClung could not.

McClung was a mediocre writer. For a long time this bothered me. How do you explain this woman’s renown against her bland literary legacy? For this, Simone de Beauvoir provided an answer I can’t help but quote at length. These authors “very often remain divided between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. Not being able to forget oneself is a failure that will weigh on them more heavily than in any other career; if their essential goal is an abstract self-affirmation, the formal satisfaction of success, they will not abandon themselves to the contemplation of the world: they will be incapable of creating it anew.” And: “instead of enriching the woman, her narcissism impoverishes her; involved in nothing but self-contemplation, she eliminates herself; even the love she bestows on herself becomes stereotyped: she does not discover in her writings her authentic experience but an imaginary idol constructed from clichés.” In Nellie McClung’s case, her writing was a springboard into an essential role in the women’s movement. 

She should be forgiven for her shortcomings, but we should not fall into the trap of singling her out based on a lazy familiarity with her name. This happened for example when in 2016 Premier Pallister argued against the Bank of Canada’s decision to cut her name from the women shortlisted for a banknote. What we need now are more historians who can take on the job of finding long-lost actors to diversify our pantheon. 

045-Puppy diaries

I was telling my sister about how I was disappointed in myself for not immediately falling in love with our new puppy. 

The older I get, the more I realize what a grouch I am about transitions. What’s wrong with me, I sobbed. There couldn’t be a cuter puppy...

“This is how you are” she said. “You always love things gradually!” And she listed examples.

I remember in elementary school, my classmates who were popular girls, would become infatuated with members of a band, or, the name I remember in particular, Dennis Rodman. Me? I fell in love with Mr. Bhaer of Little Women. 

Loving someone, some place, some thing, has, over and over again, always required effort. The effort of care and time spent together. 

I need to be patient with myself. I need to call this “The Process” like Sam Presti “the architect of OKC’s basketball success.” I only know about “The Process” because I’ve just finished reading Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town.

043-Puppy diaries

Our puppy’s name is Enzo. He only cried a few times in the night, on that first night, and Christian brought him out twice between our bedtime and morning, to pee outside, which he did, like a pro.

Interrupted sleep reminds me of when we had a newborn. The feeling is one of being stretched, like everything in my being becomes shallow: virtue, thought, breathing. It’s a frantic, “what’s next, what’s next, what’s next” state of mind.

042-Puppy diaries

On a hot day at the end of June we travelled to St. Laurent to pick up our puppy. Puppies, as it happens, are not conducive to writing. I am overwhelmed by feelings and have no distance between them and myself. If I pry a little spot, this is what rushes in: I marvel at our good luck - the breeders are an extraordinary couple with decades of experience and so many awards for their beagles that they’ve donated a portion (by the bagful, he tells me) to a center requesting award-décor. 

The puppies in their cages yelp eagerly and wag their tails. Their parents are outside, relaxed and lean, the bitches in one fenced-area, the studs in another. There is our puppy’s mom, there is his aunt. There is his dad.

There is a trend online with the hashtag “adopt, don’t shop” and I understand this well-meant admonition. I feel guilty about our pure-bread, about not nobly stepping in for a rescue. Conversely, I’m very relieved to be able to rest on the fact that our puppy’s breeder is top-notch, that their kennel of beagles is an ideal one.

041-Detail

There are many guilty pleasures I'd rather not talk about here and watching the British thriller series Marcella is one of them. However, the conclusion of the third season, in which there is a shocking amount of deaths that might not surprise a regular viewer of the Marcella series, had one niggling detail I can’t let go of.

I might just be kibitzing here, but while disbelief is suspended most of the time, the final scenes are concluded with such haste that disbelief, hung in a balloon, is punctured by the blast of events. 

I'll not summarize the events, but there's this: Rory Maguire lies dead on the floor and while Marcella is telling his stroke-muted mother about this, she opens his laptop and holds his eyeball up to the camera for an eye-scan that allows her access to his financial accounts. It’s this eyeball bit that bothers me because the eyeball, and the suspiciously long nerve attached to it, is a prop Marcella neatly pulls from her pocket, wrapped in a piece of paper towel. It's completely rigid, as if Marcella pulled it out of Rory's head and let it cure a few days on the counter, except for the inconvenience of the rapid-fire timeline. How did this eyeball held by a cord of vein or nerve, like a marshmallow on a stick, become so solid and maintain the necessary preservation for an iris scan? Liquid nitrogen? What is worse is that when Marcella leaves the house, walking past Rory, his eye sockets look perfectly undisturbed. 

It's not that I would have wanted things more gruesome, it's that I would have wanted the writers to pick a side. If we are to have gruesome deaths, why not have a gruesome eyeball? If we are to have not-too-gruesome, then give me a scene where Marcella uses her phone to take a picture of his iris and an app to properly reverse it so that the iris-recognition could be fooled and the viewer along with it.

I like detail. Big plans are fine, big plots too, but platters of detail are my delight.

39-Worry Muffins

Today I made muffins. 

I say that I've made muffins because it was a small thing I could do, on the list of things to do, while the kids did projects in the dining room. Baking supposes cheerfulness, and while it seems impossible to feel gloomy while the scent of cinnamon wafted through the house, these actions can sometimes only just barely stretch enough to simulate normalcy in what feels like pervasive worry. But people have faced worry before! Look! In December of 2006 Nora Ephron wrote: “The morning talk shows will remind me (not that I need to be reminded) that the world is currently in the midst of a total meltdown, that we have the worst president in current history, that the elation of the recent election has passed  to a numbing foreboding that nothing is going to change and that innocent people will continue to die in this hateful, violent episode we've unleashed.” And although I'm not sure which election she's talking about, and suspect the violence is about war and not racism, still, I kind of hope she was being sarcastic? Because this year’s meltdown feels like the meltdown of all meltdowns. Sometimes I feel silly for reading Nora Ephron. I picked up her book from the library on the last day it was open. It was a fat book titled The Most of Nora Ephron and I thought it could be the light reading alongside Harold Brodkey. Instead, Ephron's humour feels outdated. I’m partly to blame... I don’t get all the references. I do get the recipes though! That part is still pertinent. 

(I’m editing this two weeks later, and that criticism about Ephron’s humour makes me feel guilty. Especially since I read the essay she wrote titled “Revision and Life: Take it From the Top – Again” and realize how much work she put into “a way of writing that looked chatty and informal” by her own description. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that her writing highlights the ways in which the conversation has changed, and I crave depth.)

I baked muffins. They’re breakfast muffins for my mother-in-law and I’m happy to make them because they are a small thing I can still do. I’m happy to drop them off so they’re ready for breakfast next morning even though we greet each other under separate clouds of worry. Hers are the worries of an 80 year old. Mine are the worries of motherhood. In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie writes a scene wherein the children meet Captain Hook who enjoins them to become pirates. One of the lost boys’ name is Tootles. “‘Don't irritate him unnecessarily’ had been Wendy’s instruction in the hold; so Tootles stepped forward politely. Tootles hated the idea of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be the buffer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for it, but make constant use of it.” 

Mothers as buffers! Isn’t that so? I imagine myself providing for our home precisely that kind of buffer with enough realism and hope to guide them through this passage. I’m acutely aware that it’s not a game of pretend, that to provide a buffer for my children, I need to be a good example. When “How a Traumatized Nation Can Recover” offers advice like this: “Make sure that we disconnect and we turn our attention to our own wellbeing and stay connected to activities that feed us. Make sure you’re resourcing yourself like a plant. Watering and feeding yourself and engaging in activities that really do give you energy.” I agree, and come here to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I try to describe what I’m doing and what I’m thinking. 

039-Hummingbird moth

We saw this remarkable thing about a week ago when we took a hike in Manitoba's Spirit Sands park. At first I thought it was a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower except that it was tiny and beige coloured and it had two long black antennae. At the restaurant that evening I googled descriptions for clues and discovered we’d seen a type of moth.

That was all I was going to write about that, except that later the same day I read the New York Times article titled “How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases” and went to bed disheartened. I know about climate change, systemic racism, and the growing income inequality and yet what seems to be happening right now is that these things are coming into clearer and clearer focus. If previously it had been fine to move through life with only a vague, even somewhat dismissive, sense of these things it is no longer the case. Surviving the pandemic will be a minor detail compared to the uncertainties that will reach tendril-like into our homes.

That is why, taking a hike as a family into a landscape that can still be enjoyable feels like a limited pleasure, a thing slipped under the wire.

038-Rip

A year ago thereabouts, I went to the downtown library to browse books. It so happened a wedding was occurring in the library's courtyard and I left to go home at the same time as one of the guests, who like me, was taking the elevator to underground parking. She was wearing a dress and high heels and had a date. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened, I waited for them to go first, but she said, “No you! It looks like your arms are going to rip off!”

I like words. I like making a game of choosing the right ones and play at that with the children sometimes, providing them synonyms and nuance. The word rip seemed particularly violent. Rip sounds like flesh tearing, like jagged dismemberment, issuing blood. The violence of the word could, in a Freudian slip kind of way, suggest the violence of the mind from which it came. Had this young wedding guest played too many videogames? Or watched too many horror movies? I was only holding a pile of books, on cooking and home decor.

But a love of words can be an impediment. Communication is laborious enough as it is, why add to it particularities of usage? In fact, words are two dimensional and action is the thing that gives meaning. Perhaps what that wedding guest saw was a person full of words, full, full, full, becoming like paper herself and she was alarmed that all this paper, under stress, fragile as it was, would, indeed, rip. Maybe her word choice was perfect and I’d wasted all this time thinking it was not.

036-Non-committal

The problem I have with tattoos is that I would be unable to decide on the design. Reading Inheritance, I was almost jealous of the way Dani Shapiro memorialized the life event that is the basis of her book. It was properly symbolic and fittingly permanent. I can't seem to settle on anything.

Time is constantly forward moving. Write a history of something and within your own life, revisionist historians can change the conclusion you came to. Maybe it's built upon. Maybe it's torn down. 

Has it ever scared you how some people hold on to a thing? Like say your dad always lied and so you've committed yourself to always telling the truth, and it's become the cure for the difficulties in your childhood and the pain you've worked through in young adulthood and now you tell everyone you know the importance of truth-telling. You tell your children, you enforce your rule with friends, you marry a blunt but sincere person. But sometimes you hurt people, because your conviction is not theirs, or rather, it doesn't take into account the delicacy of their situation and you never realize how you lost sight of the balance required by love. And then you're eighty years old and your children and grandchildren gather around and they say, "grandpa always told the truth" in the way that people who look for qualities say things about dying people that also mask a familiar pain. 

I worry about that. I worry about holding on to a thing so tightly that I lose the ability to let go and reach for the next thing.

035-Hair

In 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: "Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffs, as my wife calls them: and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily - but it is only because she sees it is the fashion."

Here, there is no fashion to imitate: the less salon visits, the better; grow out the roots and stay healthy, there is no one to impress. Of course, I tease, because, pandemic or no, there will always be vanity.

I used to live with an elderly woman who had snow-white hair. She declared that if she ever felt sick enough to call an ambulance, she'd take a bath first. She continued to age, and each health issue was like an axe swing to an oak tree, before felled in a hospital bed where she lie, awake to tell me a few days before she would die, that on the other side, when she ran into my dad, she’d tell him hello from me. I really don’t remember what her hair looked like, flattened as it must have been, against the pillow. 

It's summer now. My hair is long so I can tie it up. All I need is a hat to wear to the beach. I'm thinking of a fedora, but perhaps I'll check Instagram to see what other women are wearing.

034-Thursday Walks

While the kids had school at home, we took daily walks as an exercise regimen. We always did a loop in Henteleff Park near our house. On Thursdays we chose a park anywhere else in the city. And so we explored 13 other locations as an adventure.

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Spirited Woods

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St. Norbert along the dike behind what used to be Villa Maria.

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The Sagimay Trail in Assiniboine Forest

On Earth Day I equipped the kids with gloves, garbage pickers and a clipboard and we picked up trash on a boulevard near our house.

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Barrière Park

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U of M grounds

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Whittier Park on a rainy day

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Kildonan Park before flowers were planted

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A bit of the Duff Roblin Floodway Trail

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Pollock Island

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Assiniboine Avenue and the Legislative Building grounds

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Cardiff Trail

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The last bit of Bunn’s Creek Trail

All these walks were fun. For more ideas, I recommend the Winnipeg Trails Association website.

032-Puppy

We are picking up a beagle pup June 27th.

On June 27th, we become dog owners.

By the end of the month, our family is acquiring a new member.

I’m uneasy. I grew up afraid of dogs. The extent of pet-ownership was the successive string of gold fish my mother put in my brother’s room. Now, a parent myself, I worry that depriving my children a dog-owning experience would be selfish.

I’m daunted by all the work it will take. I’m scared I’ll weary of the training, that I’ll settle for some bad habits.

I’m scared I’ll fall in love with this dumb furry life change that its intrusion will prove too short and that I’ll be heartbroken in 13 years.

031-Chocolate Chip Cookies

I make cookies for the kids fairly regularly. It was their snack when they got home, came upstairs just long enough to tell me something about their day and then disappear downstairs to watch television. Now they still have cookies as a snack and still go downstairs to watch television, but no bus drops them off beforehand.

When I was in grade three, my friend would come to school with chocolate chip cookies. Since we were best friends, she would occasionally share a piece with me. They had large chips and more of a mounded shape than a flattened one. I've tried finding a recipe to match the memory of those homemade cookies, but I've never been successful. I get annoyed with recipes that promise to be the final stop in the land of chocolate-chip cookie quests. I haven't been able to settle on one specific recipe since the kids seem to accept any iteration of chocolate-chip with indifference. Two stand out to me though because they're just different enough to throw me off from disappointing the memory. One is a vegan version, and the other is made with whole wheat and bittersweet chopped chocolate. 

It’s not good going after a memory... Our minds play tricks on us. Once, on a date, I saw a man at another table who looked so familiar I left my shyness behind and asked him if he recognized me. He didn’t. Neither did his wife. We named organizations we belonged to, jobs we'd worked at and neighbourhoods we came from, and still, there was nothing that could have connected us. I had to decide to stop looking at him, even after going back to my seat with an unresolved feeling. There was no fix. The person he looked like never came to mind. 

There won't ever be a cookie that tastes of that grade three friendship. But my children will have a stack of chocolate chip cookie recipes to choose their memories from.

030-Talking to plants

I spent a Saturday picking annuals and browsing bushes at the greenhouse. I came across False Spirea and liked it immediately. When I came home, I evaluated the plants in our front yard. They are out of proportion: two cedar bushes are overgrown and leggy, there are no medium plants to bridge their size to the small flowering annuals and perennials.  

The cedar that has overgrown the low fence that frames our sidewalk will be cut down first and replaced with False Spirea. I like the way it fills out like Goatsbeard and Astilbe. Their flowers are a spray of white.

I’m grateful to the cedar for the time it served, for the greenery it provided in picture backdrops. I’m grateful for the fragrant smell of its branches as I cut them down one by one with pruning shears and fold them into paper bags. 

I’m excited for the landscape change; “Why didn't I think of this before?” I chastise myself. Things come in their own time... at some point the diminishing returns of a thing you enjoyed are outpaced by the sum of critical glances that tip into disappointment and subtly sap your energy.

Still, I wanted to say, “Goodbye Mr. Cedar! We appreciated your stay.”

029-Events

How do you frame a blog post on the subject of racism? I don't know. I've been mulling over this for weeks, struck by how silence is unacceptable, how a show of solidarity on social media is insufficient, and how people who are white like me set out actions like a to-do list: books to read, charities to donate to, Black businesses to support. I don't think any of this is wrong. But I drag my feet. I drag my feet not out of reluctance, but because I feel like I need a minute, a minute so I can be thoughtful about this. 

Change annoys me. Kids are going to be home forever? Give me a few weeks. We should eat more vegetarian meals? I need a year to turn that menu plan around. 

Years ago, a reporter on their way out of an office where I worked asked if I wanted to record a thought about some issue in the community that seemed unfair at the time. He pressed record on the device and held the mic up to my mouth. I opened it and mustered: “It’s terrible!” See why I need a minute?

This moment feels like an exam. The answers are quickly becoming a clichéd language everyone is using. Writers have to find ways of bringing meaning back in.

The problem with developing events is that they are just that... developing. How do you write an introduction, an argument in three parts and a conclusion when the conclusion is not arrived at yet? Historians are not journalists. But historians can look into the past to understand some of the why in the now. In Canadian Studies, this has been the case for our country’s racism toward First Nations. Gary Younge wrote in The Guardian:

“I’ve never found it particularly useful to compare racisms, as though one manifestation might be better than another. Every society regardless of its racial composition has overlapping and interweaving hierarchies. Insisting on a superiority of one over the other suggests there are racisms out there worth having, a race to the bottom with no moral center.”  

This month’s focus on racism toward Black people is a chance to examine racism full stop. In my case, I have to confront my own (particularly Canadian) disbelief. A recent re-broadcast episode of Cited included an interview with activist Desmond Cole. About disbelief, he said: 

“That is what white supremacy does, it looks at violence against Black people, whether it be in the education system, in the prison system, policing, in the workplace and it says ‘uh, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that this is is as bad as you say it is…’ (…) If we were being believed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but our history would also look very different if Black people were believed.”

The enormity of the problem that we have as a society boggles the mind and challenges any effort of mine to find a solution. But looking for solutions, in a mad dash effort to absolve ourselves of the humiliation we feel for the biases we hold unknowingly cannot sustain change, even if all the efforts are well-intentioned. It feels silly to try and demonstrate here, as Kate Baer wrote on Instagram, a “pledge (of) allyship when our IRL actions are so easily unchecked.” If we are good, we hold within ourselves a high ideal, nurtured by faith or belief, like Augustine of Hippo who said: “...among these shocking conditions, there is only one remedy: do not think ill of your brother. Strive humbly to be what you would have him be; and you will not think that he is what you are not.”

It is not enough to profess an ideal, however much one strives toward it. Therefore, if these demonstrations are a symptom of change to come, then I hope not to stand in its way, not to impede its process, not to fight against the dawn of a new day.