Attention please

I was an only child for six years and lived a cozy life perched on the 19th floor of an apartment building in downtown Saskatoon. At some point in that period mom paid a magazine subscription for me, to some innocuous title I don’t remember which happened to print reader submissions. My five-year old self felt inspired one day to put words into a poem shape after a rain shower with the express purpose of sending it off to see if it would be returned to me on a magazine page. It was.

Once I heard, or maybe read somewhere, some offhand comment to the effect of “if you only knew how many people send in poems about rain!” and I blushed for my five-year-old self.

The ideas we have about something are often depressingly unoriginal. At the same time, we absorb things without even knowing… I’m always worried about how much I miss. I totally forgot I read Loving by Henry Green until I opened the book and started reading the first pages. I’ve taken up drawing, in part, for its attention-capturing quality.

I’m planning a new flower bed in our front yard and returned to a book on my shelf: Perennials for Every Purpose by Larry Hodgson. I re-read an entry for Goat’s Beard, where the author’s comment: “Goat’s Beard will never disappoint you” felt so much like my own thought that it was like recognizing something familiar - my own foot, my own voice. Our yard has 4 of these plants, used like shrubs, just as Hodgson recommends. Years ago, I studied this book when looking for inspiration and here, I’ve absorbed it without realizing.

Urban observer

I’m not any good at observing nature, and if it wasn’t for my husband’s weather-watching hobby, I’d wear sweaters in summer, and uselessly carry around an umbrella when it was cloudy. But there is a thing I can observe that moves slow enough and stays large enough to follow… that is the state of urban shopping centres.

Here in the southern-most tip of Winnipeg I am five minutes from St. Vital mall which took one of its largest hits (in my subjective observation) even before the pandemic when Sears shuttered its doors and the mall eventually filled the vacancy with three new tenants: a gym, a Marshall’s and a Home Sense. I recently walked through the mall, my errands too diverse to avoid doing so, and noted the vacancies like missing teeth in a smile: no more La Senza, Thyme Maternity, Build-a-Bear or pretzel place. Gymboree has long since given up its spot to Petland.

Within less than four kilometres of my house there are two Dollarama’s - reminding me a the grim article I read a few years ago on just this subject. (It might have been this one, in Bloomberg.) The ones here replaced Pier 1 Imports and a local grocer.

Maybe less than ten years ago, a new outlet strip mall was set up on Kensaton with stores like Tommy Hilfiger, Reitman’s, and Danier. Storefronts have changed. Just recently one switched from clothing to skin care. But this string of outlet stores face their own extinction since the appearance of the Outlet Collection on Sterling Lyon Parkway. I’m not sure how retailers managed to conclude that this was a wonderful idea, two decades into the 2000’s. I tend to be of the pessimistic opinion that malls are dying or dead, but somehow developers in Winnipeg have declared otherwise. A beautiful mall with sky-high ceilings and aisles that anticipated social distancing before a single bat ever coughed, opened and became part of the landscape like a giant mushroom. It does feel like the final stages of retail, described here as a kind of canabalization.

There’s a time warp though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. You can find articles that say that retail is dying from years ago, and yet things are still being built and bought and sold here. Are we slow? Are the people who note the trend mistaken in their conclusion? Is it a kind of pessimism, or is it that old capitalist ideas are still being clung to? I don’t know… Hence the observations.

Loch Ness monster

There’s this add for a productivity app that pops into Youtube playlists. While the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist, it says, good teamwork can - thanks to Asana.

The Loch Ness monster? It exists! It left its deep murky cove and swam far, far away, and hearing of the sturgeon lying deep below the currents of the Red River came to feast on them. Then the Loch Ness monster grew fat, and one day prayed the gods to be delivered from the pursuit of Manipogo. Like in Daphne’s case, the gods took pity and turned the Loch Ness monster into a tree.

It seems content here through the change of seasons, caught, revealingly, mid stride.

In the archives

Yesterday I went to the Saint-Boniface archives. Covid protocoles make for socially-distanced desks, and yesterday my desk for reviewing documents was just outside, under the arches of a preserved wall from the Empire Hotel.

Behind me was a wooden desk, also from the Empire Hotel.

Covid protocols keep me masked. Documents are all safe from my exhalations.

Some documents are huge!

This is a land title document with an impressively huge red wax seal, covered for its protection, still bearing pretty green ribbons. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is mentioned. It is dated 1888. Not all documents are so big and land titles eventually shrunk. But I like to imagine the office where this was written, the officious people who dipped their fountain pen in an inkwell, the giant seal and the man to whom the land was granted, walking out with this massive paper, to go farm a plot in relative isolation, going to bed at night in a rudimentary wood log house.

Two moments

This morning when I walked the dog, the river was like glass.

On the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I savoured what Christiane Wolfe had to say about anger and intention:

Forgiveness is a really hard one [emotion]. And forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Forgiveness is not something that we decide, just like “yeah that makes sense to forgive that person, or that situation, or myself.” But the thing is that anger will turn into bitterness, if we, over time, can’t let go of it. And that’s just like a yucky feeling. (…) We have agency over our intention. We don’t have agency, as I said, we can’t decide to forgive or we can’t decide to be compassionate or we can’t decide to love, right? But what we do, is we can set the intention and then we can keep inviting these qualities in, over and over and over and just trust basic neuroscience, right, that whatever we do repeatedly, that will change us.

Foreign lands

I am deep into research, trying to wrangle information gathered from archives into a neat container that one calls a thesis. I’ve come to recognize this feeling from research projects past and my favourite metaphor is one of travel…

Craig Mod in his final picture of a pop-up newsletter called “Huh” captured the feeling in a few phrases: “what I remember most about this moment is how foreign and unknowable it all felt, an impenetrable newness, and for a second five lives (Derro just out of frame) converge and information is exchanged and, with a dollop of confidence, we take the very first steps of the long walk that starts it all.”

Burrowing into the past is much like travelling to another country… You have to find your bearings - the people and the places that were different, the organizations that existed then that don’t now, the customs that were common then but sound so unusual now.

A week in five recipes

Of all the ways one might write of hectic days, listing the things you made to eat, or ate made by others, might be the most sympathetic.

On Monday I made blueberry popsicles and discovered what a mess pureed blueberries make.

On Tuesday I hosted lunch for a friend while our puppies played together. Chickpea Pan Bagnat is the visitor-friendly kind of lunch you can prepare ahead and pick up and put down for the inevitable child and puppy interruptions.

On Wednesday, Christian found enough string beans in the garden for Salade Niçoise. The garden centre had new potatoes for sale.

On Thursday, we made our son’s birthday party lunch: grilled cheese and a strawberry-banana smoothie.

On Friday we made salmon en papillote, paired it with simple fried rice and a glass of white wine to celebrate the end of an unusually busy week.

Googly-eyes

Googly-eyes are just fun. Affixing googly-eyes to pictures of people or objects isn’t a new idea… Someone did so in 1969, out of boredom and invented Weepuls. But the objective in our was less about lessening boredom and more exercising the opportunities unleashed by a bagful of googly-eyes bought at Gale’s Wholesale.

I’d noticed that my mother'-in-law’s condo had signs with eye-less mask wearers and asked the kids if I should outfit them with googly-eyes. The kids said yes. The kids also said to take photo evidence.

I learned a new word earlier this year, when Mary Karr described herself as occasionally puckish. Puckish? Here’s the OED: “Of the nature of or characteristic of Puck; impish, mischievous, capricious.” This small act of “eyebombing”? Very puckish.

“I did this thing,” I told my mother-in-law during our visit. I brought her to the elevator and showed her the sign.
”Those signs have been there forever!” she said, the new eyeballs looking so natural…
”I added the eyes!” I said.
She looked again and started to laugh.
”Want to do the sign on the floor above?” I offered. She did!
Walking along the hallway, I felt more happiness watching her stifle her giggles than I did actually affixing the eyes. But then, isn’t that the nature of a trick? The whole anticipation we feel just imagining what reactions might be? It’s a lot more fun steering the imagination that way than it is listening to it after watching the news.

Woolly

Seeing this debris left by a giant poplar, I thought of sheep’s wool. I like the idea of sheep… They pop up on TikTok being gathered by dogs, or being shorn by Katie McRose while she chats about her job… I think I like the idea of sheep because there are so few here, much like I like the idea of living in a rainy place (is it London still?) while the grass on our front lawn looks more like hay.

But back to the poplars… Step on this white fluff and it crunches. Hidden under its soft-looking exterior are the shelf of dried out seed heads.

Reading List: A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

How to begin: Francine Prose uses the opening scene from A Perfect Spy to demonstrate an example of how dialogue advances the plot. Indeed, the book has lots of dialogue, but often what made me smile were the broad-stroke descriptions of people and places.

Quotes: “Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.” (p 2)

“He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. (…) It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t beat to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem.” (p 186)

“She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out…” (p 273)

“It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again.” (p 274)

“He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat.” (p 278)

“Brotherhood had bathed and shaved and cut himself and put on a suit.” (p 288)

“At number 18 he paused and in the manner of a protective purchaser stood back and surveyed the house. Bach and a smell of breakfast issued from the ground-floor kitchen.” (p 289)

“He was tall but reassuringly unathletic.” (p 291)

“It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.” (p 386)

“Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish.” (p 415)

“Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber fertile, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.” (p 502)

“We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege.” (p 528)

“What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-class humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia.” (p 533)

“The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes.” (p 536)

Tangential: I read this book after listening to John Le Carré’s memoir, and somehow, I often still heard his voice in my head, narrating these passages. A Perfect Spy was made into a seven episode mini-series released in 1987 on the BBC.

The view

Toady, we took off to the beach, lunch, children and dog in tow. I burned my neck thinking my hat had a larger brim. I enjoyed taking the dog for a walk along the water’s edge, exploring to the limit of the sand, where beach ran into forest, and trees that once stood had toppled over, their roots like a great big diner-table top, stood vertical. Some of their dried tangle still held captive boulders.

Then we came back to find everyone else in the water, and, after chasing waves, I sat under our umbrella and took in the view.

Reading

I just finished listening to the audio version of How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I transcribed a few quotes where I felt I was learning something new:

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As president Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “you do not take a person who, for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978: “in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way. In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” (…) The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans towards equity is reverse discrimination. (Chap. 1)

We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an anti-racist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination. Racist ideas have defined our societies since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal. But antiracist ideas remain difficult to comprehend in part because they go against the flow of this country’s history. (Chap. 1)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces, policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Chap. 2)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 3)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 6)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 12)

Here's what to do with strawberries

Assuming you’ve gone out to a field under a hot sun, picked the berries fast or slow, overheard conversations from a few rows over while you were at it, paid for the privilege of picking the ripest fruit from the farmer’s hard labour and the risks he incurred from the season’s capriciousness, come home and delivered them from the uncomfortable confines of their cardboard box and spread them out lovingly on a cloth-covered table where they now perfume the air… here’s what you can do.

You can make a double batch of freezer jam.
You can also make a double batch of berry syrup - for dousing pound cake and whipped cream for example.
You can make a strawberry shrub which comes from olden-day traditions involving vinegar used as a preservative.
You can grab a bunch of them, unadulterated and drop them over waffles and cover them with whipped cream (again with the cream…).
Then, out of ideas and energy and time as they wilt before your eyes, freeze the rest.

Yes, strawberries are a feature of our summer… I’ve written about them before here, mentioned them here, and linked to one of my favourite strawberry desserts: shortcake!

Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.

Enzo - 1 year

The end of June marked one year since we welcomed a beagle puppy into our home… Just before Marie-Hélène’s 11th birthday, we drove out to Branko’s Beagles near Saint-Laurent to pick up the purebred for which she had found the name “Enzo”.

One year in to being a family that owns a dog, Enzo is very much a member of the family… And thankfully, he’s grown. Puppyhood was adorable… but was it ever a lot of work!

Now, he rings a bell when he wants to go outside. He also doesn’t eat everything he finds on a walk. Until having a puppy, we had no idea how much litter people left behind, or how many birds hid in the shrubs along the path…

One fall Thursday, Enzo swallowed a sock. It wasn’t one of our socks… it was a sock someone had left behind in the forest. It was a sock so quickly disappeared I couldn’t tell you if it was a baby’s sock or a dog’s foot warmer, or some careless small person’s. The kids who were with me on the walk, told me of the sock, and it was so quickly gone that I wasn’t even sure there had ever been one. But on the Monday that followed, when we brought Enzo to be neutered and picked him up after the procedure, the vet had made a note on our bill to be more careful about layabout socks. Apparently, when Enzo had been sedated, he’d vomited the sock.

He’s vomited on our carpet twice; once after eating crickets at the park, another time after finding birdseed on a walk and mistaking himself for a member of the feathered species.

Once my sister asked me why we picked a beagle. For one, I’ve always heard good things about the breeder… Branko’s has a brilliant reputation. For another, beagles are known to be friendly, and Enzo is decidedly so.

He’s also an active dog… early on, he was eager to come along on family hikes and now runs alongside Christian on family bike rides, thanks to a bike harness.

Car rides make him nervous and balloons scare him. (We let him play with one when he was a puppy and it popped.)

I didn’t expect that I would turn into a person who likes talking to other dog owners. Even more than that, I didn’t expect that the all-season daily walk would yield such an appreciation for cold weather… There is something special about going out in the cold with a tough dog who delights in getting his exercise no matter what.

Mostly though, Enzo has been a wonderful diversion for the kids. The moment he’s out of sight, they ask, “where’s Enzo?” With school-at-home, he was always around for spontaneous cuddles. His “welcome home” treatment of Christian is delightful to witness.

Drawing

I’ve taken up the practice of keeping a sketchbook and drawing in it daily. I felt completely out of my depths at first, but borrowed Everyday Drawing and Sketching by Steven B. Reddy, followed the steps, and immediately felt encouraged enough by the results to continue. Reddy’s tone is so friendly that one can release oneself from the death-grip of perfectionism.

I’ve noticed, as my enthusiasm for the activity has yet to wane, that it‘s the nature of the activity - the practice that leads to incremental improvement - that I like. Maya Shankar explains it perfectly in an interview on People I Mostly Admire:

Fundamentally, one of the things that I love engaging in are pursuits where your inputs feel like they really matter because they’re expressed in outputs. The more you practice, the better you become as a violinist. And that’s not true in every discipline. You can try your absolute hardest on this latest start-up but then all these market factors and exogenous factors play a role and you just don’t have control over the system. But it felt like I could see the translation of my hard work and see it manifested in better playing. And when you choose a pursuit like that, it can be endlessly satisfying because you’re not always concerned with the absolute quality of playing, you’re concerned with the delta: how much progress you’re seeing over time.

So yay for sketchbooks!

Backyard

We recently walked through a new neighbourhood where backyards lined a large reedy pond and landscapers had only recently finished with brick hardscaping and young plants. The new development and the size of the houses is impressive, but I still come home and count myself supremely content tending to the changes we’ve made in our own small yard.

Before, we had a raised garden and an apple tree. We took apart the raised bed, moved the garden and cut down the apple tree.

With some of the wood from the raised bed, sanded and painted, we made a larger sandbox. On hot days, we can top the sandbox with an inflatable pool.

Cocktails are more fun than wine

For Father’s Day, I bought Christian a cocktail shaker, muddler, stir-spoon and citrus juicer. I also bought Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Bar Book. You might suspect I bought the book for myself, and you’d be right. But one cannot prepare one’s husband some cocktail without proper technique, no? Morgenthaler talks about cocktails with the same kind of enthusiasm as cooks talk about recipes; I like his voice.

I still like wine. Short of becoming a sommelier, or tracking purchases, or reading reviews and finding out what oak and cherry means in your mouth and nose, wine will always be a little shrouded in fog as far as I’m concerned. Add to that the fact that wines change from year to year, that experts will declare that this label is priced at more than its value to encourage customers to buy it, or whatever, and see? Fog! Most rosés will taste refreshing on a summer’s evening. Most red wines will be fine with that piece of meat. Maybe one will be extraordinary, and that’s a treat, at a restaurant, on a date.

But you know what I imagine is even more satisfying? Preserving the strawberries you picked just the way Morgenthaler recommends you do, and making a shrub one evening, when the air is so warm that even in the darkness of nightfall, you take a careless stroll around the block with your husband and feel like the night is a gentle hug.

Don’t get me wrong… I like wine, but I think that mastering a cocktail here and there might be just plain fun. Wine is serious and sometimes makes me fall asleep, but the other day, when it was Father’s Day, I made mojitos for the first time. While my mother-in-law sat in the living room, I went outside with a bag of ice and used a rolling pin to pound it from cubes to crushed, as if I were a furious drummer: Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat... And the mojitos were a surprise! I thought they might be sweeter, but the mix of lime and mint and simple syrup and white rum was a bracing mouthful of flavour with each sip, refreshing in its own way. The glasses, served with straws and soda water, with their floating muddled greenery were their own pieces of art, the way a plate is, when you balance colours: caramelized sauce on charred meat, bright green salad and cubes of red tomatoes dressed in garlicky vinaigrette, the white sphere of potato with its earthy brown skin, and glazed carrots, like chopped orange firewood.

Sometimes I think our artistry is small and sensual. Look at this sky, for example. It’s huge and imposing and can’t fit into a glass.

Alcoholic drinks have always had, in my mind, an association with guilt and shame. Even writing about it here feels like a confession, feels like revealing a thing that should be hidden and I wonder why. I wonder why pleasures are classified like diamonds in a jeweller’s case: good, better, best. I feel like it’s necessary here to defend the happiness I take at the prospect of exploring cocktails. And yet, no one has to defend taking a road trip to see a new landscape even though people can pursue travel with just as much avidity. Why is it that I can take a picture of the sky and feel ownership of it and find that my admiration and sharing of nature is accepted on social media in a way that makes me seem more innocent than if I was to post a picture of a cocktail I made? But I no more own the sky or the praise I get for its capture than I own the recipe I follow and the disapproval it garners.

Sketchbook artists

I’ve recently become entranced by the idea of improving my drawing skills and consequently picked up books on the subject of sketching. I like how artists, when interviewed about sketching, have such varied habits around keeping a sketchbook:

Some have drawn since childhood and other started in adulthood.
Some sketch daily, others can go through phases.
Some plan their sketchbook pages, others don’t.
Some draw from real life, others draw from their imagination.
Some use their sketchbook for experimenting, others use it as a journal.

I don’t know what kind of sketchbook person I will be, but the only way to find out is by dedicating time to it!

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.