Note: Beta edtions of Mural Gazer stories at MuralGazer.ca
…when he saw his mother’s purse, sitting on the kitchen counter that day of his downfall, he froze, a tightrope walker quavering, struggling to regain his balance. The moral math was simple: He craved his cola; his mother had deprived him of the sugary libations that made life oh so sweet; tit-for-tat, he would deprive her of enough grocery money to buy himself a pleasure-sustaining supply of Kik. Still, he wavered. Get a Kik out of life, his jingoistic nature crooned; get a kick in the arse with a pointy shoe, a fatherly voice from up on high threatened. He teetered on the edge for a moment, then…
Harry glanced through the window, out into the garden, where his mother was busy weeding and pruning. Opportunity had presented itself, the thirst was upon him, he could either take his chance or leave it, and not expect another any time soon.
Still, he resisted the gravity of his yearning, aghast. How could he even think something so dastardly, so cunning, as to steal from his own mother… As he excoriated, himself his body slipped into an altered state, beyond the pale of ordinary consciousness. He witnessed sadly, as if in a dream, his hand reach out, fingers scrabbling like spider’s legs, prying open her purse’s lips, rummaging its contents for her wallet. He pulled it out. His breathing quickened and eyes widened as he riffled through the week’s house money, a sheaf of bills neatly sorted into their coloured denominations…
Every time I walk through our dining room into the kitchen, my eye is drawn to the Aura Frame, strategically placed on the countertop between the two rooms—our son Ian gave it to me as a Father’s Day present. Most of the images that scroll through the screen are family shots—my sister’s birthday, me and my brothers getting together for the first time in years, a deer caught munching our garden flowers.
The screen and the online cloud it’s connected to are becoming a repository of photo-memories—images that remind me and others on our family network how lucky we are and the wonderful lives we lead. But it didn’t take long for me to perceive literary possibilities for the technology, and the more I consider its potential, the more excited I become about digital frames for creating and promoting my books.
Before I get into that, though, I need to give you a thumbnail of my status as an author. I’ve had a couple of books published by Thistldown Press—since gone out of print—and remain an unknown outside a small circle of readers and fellow writers. I’ve based my creative and promotional strategies on that reality, which means: I’ll continue to submit some manuscripts to established publishers; at the same time, I will self-publish most of my books; my promotional strategy in either case will rely heavily on direct, face-to-face sales to readers, as well as producing, promoing, and selling my work on Amazonthrough Kindle Direct Publishing.
How does a digital frame fit into that picture?
I’ll zoom in on a scenario that clicks for me. Imagine yourself at a book fair. You’re engaged in conversation about your recently released thriller with one person, but others are scanning your selection of titles. What if you had a digital screen set up at one end of the table, cycling through images of your books, including back-cover descriptions of the stories and testimonials? What if those browsing readers could tap the frame and launch a video reading from a book they’re interested in?
Does frame-tech have a creative slant? I think so. A book I am planning, under the working title Realta Road, will be set in a Rialta RV, whose owner—a bereaved husband—is driving across Canada. He and his wife had planned the trip for years as a retirement gift to themselves, but she succumbs to a sudden cancer just before they are scheduled to leave. The structure of the story will be the husband’s ‘journal letters’ to his wife, describing in increasingly fraught detail the misadventures he’s getting himself into between Chemainus, on Vancouver Island, and St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Next summer, or the summer after, my wife and I will embark on our own cross-Canada journey—the second time we’ve done it. I’ll be taking pictures and videoing as we go, collecting images that will help me describe Realta Road settings and characters. Would a scrolling frame on my desk populated with those images help keep me on track once we’re back home and I’m immersed in writing?
If you’re interested in digital frames as a promotional and creative tool and would like to join in an exploratory workshop, let me know.
Taken out of context, I can understand how that plea might trigger thoughts of collapsed mines, bombed out apartment buildings, avalanches or any number of natural and man… er, human made catastrophes. You could add car crashes to the list, strokes, falls off ladders, the tally goes on.
That’s not what I intended, though, lounging in one of the blue plastic Cape Cod chairs out on our back deck, watching the progress of another home run for God arcing through the infinity of blue sky over Mount Brenton.
“You weren’t thinking at all!” was how Ashley put it. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Actually, I’d been thinking about a lot of things, before Plato came along and jumped onto my lap. Good thoughts, mostly, about how lucky I am to be living my retirement era in Chemainus. As suburbs go, Cook street rates pretty good. It’s got a crime rate that flat lines somewhere near zero, there’s not a single traffic light in town, strangers wave and say hello on the street and in the aisles of the Country Grocer store, and it’s located in the mild temperate zone of Southeast Vancouver Island—accurately fabled as a bit of paradise afloat on the Salish Sea.
There’s some irredeemably grouchy types who grumble in their coffee mugs down at Nic’s Café that the best thing about Muraltown is it’s within easy driving distance of Nanaimo in one direction, Victoria in the other. I say to them: If you can afford a patch of turf in either of those two places bigger than a dish cloth, go for it. I’m happy where I am.
I was especially happy to be out on the back deck that day.
Not that I don’t like company. I do. And I really like Serena, even if she is smarter than me and can’t help delving excitedly into the details about her research into ‘mitochondrial DNA and the role it plays in aging and degenerative diseases’. She’s ‘good people’, our niece. And my wife’s good people too. But put them in the same room, and you might as well stick your head inside a beehive, the way they natter. A quiet guy like me can’t get a word—or even a thought—in edgewise.
That’s why I retreated out onto the back deck. Once they’d talked their ways through the agony of childbirth, how to get your lemon poppyseed muffins out of the tray, the best deals to be had at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop, and so on, I decided it was time to take out the recycling and stop off on the way back for a snooze in the waning light of a balmy spring afternoon, while they continued with the task of sorting through the family photo albums.
“Oh look, there’s you uncle Martin, fifty pound lighter, with hair and no wrinkles!” “Aw! There’s Panda. Remember the time he ate your socks and we had to watch like expectant parents for him to poop them out.” “Auntie Ash, you were such a hippie. I love that dress, and the army boots are ever so chic! Ha, ha, ha!” “The Half-Lemon! Oh My God, we actually drove around in a yellow VW beetle? Look at the price of gas… 48 cents a gallon! Christ, they don’t even mint pennies anymore, and gas is measured out by the litre.”
Even though I was happy for them, I have to admit to being pinpricked by envy, watching Ash and Serena babble on like partners at a quilting bee. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I was thinking, if more men could get themselves into that head space, there’d be fewer Putins in the world, and the people of Ukraine might not be suffering through a senseless armageddon, watching their cities getting pummelled into dust like 21st Century Sodoms and Gomorrahs. I’m ashamed of my male gender sometimes. Wish I could have a bit less Y in my jeans and a bit more ‘Why?’ in my brain.
We have strange thoughts in that fantastical zone between awake and asleep. There I was, reclining in the Cape Cod chair out on the back deck, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the inside of my eyelids like lava lamps when, plop, Plato landed on my lap.
Cat’s paws are the closest thing I can imagine to an angel alighting… until they begin kneading that is, their claws tugging at your clothing and pricking your skin. Plato circled round for a couple of laps, like he was tamping down the grass under a tree on his vast savanna, then settled in and started purring. I sat perfectly still, trying to make my bony thighs soft as down filled cushions. The rumble of his contentment echoed through me. You have to feel a cat’s purr to really appreciate it, let it permeate consciousness.
Please understand, Plato is not a lap cat. He’s aloof, a strutter through our lives, more likely to show you the pink petunia when you make a move to pat him than to rub up against your leg. Usually he stumps off like you’re beneath his dignity. Ash and I are lap-cat-people, though, yearning for that mystical connection between cat’s fur and human skin, and that reassuring deep vibrato of feline contentment. He was deigning to settle onto my lap for a snooze that afternoon. But lap time with Plato? It’s like cuddling a land mine. Don’t touch, don’t move, don’t even breathe, or he’ll be off.
Ash and I share the joys of those moments as if we’d experienced a second coming. I often wonder what it is we’re missing in our lives, that we hanker so desperately after our cat’s erratic affection? We have each other, isn’t that enough? Our death-defying circle of friends? Our kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, our dog Sophie, neighbours who wave hello wherever we go in Muraltown? Isn’t that enough?
Not unless Plato loves us back, I guess.
How could I be so selfish as to not share that glorious interlude with Ash? So, risking all, I slipped my fingers like a bomb disposal expert into the hip pocket of my ever tightening jeans, pinched the top of my mobile and slid it ever so gingerly out from under Plato. He was still purring when the phone came to life and I pointed it at him in camera mode. His enlarged rump filled the bottom of my frame; my hiking boots—propped on the deck table—the top.
‘Click’ went the camera. Plato purred on. I dared not breathe a sigh of relief.
Kids can thumb in a text quicker than ‘u or i’ can let go a fart. I punched my mobile’s runes the same way you’d poke at an elevator button, my pudgy index finger hitting the wrong key half the time, so that I’d have to go back and try again, and again, hissing like a kettle too long on the hob. But eventually I got the message into the allotted space beneath the distorted image of Plato on my lap, then zip, off it went.
‘Help! I can’t move my legs!’ it said.
Panic is instantaneous contagion. It zaps the collective consciousness of a room like the sudden glare of a flood light. It’s another sort of bomb, its shockwaves radiating out into the neural network, forcing adrenaline to squirt like juice from a squeeze bottle into the guts of its infected tribe. On the one hand, panic gets us moving before the bus runs us over; on the other, it doesn’t give us time to think. The autonomic nervous system kicks in and we get jerked around like puppets. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we analyze ‘the event’ after the fact, picking apart the threads of mayhem.
My theory is we’re predisposed to panic. The Doomsday Clock is always ticking closer and closer to midnight, shaving off half the remaining time, then half again, until the calculus of destruction tells us there’s nothing, no measurable allotment of milliseconds left between us and…
Duck, cover and hold! We don’t want to hear that bomb go off!
Ash, for example, is predisposed by images of me snacking on potato chips and sneaking chocolate bars, munching toward the imminent possibility of a heart attack; she has witnessed my shuffle-footed stumbling often enough to anticipate my tumbling down any convenient flight of stairs; tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps blinking, until…
‘Bing!’ The text message slid into the corner of her screen, minus the cute, explanatory photo of Plato snuggled in my lap. It shouted: “Help! I can’t move my legs!”
So there I sat, swaddled in the joy of Plato’s fidgety affection, while Ash and Serena dashed about the house looking for the corner I had collapsed into, or the staircase I’d toppled down, expecting to find me dead, my finger still touching the screen after I’d shot off my desperate expiring plea for assistance…
“You scared the crap out of me!” Ash shouted without preamble once they’d zeroed in on the back deck. She slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise, maybe even trigger some kind of cardiac event. “Serena was about to dial 911!”
“It was an accident!” I protested. “There was supposed to be a picture…”
“You’re the accident,” she shook her head. Case closed; sentencing to be announced over dinner and executed over some indeterminate length of future time.
Thoroughly harangued, I was left standing on the deck by my two saviours, who marched back into the house through the sliding door, shaking their heads, words like ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘stupid’ reverberating in their wake. I turned round, and looked wistfully at Plato, inscrutable as ever, purring away on the Cape Cod chair.
“You little shit,” I said. “I really do love you.”
Paddling with my good friend Craig Harris yesterday down the western shore of Penelakut Island, I was haunted by an inkling of what it must have been like for a First Nations inhabitant, gliding through the same waters before the colonial era.
Much as I am enthralled by nature, I realized that I am but a tourist on the region’s land and sea; I can only imagine the deeper connection of a hunter-gatherer society, whose people ‘lived off the land’ and whose spiritual awareness was as deeply rooted and binding as that of the surrounding forests.
Before going any farther, an explanatory note: I am a Canadian of European ancestry. The influences that define me have been shaped and interpreted in that context and from that perspective. I do not want to be anything or anyone else. I do want to accept the challenges European social, scientific, and economic development and innovation have led to. The late-20th and 21st centuries have been a necessary time of reckoning. We either take responsibility for creating a better, more inclusive, more sustainable world, or accept the consequences and blame for our selfish, shortsighted decisions and behaviour.
It was from that perspective that I asked: What knowledge could we have gained from the indigenous peoples of North America and the world if only we had restrained our colonial incursions and taken time to learn from them what we had unlearned through centuries of abstracting technological and cultural development that had distanced us from the ‘natural world’?
That haunting question leapfrogged me into the present day, and a more timely consideration. What might we learn through the process of Truth and Reconciliation, as we honour the survivors of our colonial depredations and build a new relationship with them? That we are attempting such a feat makes me hopeful; if we can actually succeed, I will be truly proud as a Canadian of European ancestry.
Just past Chemainus Farms, heading up River Road toward Highway 1, there’s a gate that always intrigues me. It seems as much an invitation as a prohibition, because it’s centred at the entrance to a green, but has no surrounding fence to prevent curious wanderers and wonderers from simply stepping round it and carrying on. Is it meant to keep people in or out? Is it a remnant from a bygone time when livestock had to be penned in? Does it serve a present purpose—other than to excite speculative imaginings? What’s its story?
Photo and poem were composed after I spent half an hour reviving a dying wasp I found on one of the slats of our livingroom blinds. It is a living room, after all!
It’s the dawn Of a new day In an old era In the same old way.
It’s the cycle renewed Again and again without end A ceaseless iteration Of nation against nation Of despair strangling hope Shoots of hatred Tendrils of fear A choking underbrush Infesting our gardens of Eden
Who was it said We must kill, and kill, and kill Until all are dead Who would become invasive species? Whose god roared that battle cry Under the glaring sun Denying even the possibility of innocence Declaring even the unborn ‘Enemies of our state’ Infected with murderous intent? Vermin only fit to hate?
Bloodlines. Worm like veins Through our sacred soils Rooting the detritus That defines us. Ancient scrolls And chiseled texts Implacable as tombstones.
Lead on! Lead on! my old, best friend, beyond the very end of this leash we both are tethered to.
Lead on! Lead on! Even though we do not know, and dare not say, exactly where we’re going… Even though there is no point within the compass of our ancient souls to suggest one way or another— no brilliant star, no station of the sun for us to fix upon. Whichever way we face, that becomes the direction of our knowing.
And yet you pant, and strain, and snuffle, and sniff, as if there were some secret (just around the bend or crouching under some bush) that makes sense of it all.
Lead on! Lead on! Beyond the very edge of this—our flattened earth— and be assured, for what it’s worth, that I must surely follow, and you are not alone.
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow — You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand — How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep — while I weep! O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
Oh! How I wish the letters Of the word Would dissolve Into the very thing
How I would delight In that incandescence, That essence emerging In my bleary dawn, Like souls coalescing Out of nothingness… Engendered by the welling sun, And the risen mist, And the stilled air that I breathe.
Oh! How I would sigh And beg the pending breeze To hold off—just a moment more And not disturb this glowing dream… This fantasy that must always be Precursor to despair.
