Saturday, February 25, 2006

My education through blogging

I read the Anne Sexton poem on Alan’s blog and decided to go wandering through the internet to find information on her. (I know - forty- three years old and I am only now stumbling over poets and writers that I should know but don’t) So I read her sad biography and read about a half a dozen poems of hers, one titled, Christmas Eve which put a hitch in my heart and then I clicked on images and oh my God – she reminded me of my mother. Her features. Which was all really strange and really had nothing to do with poetry– but I threw on my coat and rushed out the door without the dogs and they were whining for me to come back for them but I kept walking, all excited, to the used bookstore hoping to find a book of hers. But I was out of luck and when I finally calmed down I realized I got a little carried away there. However, I did happen to find an old copy of Ariel (The price on the cover is $1.95 and it has an introduction by Robert Lowell??) and also Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I also found a Philip Levine way in the bottom of this stack and as I pulled, somewhat gently on it, the books piled on top went crashing down everywhere. A Leonard Cohen went flying and a couple of Ogden Nash’s hit the ground and a Margaret Atwood fell in between the shelf and the wall but I was able to reach down and save it. Right it all again. Thank God I was in the back room and alone.

Now I have to help Erin make an animal cell out of jello. Don’t ask.

And tonight Greg and I are off to see the documentary -- Heart of Gold (Neil Young). We heard nothing but good things about it.

Friday, February 24, 2006

hair cut

I finally got my hair cut and coloured. For a while there yesterday afternoon, I felt all (how did Tom Waits say it?) shiny like a new dime. It has been over a year since I had it cut last. Oh my gosh, is this all l I can come up with? – a hair cut.

Well, there is this friend of Greg’s (and mine too due to my association with Greg) who had a showing last evening of her work. Greg went to it. Really likes her stuff. It is abstract (horizons and oceans). – I know so little about art but I would say her strength is in the way she blends colour. Very striking.
I remember a conversation I had with her a few years ago where she mentioned that all she wanted was to be able to spend more time with her brushes and her canvas. But it was difficult for her because of the amount of time she had to spend at work. So I am happy that she found a way. I hope she finds enough success to paint full time. I think that is what most creative souls want – just enough success to make it their primary source of work.

Why I didn’t go? I wanted to. Greg was a little upset that I didn’t want to accompany him. See, Greg has four or five different groups of friends that he enjoys and keeps company with. This group happens to be a handful of very creative people. Writers and visual artists and well, quite frankly, I’m scared to death of them. Not that I have any reason to be – they are very nice people but I guess the thing is I always feel small and uneducated around them. And so of course because I don’t wish to feel that way I would often in the past drink excessively when near them thus making that small and uneducated factor a lot more warranted. How to win friends and influence people – NOT!

Anyway, if she ever puts up a website I will display the URL so you can have a look at her work.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Yes

It was a good hockey game yesterday afternoon. Apps, Piper, Campbell. I find these women truly amazing. Women just didn’t play hockey when I was a girl. My Dad played hockey, my brothers played hockey. The only time I ever got to play was in the summer, street hockey and only because I use to beg my brothers to let me play. Ice hockey had never once crossed my mind because it just seemed so unreachable. It was strictly a boy’s club. And anyway, now we finally get to be hockey players if we wish to – how grand is that. I see Monica’s friend once in awhile going with her gear and her stick and it makes me proud for her. And when the Canadian team received the Gold yesterday I was overjoyed.
I remember so many times as a kid standing at the side of the road and yelling to be heard over the slap of sticks on asphalt. “Can I play?”
And my brother yelling back, “NO, but you can watch for cars.”

Here’s to women’s hockey!

Friday, February 17, 2006

windy

We are in between two snow squalls. The wind all night wanted to beat down our door. I step out this morning to right the garbage cans and notice our pear trees of stone. The wind does not move a single branch of theirs while my neighbour’s willowy spruce rocks back and forth hearing gospel. And in between all the howling and lamenting a cardinal’s clear voice.


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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Listening to Arcade Five -- a band from Montreal -- they're brilliant.

good help is hard to find

I am such a lollygagger. Greg and I went out for lunch yesterday and we actually discussed my idle ways. I brought it up. He sort of added that I am just someone who can’t self motivate and I was much better off when I had an employer to motivate me. He’ s right. Well, he is sort of my employer at the moment but the work is kind of sporadic, a couple of hours here and a couple hours there and even that I usually get to him at the eleventh hour. And he must of asked me now about a dozen times to keep my hours up to date in an excel spreadsheet – which I keep forgetting to do. So when he goes to bill the client and asks me for my hours I’m like opps… really I’m hopeless and I guess that is because his disapproval doesn’t really bother me like it should – like say if he was a real employer, I probably (hopefully) be more on the ball – not that he isn’t a real employer but it’s not the same, we’re too close. Hell, I sleep with him.

And then he asked, “What do you do with your time?” And I tried to tell him because it isn’t like I’m lying on the couch eating bon bons all day but that being said some days doing that would probably make a more productive day. Like right now, I shouldn’t be blogging. I know that. And yesterday that little piece I wrote about my childhood recollection took me like an hour and a half to get down what? two paragraphs? As it is I want to rewrite it or delete it but regardless, I found the exercise therapeutic and that has got to be worth something?

What do I do with my time? Well mornings are sometimes a little hectic – Erin had questions about her math this morning, Monica couldn’t find her favourite hoody, the dogs needed to get out for their walk but Bow somehow removed her sister’s collar and I couldn’t find it anywhere (it was in the back yard), breakfast, dishes, a load of laundry, a walk around the back yard to pick up dog shite, wiping the dogs down after their walk, the girls come home for lunch every day so I make them lunch, just a lot of small things that just seem to eat up my time. Of course I do read blogs once I start up the computer but I only have about six that I read faithfully – it really doesn’t take up that much time – I use to spend longer reading the paper when we use to get it. Anyway, here I am defending my leisurely ways when I only started writing this to convince myself to get out there and start looking for a way to be more productive. Putting mother, wife, dog walker, wanting writer a side - I need to go out and find something I might be good at – earn a little money, gain a little self esteem. Oh man, it’s scary though. I have been gone so long.

OR - - I could just pick up the pace around here some and start motivating myself to stick to a better routine. Be a better employee to Greg and get more involved with his business. At least keep on top of his filing and finish these small projects he gives me, in a timely manner.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

about my mother

My mother died on Valentine's Day twenty-nine years ago. Well, it was actually a little after midnight on the fifteenth but we spent most of Valentines Day waiting for her to die. We (her children, all eleven of us) at the time ranged in age from twenty - two to five years old. It was around noontime when we knew for sure she was dying. It was the parish priest who sat us down and told us --
- - Mom was sick for a long time, had undergone radiation treatment and two major operations on her throat – when she returned home from the hospital for the third time she had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak anymore. But still we thought she was getting better and I guess it must have been her decision not to let us know that it had spread. She would write small notes to us in these campfire notebooks. My dad kept a few of these. They don’t say anything profound or anything and half the time no names are mentioned so you don’t know which one of us she is directing the question at -- but they still bring it back – “Did you wash your hair today?” “Can you make me some tomato soup, half milk, half water,” “did you get your math done?” “Don’t wear that shirt to school.” “Can you pass me my glasses?”

Anyway that Valentine’s Day was probably the longest and most surreal day of my life. I remember three things very vividly. First, when it was my turn to say goodbye, my aunt told me that mom wouldn’t know or respond to me because she was on a lot of medication and not completely conscious anymore. But when I approached her bedside she smiled at me. It was a small smile but it was a smile. My aunt tried to take that away from me by telling me it was just a facial twitch or a grimace but I know what it was. The second thing I remember is about half an hour after she died and the ambulance had taken her away, I had to use the washroom and I didn’t want to use the washroom downstairs because there were too many people about so I went upstairs. However, I couldn’t get past her bedroom without needing to step into it. One of my aunts had already been and gone, stripping the bed and straightened everything up. There were a lot of voices down stairs but as soon as I crossed the threshold into her room I couldn’t hear the voices anymore. It was and still is the emptiest room I have ever been in. Even the air was gone from it so that I couldn’t breathe. I ended up running back down the stairs to use the downstairs washroom after all. The third thing I remember clearly is going for a walk around the block with my older brother and a few of my younger siblings. It was probably around two o’clock then but the night was extremely bright and it was snowing. Big, gentle flakes and as we walked, we talked and up near the barns, my brother lit a cigarette and he offered me one and I was surprised at this because any other day he would of choked me if he caught me smoking. But I wanted one and took it eagerly. He even lit it for me. I felt calm. I think it might have been shock – that walk was so strange. Everything felt like it had slowed almost to a standstill. It was like change decided to give us a chance to catch our breath before it swept us away. It gave me a bit of poise. Sometimes I wish I was still that person, the one in the snow, in the middle of the night, smoking a cigarette with my brother, unaware of how drastically everything would change for us over the course of the next several years.

I think of mom every Valentine’s Day. I would give anything to have known her. Not as a daughter knows a mother but as a woman knows another woman. -- so much was left unsaid, unresolved -- there were so many secrets to my mother, so many layers and we never got to really know her. She will always be this mystery in my life.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

finally

Snow. Not much, just enough to make it winter out there. The cat in her thick coat sits at the edge of the pine table. The dogs leave white tracks on the kitchen floor. Scraping of snow shovels on walkways. Grey pigeons in a grey sky. Bare branch and red chimneys. - I’m not crazy about winter but I do expect it to be here in February, so it is with a little relief that I woke up to snow this morning.

I am enjoying the book, Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell. It is very different, funny. I like how she writes. And we rented Junebug on Friday evening and that movie is still big in my head. It was very well done. And then I got my sister up there too – my sister of the morning pages – she is in the process of moving away from her marriage and it’s a pretty difficult time for them and the children. I hope it all goes smoothly, or as least as smooth as possiable. It’s starting to snow again. I feel lacking today. What should one do when one feels lacking? Bake cookies I guess?

Thursday, February 02, 2006


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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

ouch

I stopped writing morning pages three days ago. I can’t believe I am setting that book aside once again. I’m such a dork.

Yesterday was fun although I had a difficult time reaching that point where I had left off last winter. I have better control of the board if I gain a certain speed but in order to do that I need to reach a certain comfort level, trusting myself and the board, I guess? But I couldn’t get there and I ended up taking a few big spills. By the end of the day I was so fustrated and Greg who had finished his last run was watching me come down the hill and although he witnessed me fall four times in a row, I don’t think he knew how mad I was becoming because by the time I reached him, he said, “I think you need another lesson.” It was just the wrong thing to say to me at that point. I mean it was true but I wasn’t ready to hear it with my head still ringing from the last fall. I snapped a little at him.

Earlier that day we shared the lift with two teenage boys and one guy turned to the other and said, “Man, I can’t imagine my parents on snowboards.” That remark and a few falls later, I started wondering if I was too old for this?

And then afterwards before heading back to the city we stopped in for a drink at a pub at the base of the hill. Greg and his brother ordered pints and I, who am trying desperately to stick to my resolution this year not to drink, ordered a coffee. I now have a month in and what do they say? It takes 12 weeks to break any habit? So I am a third of the way there. It’s tough though and summer will be really tough. I can’t imagine a camping trip or a game of golf without a few beer or sitting under the grapes at night without a glass of wine. I’ll just have to cross that hill when I get to it.

Greg is reading How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill and he is really enjoying it. He was reading to me about the scribes in about the seventh to the ninth century and how they would write their own bits of poetry and scribblings in the margins of the books they were copying –

One wrote

All are keen
To know who’ll sleep with blond Aideen.
All Aideen herself will own
Is that she will not sleep alone.



And I really liked this one

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
“Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our task how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.


‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.