About hair

Sometimes, when I blow-dry my hair, the loose strands form themselves into a ring around my thumb. I feel a tiny pang of regret when I slip the hair-ring off and throw it out. It’s like a wasted piece of tiny art.

But what would I do with it? And wouldn’t it be a little macabre to take a picture?

The Victorians used to transform their stray hair into pieces of art. I learned this when we visited the Dalnavert Museum and there was a hair wreath on display in the attic. (You might still be able to see it here.) I thought it was a sign of quaint olden-day thriftiness, where nothing, not even stray hair, is thrown away. Apparently, it has more to do with period sentimentality.

On an episode of “This Is Love,” the host Phoebe Judge includes this snippet of interview with Drew Lanham, a wildlife biologist on the podcast to talk about his passion for birdwatching:

Phoebe Judge: “Can I tell you something wild?”
Drew Lanham: “Sure”
P.J.: “And given your response to this we will or will not cut it from this interview…”
D. L.: “Ok!”
P.J.: “Do you know what I’ve been doing since I was a little girl?”
D. L.: “What’s that?”
P.J.: “I’ve been taking the hair from my hairbrush and putting it outside for the birds, for their nests…”
D. L.: “Perfect.”
P.J.: “And my grandmother did this her whole life and she had this wonderful white hair and she’d been doing it forever and right before she died, uh, she found a nest in a tree and it was completely covered inside with her white hair.”
D. L.: “Wow! What a gift! I mean…”
P.J.: “Is that something we should…”
D. L.: “Yes! Yes!”
P.J.: “…should we be putting… ok, because I really… it’s pretty crazy to catch me outside putting my hair around on all the bushes...”
D. L.: “Well that’s a really cool thing. (…) It’s sorta a way of giving back, right? It’s a way of giving back. And you talk about your grandmother having done it. Your grandmother probably watched those before her do it. And in a way that’s a legacy passed forward. And you can imagine that hair cradling, nurturing a nest of eggs. And then keeping those naked young warm.”

I have trouble imagining such a thing. I don’t know why. In fact, I envy those two their whimsy. Instead, my mind slants toward Victorian morbidity, and to the depressing fact that pigeons have amputated toes because of “waste human hair” as The New Scientist calls it. For them, it’s not a hair-ring but a hair-noose around their doomed digit.

In celebration of a random Friday-night meal

Could we pause here just a minute to appreciate a meal well pulled together? I mean it’s delightful that the internet abounds in recipes, that cookbook authors put forth books by the series, that categories of cuisine fill shelves, but really, the home-cook does not jubilate over a single successful dish. No, the home-cook celebrates the satisfactory table. The table upon which each of her children finds something they enjoy, upon which there is something that does not demean the sensibilities of the adult, upon which tastes mingle and are sated.

On Friday, the fridge offered half a bunch of asparagus, sliced deli ham, 5 eggs, and some leftover cream too. The freezer was stocked with frozen berries, but no bananas. In a cupboard, dried dates had become this inconvenient pinecone-shaped leftover (from date-nut pinwheels) that shuffled between the sugar cubes and the chocolate. We’d already had pasta. I was loathe to go to the store (I always am).

This was Friday night’s menu:
Date Milkshake (from Jamie Oliver)
Blueberry pancakes (from Mark Bittman)
Asparagus and ham omelet (inspired by Mark Bittman)
Tasty Taters (from the freezer, by McCain)

On the surface, it might not seem all that much of a triumph, but what should be considered are the following factors: that the home-cook had no idea what to make for supper Friday morning, nor even Friday afternoon, and at Friday 1:00 considered texting her husband some words on the theme of mealtime despair. Fortunately, I resisted.

Sure, maybe home-cooking is an under-appreciated talent, or maybe home-cooking is undervalued, but when those grimy gremlin thoughts leave their swamp and start marching towards you, they can only be dispelled by a level of confidence wielded by professionals facing outside-the-home kind of problems, like the high-school principle who had, on her doorframe a magnet that read: “put on your big girl panties and deal with it.” (She was of a certain age, but no matter.)

Dealing with the problem created dishes, but also the tastiest omelet, one son’s favourite milkshake, satisfyingly crisp potato bites, and a pile of perfectly turned out pancakes that not only quelled my daughter’s hunger, but had that addictive quality where hands keep reaching to the plate for just one more, blueberry-studded and syrup-doused.

Children's books

When my daughter was still tiny, long before she could read, I felt overwhelmed by all the possibilities the world contained for her burgeoning existence. Decorating her room, picking out clothes, selecting toys, finding books… all these things felt big and important because they would mould her childhood memories. If she liked one thing over another, that thing could be the beginning of a collection… I hoped I was making the right investments…

Now, as two brothers have joined her under our roof, childhood things multiply more easily, collections are apparent and decisions feel less weighty. It pleases me especially to see the wear of a well-loved book, and a row of shiny spines from the “Mes Années Pourquoi” series.

Trivialise

I don’t like committing to words, or quotes - the kind you stick to a wall, or frame, or tattoo to your skin. I no sooner write down a thing meant to inspire me, that I go blind to its existence and the inspiration turns to dust. But things do inspire me! Like, for example, Jack Druce’s advice in a recent Dense Discovery newsletter:

‘Trivialise what you do.’ I learned this with comedy but I think it applies to everything. If you are betting your self-worth on everything you do, it’s easy to crumple under the weight of your own expectations. If you can find ways to convince yourself that whatever you’re doing is just silly and fun then you can simply do your best without dreading the consequences of it not going exactly how you planned.

It corresponds with what Caroline McGraw said in an interview with Gretchen Rubin:

The most common objection I get to “you don’t owe anyone,” is the idea that if we don’t walk around overburdened with constant guilt and obligation, then we’ll just run amok and ruin people’s lives.

What I’ve actually found is that when you live like you don’t owe anyone – when you are free from the weight of expectations, and have a felt awareness of your own freedom – then you are more likely to act in loving ways.

It’s linked to that great concept from Brené Brown, how our boundaries keep us out of resentment. When you set boundaries around your time and energy, when you don’t owe anyone an interaction … then you’re free to give from the heart.

It’s very heavy walking around burdened by your own ideas of how you should be and what you should do. I can’t help but feel that in excess, it can become like Sara Gruen’s tragic rescue mission.

One of the advantages Seth Godin lists as a benefit of writing a book is that “it leaves behind a record of where you are in this moment.” Blog posts are similar. Today, I like thinking about the balance to be found between love and expectation. Because this idea is on my mind, I find it expressed in new ways, everywhere… Last night, reading aloud from Anne of Avonlea, this description made me smile: “Jane was not troubled by any aspirations to be an influence for good.” Pithily, “The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.” (Mark Nepo via)

Reading list: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

How to start: I think it was V.S. Naipaul, in Literary Occasions, who admired Dickens’ fresh prose and imaginative descriptions in Bleak House. Of the readers who debate which of his 16 books is the best, some make strong arguments for this one. Set against the backdrop of a protracted law case, it begins with a vivid, playfully-described, rainy day…

Favourite quote: “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets , as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in the mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
”Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green hits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”

Tangential: I had no idea the protracted law case was based on fact and learned via Wikipedia that “Scholars – such as the English legal historian Sir William Searle Holdsworth, in his 1928 series of lectures Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian published by Yale University Press – have made a plausible case for treating Dickens's novels, and Bleak House in particular, as primary sources illuminating the history of English law.”

Words

I’m not the kind of creative person that can invent a story. Even playing “two truths and a lie” requires some mental preparation. Inventing a recipe would stress me, and why bother, when the world is full of recipes already? I’m especially uninterested in reading lists of words-that-don’t-exist-but-should. I’ll tell you why…

The other day I was listening to John Le Carré’s memoir titled The Pigeon Tunnel. He reads with a sonorous voice, has an English accent, but also reads in the other languages he speaks: German, French and American. I might not catch the all the references but I’ve enjoyed listening. Perhaps because he loves writing: “I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a pokey desk, on a black-clouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the international New York Times doesn’t arrive till lunchtime.” So I listen with the kind of satisfaction one has for a well-prepared meal. I listen to the words he uses, like “exophthalmic” for a description of eyes.

I looked it up. It is an adjective to describe those eyes that protrude, and how many times have I not noticed people with such eyes, or heard my mother describe such a look. My mother always had a knack for describing people. She could mimic something of them until you understood who she was talking about, or had at least, a caricature in mind. She once described a nun with a toothy smile as a person with teeth like piano keys. But those eyes? There’s a word for them! It is a serious word that John Le Carré can deliver with effortless pronunciation, as if, my goodness, these exophthalmic-eyed people were just as common as the elderly rheumy-eyed ones.

We don’t need to invent new words! They exist already… it’s just a matter of reading to discover them.

Feelings path

If I hadn’t listened to the Fresh Air podcast episode wherein Terri Gross interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, all the way to the end, I would not have heard of Stacey Kent.

If I had not heard of Stacey Kent, I would not have listened to her album, retiring early to bed, to lie in stillness to escape the day and the fatigue of obligations.

If I had not listened to the album by Stacey Kent and realized that in spite of being a glib introvert stoically surviving pandemic restrictions without much complaint, I did in fact miss our occasional carefree nights out. And then, I would not have felt that line in the documentary titled Audrey, wherein she describes life resuming again after the war: “All the things you’ve never had, never seen, never eaten, never worn, started to come back again. That was such a stimulus.”

(If I had not listened to the whole documentary, I would not have realized how inspiring Audrey Hepburn was… With lines like: “She most certainly took trauma and transmuted it into love.” Or her own observation: “Humanitarian means human welfare. And responding to human suffering. And that’s finally what politics should be. I think perhaps with time, instead of their being a politicalisation of humanitarian aid, there’ll be a humanisation of politics. I dream of the day that it will be all one.”)

If I had not spent the evening doing nothing, I would not have appreciated that Radiolab episode on Escape this morning.

Who knows if I wouldn’t have arrived at these feelings in spite of these bits of media, but here they are, gathered in one neat little posy.

Five stars

Brussel sprouts, boiled or roasted are inedible in my opinion. But buy them when they look good, take off their dusty outer leaves, chop the core off, cut them in half and slice them, thin, thin. When your pile of Brussel sprouts looks like a mass of green-yellow paper confetti, put them in a mixing bowl, drizzle olive oil over them, squeeze a fresh lemon over them too, for brightness and add salt and pepper and shave parmesan and mix everything with your hand, till the leaf-shreds glisten. Top with toasted walnuts and enjoy!

(This Brussel Sprout salad originally comes from the cookbook Six Seasons.)

Sound

The noise of geese flying over head has been a feature these past few weeks. I often think of them as waddling nuisances, but something about their call this morning gave me a feeling of nostalgia. Were the geese to be removed from the scene, were I to travel to a country without geese, I would feel their absence. Hearing them is a feature of spring and fall, across all the years I grew up and all the years I’ve lived here on the prairies as an adult.

Sound ties memory to a place. I picture a multi-lane bridge somewhere near Toronto as we listened to the rhythmic drumbeat of an album by the band Brulé on a family road trip. I see night sky when I hear “I Want to Spend my Lifetime Loving You”. I see my room in Saskatoon when I hear Strauss waltzes. I’m in a car in the province of Quebec when I hear Richard Abel. Yesterday, I remembered how much I enjoyed Steve Hackman’s compositions that mix classical and contemporary music: Beethoven and Coldplay; Brahms and Radiohead.

John Green reviewed Canada Geese in his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, describing them as waterfowl “(…) with a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada Goose is hard to love, but then again, so are most of us.” He draws connections between the geese and humans, admits to considering them pests, like everyone else, but notes: “Even if geese have become mundane, there’s still something awe-inspiring about seeing them fly overhead in perfect formation.” He concludes by rating them less than five stars because of how they represent our species interference with nature. This morning though? I’d have given them five stars just for reminding me to appreciate sound.

Reading list: Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

How to start: Brodkey seems to have been a controversial character, gleaning from online articles about him. Francine Prose admires the way in which he depicts “people ranting to children” which she calls one of “several notable literary examples.” About a story titled “S.L.” Prose explains: “the ranter is the title character, a self-indulgent decent man who is about to adopt the little orphan to whom he is raving. Reading S.L.’s monologues, we become intensely aware of the way that people often talk to children - as if they aren’t sentient, comprehending beings - when in fact children, like the boy in the story, know perfectly well what the adults are saying. Though S.L. wants the child to love and accept him, everything he says increases our sense of the child’s isolation, confusion, and desperation.”

Favourite quotes: (Bookkeeping) “Sometimes it horrifies me,” he said, “that we dare talk about serious subjects - the camps, love, anything. We should leave the serious subjects to poets, who will tell us how to speak of them without lowering them; we should confine ourselves to the weather and the stock market like sensible people.”

(Innocence) “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style, he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.”

“There’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bread for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it’s in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near.”

(His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft) “The man I hugged or ran toward or ran from is not in any photograph: a photograph shows someone of whom I think, Oh, was he like that?”

(The Nurse’s Music) “I do not think memories lie for a cheap reason. It is just that memory deals in totals, in summaries, in portable forms of knowledge, so that what it dredges up are things that are like mottoes or aphorisms or apothegms rather than like real moments. And the totals are often true enough as they are pictured, even if the pictured thing never happened, but is a total, a mind thing, just as what’s in a photograph never happened but is the machine’s slice of a part of reality, which it then slides out sideways, so to speak, from the forward rush of real air. Time was never that stilled; the photograph lies; the eyelike machine slices off a thin and fixed souvenir; what gives it focus makes it untrue - no one I know was ever as still as a photograph.”

(The Boys on Their Bikes) “He’d gotten me to start to try to explain; explanations are demeaning: you’re in service to the other’s understanding you then; you’re not allowed to live but have to stand in a clear light and just explain.”

(Angel) But I imagined all that as laid aside with regret or even hatred, but since, if one lives, one will most likely be a witness from now on, what need is there for most of such aspects of will in one’s self as one has needed up until now when one was not a witness? Almost certainly, one can expect to be inspired now and protected - oh, not physically: one can be martyred, used in various ways in whatever time or timelessness there is to be now: one has a very different sort of soul - the total of one’s self now includes this occasion and one is different.”

Tangential: Harold Brodkey’s obituary in The Independent, as written by Andrew Rosenheim, makes light of the opinion that Brodkey was a narcissist: “He was, to be sure, an incurable narcissist…” but some of Brodkey’s stories describe Narcissistic Personality Disorder to a T, namely “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” and “Largely an Oral History of my Mother”. I wish more could be written about narcissism in literature, but I do feel that this website has it right when they state: “Creating a believable narcissist for fiction ultimately requires real life experiences of living or working with a person.”

Another blanket

Just as Daylight Savings has ended, as the river ice is breaking up and making scraping sounds not unlike the swish, swish, swish of slush underfoot, as squirrels are busy everywhere with bounce-like hops across last fall’s dry leaves, I’ve finished a blanket.

This blanket stitch is old-fashioned… I spied a crochet blanket with this stitch on The Crown and felt inspired.

HangIng chair

Today we hung a chair in the living room. The space is now 20% more fun.

Clothes

In the evening, when it is dark and cold outside, my daughter and I spend a few minutes before her bedtime reading a chapter from a book in English. (We’re read through lots of recommendations from Gretchen Rubin’s list of 81 Kid Lit / YA books) Curled up on the couch, we recently read this passage in Anne of Green Gables: “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable. At least, it is easier for me. I suppose it doesn’t make such a difference to naturally good people.” She goes on to describe her coat and compliment her friend’s hat and concludes: “Do you suppose it’s wrong for us to think so much about our clothes? Marilla says it is very sinful. But it is such an interesting subject, isn’t it?”

I grew up with a mother who, reacting to her own childhood, scarred by other experiences, and fully committed to conservative Catholicism, dressed me in modest cleanliness from my birth to adulthood. When I left home, I had to learn how to figure out my own style. Sometimes the thought this exercise required and the shame it exposed made me feel resentful. I think that is why I find Anne’s quote so interesting, because once I could stop worrying so much about what I wore, there was space to concentrate on other things.

Growing up, clothes were humiliating, because I felt they set me apart when I wanted instead to fit in. Obsessively attributing the day’s good turnout or bad turnout based on what I was wearing felt silly even as I did it throughout high school. Clothing, I was supposed to understand, was a frivolous thing, much like Anne’s obsession over puffed sleeves. Thinking about it was impossible to justify. And yet, it was the clumsy handling, growing up, of “what is important” that still nags at me today. In the place of my mother, I’ve taken to books like Parisian Chic, Women in Clothes and The Sartorialist. They’ve shown me how clothes are “such an interesting subject.”

Texture

Today, all I have to offer are the things I took from the morning’s walk… the textures of tree bark, the patterns made by the melt and freezing of snow, the shape of branches, the colour of dogwood…

Collage

I often get the feeling that I am just collaging ideas together here, scraps gathered from one area and then another, brought here, and taped together with a capital and a period. It’s not art, I keep thinking… but it’s fun.

Take Sam Anderson’s mini essay from his New Sentences series, this one on Nassar Hussain’s ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’. Anderson writes of Hussain’s poem: “It is powerful to see these foundational myths reconstituted out of bureaucratic mundanity — like a model of the human genome built out of Legos.”

And then look here: Jason Kottke’s: “Four Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish” includes, “This Lego bonsai tree is ‘a mindful build’ designed for adults.”

Is there a point to this assemblage? No. It’s like what the kids and I do sometimes after school… I didn’t notice this creativity was missing until I unrolled a filled-up roll of paper from an IKEA easel we’d set up last year at this time for school-at-home. The roll had journal sentences, announcements, explanatory drawings, and just-for-fun drawings. We stopped using it, and I’d regretfully put it away, until I realized, having unrolled the old roll, that the creativity inside was in fact a back-and-forth between the kids and I. We gave each other ideas and sparked artistic tangents for no other reason than because the white space invited us to.

A poem being described with a Lego metaphor - the Lego there being an allusion to what is clunky and heavy, versus the image, offered by the Lego company itself, of a use that aspires to lightness and intricacy - a bonsai tree, mindfulness - is delightful when paired together, don’t you think?

Humility - again

I wrote a blog post commenting on this idea of humility, which, from my understanding, is a theme in Adam Grant’s book Think Again. His book and his ideas have been bouncing around the cluster of podcasts I listen to, and I suppose that is why I am revisiting the idea. Humility itself is interesting. I think it is vaguely amusing that I reactively dismiss the promotional urgency to read the book based on what I feel I already know. However, Adam Grant recently released a podcast episode that combined two interviews he’d done with Malcolm Gladwell and this latter gets at a point that reflects my feeling. Here is my (lightly edited) transcript of their conversation:

Malcolm Gladwell: I’m always very attracted to religious themes in things, particularly if they’re slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some kind of moral case being made in your books, that maybe you weren’t making explicitly but that there was something about reading your books that felt very comfortable to someone who is used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I (I was thinking) if I had a Bible study of Evangelicals and I said ‘this week we’re not reading the New Testament, we’re gonna read the works of Adam Grant’ I think actually people with that kind of worldview would be very at home with the arguments that you’re making. 

Adam Grant: That’s interesting! I love it when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think, where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around … for me at least, a lot of the principles and recommendations that comes out of religious traditions are missing the nuance about ‘how do you actually do this in life’. So yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want to be humble, but I don’t want to become meek, or lack confidence and so I think, I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where, where these higher principles leave off, and ask, ok, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know, our ambitions.

 M.G.: Yeah, yeah. But even that, I mean, that’s why Christians have Bible studies, and that’s why Jews study Torah, because the original texts, they are only the beginning, they require additional interpretation and understanding. They’re not sufficient on their own, otherwise you wouldn’t need to study them.

A.G.: When it comes to having those conversations about the ideas in those texts, I just, I happen to love the tools of the scientific method as a way to figure out what’s gonna be effective for more of the people more of the time.

I think Malcolm Gladwell highlights what it is in Adam Grant’s latest book that makes me feel like his theme is a familiar one.

Community

A promotional magazine arrived in our mailbox last week, all about moving to a rural community in the Southeast region. The first article’s title reads “Five Great Reasons to Get Out of the City” which lists short commutes, amenities, savings, and, at number four, “Everyone Knows Everyone”.

I take that as a negative.

But wait, this nameless writer argues. “There is a long-standing myth that living in a small town means everyone knows everyone else’s business. There may be a kernel of truth to this, but there’s another way to look at it: small towns are infamous for their neighbourly outreach.”

I am unconvinced. I’ll take a cabin over a rural development any day, thanks.

Then I happened to be listening to Terri Gross’s interview with James McBride on Fresh Air. They’re discussing the setting of his most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, and McBride explains how, throughout his childhood, he would leave Queens and spend summers in Red Hook. “There was a freedom in Red Hook that I didn’t experience in Queens. The church was there. My godparents were strict but they were fun. There was just a freedom there that I didn’t really feel anywhere else. There was also a sense of community that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere.”

When Terri Gross asked how you could feel a sense of freedom in a neighbourhood reputed for its crime, McBride elaborated. “Because you know who everybody is. You know who not to mess with, you know [who not to fool with, who’s in a bad mood because bad news, who’s trustworthy, what someone’s mother is like,] it was the sense of being in a village, a sense of ‘us against the world,’ (…) a sense of ‘we are kinda together here’. Now, granted, (…) you kinda have to remember (…) to let people have their own space, so you just ignore things you just don’t want to see. You see someone doing something wrong, you see someone dating someone they shouldn’t be, you just kinda look past it because everyone deserves their own space. But there is a togetherness that comes with that.”

I think that what McBride does is relay an experience that is both unique and convincing because it has soul. The promotional article has no soul. I mean, that’s normal, it’s to be expected, but still… I like feeling!

Crochet

The other day at the dog park, a retired person asked another retired person if they had hobbies. “No, not really” the latter answered, saying that they had worked so much, that adopting a hobby now felt like more work. A hobby-less life seems gloomy to me and I am forever grateful to my aunt who showed me how to crochet some 17 years ago. Like her, I usually crochet while watching tv, but lately, crochet has also come in handy during social Zoom calls.

This is a two-sided blanket made from wool. The puppy chewed a hole in it, and it required some repairing.

On the left is a circle-scarf, made using a free pattern from All About Ami. On the right is a scarf I made using a basket-weave type stitch.

These are blankets for the boys’ bedroom, made in their favourite colours, during Covid-19. It was something to do when school-at-home required availability and denied me concentration for anything else.

Pet dogs

My mother-in-law remarked, the other day, that “dans le temps” (the French equivalent to ‘back in the day’) city people didn’t own so many dogs. St-Boniface in her time was the 1940’s and 1950’s. I can imagine fewer families owning dogs. I can imagine that now, we are a society that abounds in domestic pets. In fact, that was part of the reason I didn’t want to have a dog… so many people already had dogs and I was reluctant to join the society of people who obligingly carried poop bags with them. But I also wonder if it’s true, what she says as an observation.

Today, we took the dog to a dog park for the first time. We unleashed the puppy in the puppy pen and soon a husky joined in and I chatted with the retired couple while this beagle of ours held his own against the larger dog and chased it and howled at it for being unable to catch up. Other dogs joined and our hound smelled treats and jumped after other dog owners, determined to get their treats. To some degree, dog ownership is not unlike parenthood in that it drops you into this new category of people and expands your language and familiarity with behaviours heretofore ignored.

In 2019 the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) published a report indicating that the dog population increased from 7.6 to 8.2 million in 2016, nearly equaling the cat population for the first time since statistics were kept by the institution in 2004. (via)

In 2015, Philip Howell published a book titled At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog and Victorian Britain. In it, Howell set about studying the dog’s place in Victorian society and writes that “the Victorians may plausibly have invented the modern dog.” To this effect, he quotes James Rubin who “writes that ‘the spread of pet- keeping to the middle classes and its association with emotional wholesomeness is a modern phenomenon.’ And the case can be made that it is in the Victorian period specifically that the practice of keeping dogs as pets—with all its repercussions—developed most meaningfully.”

Howell’s introduction exposes how recently the study of pets has become a legitimate area of research, noting how the field was barely a generation old at the time of publication: “The historical study of animals has reached a maturity and acceptance that could barely be imagined only a few decades ago, when the idea was nothing more than a source of amusement, a satire on the faddishness of social history.”

See, the point of this is to say that it is only a matter of asking a question. The search for an objective answer can lead to worlds of discovery. Of course, I haven’t been able to resolve whether or not there are more dogs now in Winnipeg than there were in 1950, but a few minutes research has offered two clues: dogs as domestic pets seems to have originated in Victorian England, and secondly, the dog population in Canada has increased since 2004.

Today's walk

It feels extra-adventurous when the dog and I slip away from the usual pathways to walk instead along the riverbank. The mud looks shiny-wet in the morning, but it’s still frozen from the overnight lows.

Crevices make the dirt look rock-like. Rain ran here in rivulets anxious to regain the river.

Winter’s palette is full of blues and grays, browns and golds.

Across the river, the University campus has finished its second phase of riverbank stabilization. The rocks are huge and grate against the metal of the heavy equipment, cumbersome to move into place, their sound ricocheting through the air.

And then we’re home! The dog insists on bringing back a stick almost too big for him to handle.