Toward the end of our session Dr. Nolan said, “It would help if we knew what your daily routines and rituals are, Bob. Don’t you think?”
He has a way of doing that… inviting me to approve every next step in our ‘journey’ so it will be my fault as much as his if we get lost in the metaphorical forest or I walk off a cliff. I suppose I could have said, ‘No way. I’m paying you to get me out of this mess!’ But that’s not how things work.
Besides, I’m not paying him; my boss is. It’s one of the ‘employee benefits’ we lucky clones at college receive for dedicating our souls eight hours a day to the education of a cadre of snotty rich kids. ‘Education?’ That’s a laugh. I could just as easily teach a bunch of baboons the intricacies and nuances of English Literature.
The ‘mess’ I’m talking about occurred three months ago, when I shoved Lenny Hertz and he tripped over the coffee table in the staff room. He bruised his elbow, a small price to pay for his crude arrogance. I apologized and helped him up, but he lodged a complaint anyway and the verdict turned out to be anger management counselling with Dr. Nolan.
It’s my penchant for ritual that got me into trouble, he believes… or rather, he’s nudging me toward that belief. The sessions last an hour, the conclusions marked by his hummingbird alarm. When the hummingbird zooms through the room – an audio avatar emitted by an app on his iPhone – we are supposed to sum up our day’s progress, and prepare for the next session. Dr. Nolan always smiles when the hummingbird hovers, as if he’s imagining it landing on his shoulder.
I hate the hummingbird, because it reminds me where I’m at, and why, and what we’ve talked about during the last hour. I imagine it hovering next to my ear, sticking its pointy beak inside, and sucking all the private nectar out of my brain.
The objective of my ‘conversations’ with Doc Nolan is for me to become aware of the ‘detonators’ that caused me to shove Hertz, and to be able to ‘defuse’ the situation when – not if – it recurs. His logic goes something like this: I am ritual bound; my rituals are sacred; if anyone makes fun of my rituals, anger builds; if, like Hertz, they don’t stop making fun when I signal my displeasure, I am likely to explode.
My theory is much shorter: Hertz is an asshole.
Doc Nolan says we have to ‘unwrap’ the meaning of words like that. They are the labels we slap onto our ‘perceived enemies’ to avoid having to them becoming real people. “What you have to do, Bob, is become aware of the human beings who have become the antagonists in your life’s stories, and deal with them on a mature level.
“Make yourself bigger than them, then invite them to grow up with you.”
In our fist sessions Doc Nolan and I reconstructed the day leading up to the staff room incident. In retrospect he forgave me. Said I’m not alone, when it comes to living by rituals. “Everybody has ‘em,” he proclaimed. “We like to think of ourselves as ‘free spirits’ and ‘spontaneous’, that’s how the marketeers portray us, but truth is, as soon as we start analyzing our lives we find they are made up of routines, which are actually the stem cells of ritual.”
That assurance in place, he said: “Describe a typical morning, Bob.”
Anger management training is not so much an exercise in healing as a perverted form of punishment, it occurred to me in that moment. For session after session you are forced to decide between the truth, or denial, or silence, or a lie. And you realize gradually that you’re not going to shove dickhead Hertz next time, because you’ll have to go through this kind of counselling torture again, and again… that you’d rather leave him to his smug taunting and go put your fist through a bathroom mirror or something…
“Bob?” Doc Nolan coached.
The first thing I do in the morning is look at Maria, lying next to me, and thank her for being there, and hope I will be able to make her happy. I have to confess, I’m not the best of husbands. I’m boring, I know. And weird in so many ways. And resentful of Maria’s interminable efforts to ‘liven me up’ and get me ‘eating healthy.’ The least I can do is love her, and renew my vow to make her smile, keep my love from becoming threadbare.
“And after that?” Doc Nolan prodded, murmuring in that tone counsellors have mastered, a subtle frequency that sounds like benediction emanating from somewhere deep inside your own brain.
Lordy, I found myself mocking. If only I had a couch to lie on.
“Bob?”
“After that, I hang ten and stretch for the sky.”
“Hang ten?”
I sit on the edge of our mattress, a gigantic aerial raft of memory foam, my tootsies dangling like pulled roots seeking ground, my crown expanding toward the overarching light. And there, in equipoise between being and not, I imagine the dawn of another day.
“You do this every day?”
I have to admit, his surprise gave me a fillip of pleasure. The thought of my own counsellor thinking of me as a nut case made me feel special. I pictured him at his next mind-benders’ convention, offering me up a an example of weird and wonderful that would surely outdo the tales of his colleagues…
And my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor.
“Then what?”
The rites of brushing teeth, letting out the cat, shuffling into the kitchen and getting the coffee brewing seemed hardly worth mentioning, although none of them are routine, now I think about it. Routine is the things that happen on autopilot. You’re not actually there. I’m a priest at my bathroom sink ablutions; a prophet, sending Rusty out into his dangerous world; a saint, counting scoops into the French press for the coffee I’ll offer Maria in bed. But Doc Nolan wouldn’t appreciate that. Those daily chores are too ordinary to parlay into anything verging on madness. Quirky, perhaps, but in unexceptional ways.
What he was really rooting around for, like an earthworm in my gut, were the five affirmations, and that clumsy ballet I perform in their honour every day, when I think no one’s watching… Maria excepted. She has intruded on my ritual often enough to know about it. We laugh when she refers to it as the platypus’s dance of the sugar plum faery; laugh even harder when I accuse her of being unkind to platypuses.
“The five affirmations?”
Value Life; Complete the Circle; Give with Joy & Grace; Receive with Gratitude and Appreciation; Experience and Express the Tetrahedron. I sometimes wish I was a hologram so I could enact those things with the fluid movement they deserve, a whirlwind of flashing light, limbs spiralling like constellations, toes and head axles of a universe without boundaries.
But I’m only human, and Hertz caught me unawares, doing my clumsy dance in tune with the final chant of the fifth affirmation. I was balanced on one foot, the other leg stretched out behind me, arms reaching toward the horizon to give and receive. Spirit is the fourth corner of The Tetrahedron, and I was lost in its meanings, so immersed that I didn’t notice Hertz suddenly there, behind me in the staff room.
I knew Dr. Nolan couldn’t possibly understand. At best he could misunderstand and misrepresent. “Spirit consists of four definitions that are beyond comprehension,” I explained.
“Go on.”
“Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, Omnipotence.”
“God?” he guessed.
“Not God,” I corrected.
“What then?”
“Not God,” I repeated.
I admit it was wrong for me to have shoved Hertz, even though it wasn’t really much more than a nudge, which he exaggerated into something more dramatic. But the idea of Not God next to the reality of Hertz was just too much for me to take. I confess, I wanted his smug, leering face out of my sight and I won’t forgive myself for that, even though it wasn’t a sin, it was just being stupid.
For the very first time in I don’t know how many years I don’t feel like writing (and yet, here I am writing!)
I can’t imagine this as a permanent state of mind; I’m thinking of it more as a hiatus… an opportunity to sit here, watching the half moon greet the rising sun, and listening to the chirping of a robin across the way, and feeling the cool, fresh air on my skin, and thinking of myself gliding over Stuart Channel in my kayak.
After a cold and dreary month, it’s nice to pause and simply celebrate our belated spring with all the other creatures on the edge of Wu’laam Wood.
So again, I ask: Why write?
Because, as I have just experienced, writing helps me expand and connect thoughts and feelings in wonderful ways. It’s a peculiarly human perspective on the world and an integral aspect of my being.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
The earliest evidence of my existence isn’t preserved as a proper memory. It’s been reconstructed based on family photos, blurry black and whites captured by an Eastman Kodak ‘Hawkeye’.
Dad’s never in those seminal shots because he’s the guy working the camera, and I don’t figure in many or them either because my older brothers Frank and Kevin were the stars along with my sister Natalie.
There’s one of me in a baby carriage, parked on a sidewalk, my face wrinkled and scrunched up like I’m getting ready to howl. If I try really hard, I can imagine Dad hunched over the view finder, divining just the right moment to trigger the shutter and capture another chemically rendered pattern of light for posterity… this one of his prune-faced youngest.
What was going on inside his head? I wonder. What sequence in the charged neural plasma determined the exact moment the hologram of me got burned into the photo emulsion? And what was mother thinking when she scribed on the flip side of that archival image: “Arthur in his carriage at Portage la Prairie.”
Then there’s a shot of us kids and Mum posed in front of the family Christmas tree, taken in some living-room I can’t for the life of me remember. Frank and Kevin are playing with their shiny-new truck and grader; Natalie looks petulant and pouty, as if she already knows Santa’s never going to bring her exactly what she wants; Mum looks like she’s staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. I’m toddling in front of the montage, slightly to the side, looking doubtful – as if I haven’t yet figured out who this guy Santa really is, and why I’m getting presents and having my picture taken in his name.
Dad wasn’t much of a family man back then. I suspect he took the photo as a form of misrepresentation. But since the Hawkeye didn’t have a timer, he couldn’t insert himself into the happy montage – could only claim that he’d been there in absentia. How would he have fit in anyway: still young enough not to have succumbed entirely to the dreariness and pettiness of it all… to believe if you drank hard enough and laughed loud enough, maybe things would turn out alright. If he could have swapped himself into the scene quicker than the speed of light, I think he would have struck an intrepid explorer’s pose, looking over the top of the camera’s infallible lens into a future none of us could either foresee or forestall.
The first shot I can actually remember being in with Dad was taken on the edge of the Atlantic. The family trekked to Sydney every summer, our pilgrimage to Dad’s ancestral home. Our favourite destination from there was Kennington Cove, about an hour south, just past Louisbourg. To us kids the waves rushed in like liquid mountains, as if the God we still believed in had grabbed the far edge of the flat world and was shaking it like a sheet. Frank, Kevin and Natalie would have been out there in the surf, but I was too young. So I ended up in Dad’s arms. Mum must have snapped the picture.
His right arm is wrapped around me. I’m clinging to him and squirming at the same time, my left hand planted on his neck. It’s hard to tell if Dad is really aware of me or if he’s successfully ignoring my struggles, but I like to think we’re connected somehow. He is aware of the camera all right, striking a relaxed pose, leaning against a boulder, the ocean roiling in the background, hissing up and down the strand.
That photo sucks me in like the Atlantic’s undertow. Whenever I see it I am suddenly there, at Kennington Cove; held tight in my father’s arms; my chubby baby’s hand splayed against his neck and cheek. I mustn’t forget that. Despite everything else that would happen, I have to recall the tight muscles of his neck, the rough stubble of his cheek, him peering ahead as if there might be something dangerous, lurking out there on the bluffs, me fascinated by the breakers collapsing onto the beach behind, where Frank, Kevin and Natalie frolicked.
Family photos are counterfeit memories, reproductions of light that has long-since been absorbed by the landscape or bled off into unalterable dimensions of space. We preserve them in battered valises, in dusty attics, in houses moved away from long ago. They never get thrown out; instead, we simply leave them behind for someone else to deal with. They molder away in dark attics, forever waiting to be discovered. Like crematory urns, they become repositories that reassure us simply by existing.
It’s the images never taken that define us – the photos not allowed.
I don’t remember a single photo of Mum and Dad holding hands. There’s a picture somewhere of Mum sitting on a grassy slope, her skirt hiked up above her shapely thighs. She looks directly into the camera, laughing at the man who would be her husband. On the back, in her neat script: “Taken near London, during the war.”
Odd, we still call it that: ‘The War.’ As if applying the title to any other of the murderous cataclysms that have bloodied and tortured the planet in the last six decades would be a misuse of language. Ten billion lifetimes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki supposedly put a full-stop to hostilities, and we still look back on that global paroxysm as present and playing itself out in the here-and-now.
I can’t be sure why there are no photos in our family albums of Mum and Dad holding hands. Never really thought much about it. I have a slight aversion to hand-holding myself – as if it’s a species of weakness, an act of self-delusion, like offering a stuffed toy to someone waiting in line, patting him on the back and saying: “It’s okay kid, everything’s going to be just fine.”
There are other pictures of Mum and Dad during the war: the one taken on their wedding day, Dad in uniform, clowning around, making a face, his hat turned sideways on his head, Mum laughing, leaning into him, his arm around her shoulder; My sister in a pram, somewhere in London, the lineaments of our shared genetic code showing clearly, even then, in her frown.
But there’s not a single image that breaches the unofficial secrets act. Not one that breaks the unspoken code adopted by sane men whose job it was to fly over the blighted, blasted cities of Europe and drop pulverizing incendiaries onto the innocents below: children, women, men. Dad never talked about it, so I invented that period of his life – his hands gripping controls, nudging throttles, easing the lumbering bird of vengeance up into the sky.
I once asked him to accompany me to the Royal Canadian Air Force museum, where the preserved carcass of a Lancaster bomber sits on display, as if it were some breed of mechanical pterodactyl. He avoided the topic at first, then turned me down flat. Mum said he was afraid he might have forgotten too much about those times, what it was like to fly those ancient machines and might have been embarrassed.
I think it was because he didn’t want toremember.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
At Dad’s funeral they couldn’t get the hands right. The way they were arranged on his chest, against the blue serge of his blazer, under the Royal Canadian Air Force crest, was… and there’s no other language for it… fake, grotesque.
Rigor mortis sets in about 12 hours after death. The muscles tighten around the bone, jerking the limbs into a sort of fist, which is unable to let go because the enzymes that normally complete the cycle of clutching and releasing are no longer being produced by the body. It remains in that state about 48 hours, then as decomposition sets in, the body relaxes, accepting – it would seem – that it has truly died. Dad’s hands never did relax, so the mortician arranged them as best he could, the fingers meshed like cogs in a gear-train.
His face looked almost normal. You could tell there was something unnatural about it, like it might have belonged in a wax museum, but at least you could imagine it once having been alive. The hands are what I remember, though, the message they conveyed in their involuntary language of signs.
Going direct-to-web is more than an experiment. It’s a mission.
Nine years ago I began work on what would become my first direct-to-web novel, The Boy From Under, a crime thriller set in Langley, British Columbia. I have since taken the story offline, and will be republishing it after I complete work on my second D2W book, The Mural Gazer, which I plan to publish in a print edition this summer.
I launched myself into D2W because, like many writers, I was frustrated with the length of time it took to get my work published; with the trickledown process that left everyone up the chain earning money, while I had to pay off ‘reverse royalties’ before a penny would come my way; and by the challenges of getting my stories off bookstore shelves, into the hands of readers.
D2W as an adjunct to print editions seemed a promising concept, which might address those issues. I am still convinced of its potential, even though I have become increasingly aware of the daunting magnitude of the undertaking – not the technical difficulties, which are surmountable, but the steadfast loyalty of readers to books on printed pages, between covers.
That isn’t going to change any time soon, certainly not within my own lifetime. The iconic image of curling up with a book in a favourite armchair is not going to be supplanted by the notion of reading or listening to a novel on your mobile while jolting along on public transit between home and office. For the foreseeable future print will be the overwhelmingly popular choice of readers.
So why bother with direct-to-web at all? Why not let young up and comers crack open that niche market for a new generation of readers?
First and foremost, because literature is too important to a healthy, vital society not to secure its place in the online, digital world as soon as possible. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post, but getting books online has become an urgent priority for me because literature remains the most powerful mode I can think of for sharing ideas and feelings. It’s foundational to a society that explores its motives and challenges its actions.
Then there’s the creative possibilities D2W opens up. When I started down the direct-to-web path, I considered it purely from a publication and distribution point of view. Inevitably, however, it morphed into a mode of writing that excites me. The Mural Gazer was created dynamically. I know many authors will shudder at the thought, but I posted episodes as they were written – the online equivalent of an author writing his book in a department store window.
Over the years I have also come to appreciate the tremendous distribution and marketing opportunities of D2W. I can share The Mural Gazer with readers anywhere in the world as a text or audio book at almost no cost. Readers can access the book immediately when they see it promoted on social media. With a click they can open up the story on their mobile phones, laptops or desktop computers. After reading a few chapters, they can pay for the book online, too.
Finally (for now) there’s the matter of control, a decidedly two edged sword. I don’t really want to be a writer/publisher/promoter/bookseller because I value the knowhow of partners in the literary realm and would love to narrow my focus more on writing. For the time being, however, I have no choice. Until there are collaborative pathways from writing to publishing and selling, I will have to multitask as a D2W author.
A retired journalist and communications manager, I am in the tempting position of being able to take on that do-it-yourself book writing and publishing role. But I know it’s not a viable, sustainable model. What I envision are collectives, bringing the necessary skills together to see the dream of storytelling from conception through publication and sales in D2W and print formats made real.
That’s my goal for Books Unbound. I’m happy to share ownership.
Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail will be published this summer. Readers can crack open the cover online in the preview slideshow above.
Encourage online readers to take your book off the shelf
Imagine your newly released book face out on a bookstore shelf, just waiting for an avid reader to reach for it. What’s the first thing they are going to do?
Now reel back that opening scene and imagine your reader glancing at the cover of your book for the first time online.
How are you going to translate that website experience into something reminiscent of the in-store type of experience your audience is most familiar and comfortable with?
As illustrator and partner Diana Durrand and I ready our soon-to-be-released young readers’ story Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail for launch, that’s a question that needs answering. What has emerged for me as an author/producer/publisher is a web slider modelled on the in-store experience of deciding whether or not to buy a book.
The first thing visitors to my craigspencewriter.ca/flibber-t-gibbet page will see is the book’s cover, not as a stand alone reproduction, but as the first image in the slider posted at the top of this post. In that frame they get to: meet the main troublemaker of the story, Flibber T. Gibbet; see protagonist Lincoln Cranston, running up the Hermit’s Trail, where the story is set; and gain a sense of the audience the book is written for.
What would they do next? My guess is an interested browser might flip the book over and look at the back cover for a description. The second slider image goes there, offering readers an overview of the book’s highlights. (Please note: If they’ve got this far they’re already readers, even if they aren’t yet buyers.) The back cover foreshadows the adventures they will experience in the tale and gives a flavour of the author’s writing stye.
At that point, I’d want to know a bit more about the author and illustrator. So slide three takes our audience (Note: as an internet era writer I am redefining the nature and habits of potential readers) to a very brief introductory page, describing Diana’s credentials and achievements as an artist and my own as an author.
If I had my marketing hat on straight, I would insert a final slide, linking visitors to options for purchasing copies of Flibber T. Gibbet. But determining a distribution and sales strategy is a work in progress, one that will be the subject of future Books Unbound posts. So for now I’ve inserted a placeholder announcing the anticipated release of the book in print.
Stay tuned by going to my Connect page for options. Thanks for visiting.
I didn’t say it out loud, of course – not right away – and can’t determine to this day if the thought was true – I mean sincere in all its dimensions, down to the place where sole meets concrete reality. But it was the best I could come up with on the spot, and even though I didn’t voice the sentiment right off, she heard me. That’s the trick I believe: Think things before speaking. Sometimes keep them as thoughts forever because you’re bashful, perhaps. Or maybe because the person you’re interested in is perfect and you could only detract from that by wheedle-wording your way into their affections.
I had instinctively done an up and down of the sandals’ occupant – that checkout-scan we males of the species do when attracted by something potentially sexual in our peripheral vision. But it was her footwear – and I must confess, her feet –my roving eyes locked onto.
Her toenails were painted pink!
Not gaudily, in that slapdash way you sometimes see and feel embarrassed about – usually for bubblegum teens. The polish had been applied with artistry. Details like that say something, don’t they? She had a conception of self that was bold and subtle, I figured.
So maybe I was indulging just a little. But it’s okay to try and fathom why someone’s special isn’t it? And at first, we have to draw assumptions from observations as seemingly insignificant as pedicure, don’t we? You’re a liar if you say no. The forensics of love are based upon minute chips of evidence, hinting at theories made up as we go.
To me the convex surfaces of her nails were intriguing as conch shells turned inside-out. Can you imagine such a thing? My eyes stuck on the tops of her toes for a breath or two then – without my thinking, without conscious intent – zoomed in on her sandals, recording every facet of those elegant slippers.
Even as my eyes went about their rogue’s work, though, part of me realized there was nothing so very remarkable about Gloria’s sandals… aside from the fact that she was in them. I can think of a thousand movie stars and a thousand more princesses who would have turned up their noses, if asked to wriggle their dainty nether digits into such a pair of Walmart flip-flops. But on Gloria’s feet! Oh my!
“Oh my!” as grandmother would cry when occasion warranted. Of course, her delight was usually over events as homey as cherry pie coming out of the oven, or particularly brilliant works of crayon art, not over anything so exotic as the footgear of a complete stranger. For grandmother agape wasn’t so much about miracles as discovering the miraculous in everyday things – about seeing through the veil of ordinary and triggering suspirations as emphatic as a last-gasp.
By the way, mentioning Gloria’s name right now makes everything from here-on-in non-sequitur. I didn’t know her name at this point in the story. True, I was cultivating an intimate relationship with the bone structure and musculature of her feet, the same way Toto might have got to know Dorothy before they ventured into Oz. But that’s not the same as knowing a body’s name, is it? Love works backwards. We fall into it then double back, tracking down the meanings and consequences of ’til death do us part.
I’ve broken sequence because I can’t bear talking about Gloria as ‘her’ or ‘she’. I have to give a name to those theoretical references. So I have christened her even though a name at that point would have been as naively symbolic as graffiti sprayed anonymously on whitewashed stucco, or rote declarations carved into the trunks of trees or the planks of park benches. At that point in our relationship her name would have been a catch-all of fantasies. A concatenation of dark eyes, long black hair… an aura you could best see through eyes half-closed.
In truth, if Gloria had dematerialized before I got a chance to talk to her – whisked out of her sandals by powers unknown into some sci-fi Nirvana beyond the frequencies of daytime TV – nothing would have seemed remarkable about her footwear left on the corner of Quadra and Hillside. Other than the fact the sandals were there – placed carefully on the cracked concrete as if the intersection were a portico into some alternative dimension, and she had been called away suddenly. Barefoot.
The thing about Gloria is she even stands with her shoes neatly placed, and she never just kicks her footgear off. She’s neat that way. Fastidious. It makes me laugh. And because of her, I place my work boots carefully on the mat inside the vestibule door, too – toes pointing toward the wall, heels knocked together. She’s aware of details like that, so it pains me to bring disorder into our lives, especially when it’s so easy to do things right.
There’s meaning to the precise placement feet on a sidewalk; someone needs to see that. Imagine yourself in the presence of a goddess. You’ve been schlepping your way through life down at the pit, a latter-day Sisyphus crunching stones into various grades of gravel, then suddenly she’s there, and you know sheis a goddess, that she already knows everything she needs to. What do you say to her? What’s your conversation starter?
In a way, Gloria was aware of every rhinestone glued to those bargain basement sandals of hers. Not individually, of course, but as elements of a sensory field, if you will. I wondered which tiny mirror I might have been reflected in, standing beside her, my bike held between us like a barrier. What did she think of this guy? Of his long hair and never-quite-matured beard, his knobby tired bike? She hadn’t even glanced my way – a sensible rebuke. But I did want her to appreciate the nobility of my feelings… that if the sun could be positioned just-so behind me, I would glow, too, with my own halo effect.
I glimpsed her profile, then surveyed the intersection for clues. Perhaps there were points of convergence, shards of data that proved we dwelt in overlapping dimensions. Which of the drab architectural features could I point to and say, There, that’s us. The San Remo Market Deli & Café? The Salvation Army Community & Family Centre, across Hillside? The Money Mart (real people fast cash) diagonally opposite? The Sally Ann thrift store on the west side of Quadra? The garbage receptacles, and bike racks at every corner to dispose of stuff we no longer valued and lock up the things we did?
We were none of that, and perhaps – without knowing it – denial was the point of convergence I had in mind.
“Nice sandals!” I said.
No kidding! I said it out loud. Breathlessly. Disguised as a brash joke, because any second now the light on Quadra would wink green and the little silhouette that says walk would let her get away, and I couldn’t let that happen without at least a memory of me – strange and deformed as it might seem – hankering after her. Things had spiralled into a place where an inkling of madness is the only reasonable state of mind – not stark raving lunacy, but a sort of emotional Pi, never quite defined, always panicked by another incremental digit of yearning.
If only we had it in us to feel that way about every living thing, we would truly be incarnations of our imagined gods.
The light changed. Gloria stepped off the sidewalk into the intersection. I walked beside her, thinking: This is it. It’s finished. She still hadn’t glanced at me. I studied her profile for signs. She wasn’t ready to offer any – and how could I blame her? But I took comfort in the fact that we were walking in the same direction – that the imagined pat of her sandals on the pavement didn’t seem hurried or doubtful. She was willing to abide my company to that extent at least.
Gloria strode on, back straight, black pantaloons fluttering in the breeze, pleated jacket conforming precisely to her slight, angular build. Did I imagine it, the faintest hint of a smile turning up her lips? I’m not sure, but the words rushed out of me anyway when I saw what I took to be a cue, as if I’d waiting to blurt my intentions for just-about-ever. “Maybe you won’t take it wrong if I walk with you a-ways?”
Creep! Is that what she was thinking? She stopped, looked straight at me, her head swivelling round like a security camera on a pole, eyes locking on. This is it, I thought. It’s finished.
Then she smiled and laughed out loud, and… Oh my God!
We plan on having kids someday, but there’s still lots of time to think about how I might answer, if one of the little rascals ever asks, when they’ve attained the age of reason, or at least a mature state of curiosity: “Hey, Dad, how did you and Mom first meet and fall in love?”
Perhaps if I framed it as a joke, I could admit to my temporary state of foot-fetishism at the corner of Hillside and Quadra while I was on my way to the pit and Gloria off to her studio. Or maybe I could fast-forward to our first date, on the evening of that first day, at Caffé Fantastico just a couple of blocks away from our point of departure… I paid; Gloria objected; we laughed at the clumsiness of it all… our perfectly memorable ineptitudes.
To be honest, I was amazed she showed up at all, or that I’d asked her to, when we parted ways that morning, me pedalling down Bay Street, heading for the pit; her, carrying on up Quadra. Gloria walks without making a sound, it’s like she rolls the soles of her feet through each step, feeling the ground beneath her, sensing its contours, its tilt, its flaws and fractures. Silence is what she leaves behind when she walks away from you or out of a room. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an angel or anything, and I’m not a worshiper. But that silence she leaves in her wake? Your instinct is to fill it with thoughts of her.
The circular patio table we chose on the sidewalk outside Caffé Fantastico had a rippled glass top, so I could still make out Gloria’s feet after we sat down. They became a point of reference – their muscular arch, perfectly articulated toes and meticulously painted nails a sort of permissible zone of psychic gravity, which assured me the rest of her was still there, that she was real in an incomprehensible way… there’s a difference between comprehending someone and figuring them out, I think. Comprehending is like hugging your partner, knowing you’ll always be wondering how amazing she is; figuring her out is like taking her apart so you can adjust the mechanics of her soul – like tuning a bicycle.
A lot of my friends have got round to asking me – in one way or another – why I majored in philosophy at UVic. They don’t come right out and say: “Hey, you could be doing a hell of a lot better than crunching gravel down at the pit, if only you’d go into law or something, or maybe take a few more PSYCH courses, get a master’s? Get into counselling? Or teaching? Heck, why not try for a PhD in something or other; you’ve got the smarts.” And maybe they’re right; maybe I will someday. But all that misses the point – the vanishing point of our existence, you might say. I can’t map things out in a straight line, like I was crow flying from here to there, and happened to land on a lamppost in the epicentre of Nirvana. Life doesn’t move in straight lines or elegant curves that can be described by some sort of derived calculus.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I took philosophy so I could understand the meaning of Gloria’s feet, seen through the rippled glass of a patio table. Intimacy is the sudden awareness that your partner is too beautiful to take in at a glance, that you have to look away, take time to grow-yourself into it, expand your ability to appreciate every facet of her being… now there’s a word that takes me back to the Big Bang of prenatal existence.
There’s a theory I call bracketed infinity. Choose any points as your arbitrary beginning and end, and the information you would need to decode the significant events between will be infinite. We divvy up experiences as if life had a shutter speed and we can string moments together like the frames in a movie. But that’s not how things really work…
Get it?
Can’t say as I’ve figured it out yet myself, so you’re smarter than me if you have. All I know is, when I wake up beside Gloria, and we smile, my future, past and present areright now.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Feet First in Love There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
Screen views of The Mural Gazer, a Direct-to-Web novel
What is D2W? The easiest way to answer that question is via a link to my Direct-to-Web novel The Mural Gazer. But before you click let me point out a couple of advantages D2W has already made available to you as reader and me as author:
First, I can share my novel with you in an instant, just about anywhere on the planet you can pull in an internet signal;
Second, you don’t need any dedicated technology to get into the story. Your laptop, mobile or desktop computer are your eReaders.
So back to definitions: A Direct-to-Web book is published as a website.
More specifically, it’s a website formatted as a book that reads like a print edition. If you’ve visited The Mural Gazer, you have seen its landing page, which introduces the story as would the front and back covers of a conventional book.
From there you can follow links to either Pullout, the opening scene, or the Episodes menu item, which takes you to the Mural Gazer’s table of contents. It’s the same type of decision you might make browsing a volume pulled from a bookstore shelf.
If you dive right into the story via the Pullout page, you will see an audio link at the top, which lets you listen to a reading. That’s handy if you happen to be riding on a subway or driving to work.
You can always jump to another page, or get back to where you were when reopening the novel on another device via the Episodes table of contents link.
Beneath the audio bar and at the foot of each page are links to the next episode. Every page links to its following episode, so you can read or listen to the entire novel as if you were turning the pages of a print edition.
That pretty well sums up the Direct-to-Web concept in terms of what you might expect from the design and layout of any book: accessible, convenient, portable and navigable.
There are a few extras, though.
You don’t need a light source to read a D2W thriller! You can be right out there in the dark and stormy night, scrolling through its pages in situ, while glancing over your shoulder for any ghouls that might be in pursuit!
The Mural Gazer can be readily shared via email and social media, so you can invite friends into your reading adventure. At the top of each page are social media and email icons that allow you to instantly send a link from the page you are reading to anyone on your contacts list. Books are meant to stimulate conversations.
Up in the menu bar there’s also a Contact tab, so D2W readers can connect with or follow authors if they want to share some ideas, ask a question or keep up with new releases. This feature is especially important if, like me, you are an author who sometimes chooses to write ‘dynamically’, inviting critique as the story unfolds in real time.
Not showing on this excerpt form the Mural Gazer are internal links. But say in the seventh paragraph of Pullout I wanted to give readers a snapshot view from the Malahat Summit on Vancouver Island, up Finlayson Arm? I could put a link into the text and take them there. Or I could link to a side story from the narrative, or provide supporting description for a word or phrase some readers might not be familiar with.
Of course, because the reader happens to have their internet device in front of them, they can do a quick Google snoop any time they choose to check out a scene or expand on a bit of information.
Finally, if you look at the widget area on both the Pullout and the Episodes table of contents pages, you will see a description of the book and a button that allows readers to ‘Buy-In’ to the story. Readers can get a sense of the story before – at any point – they choose to buy, and authors can choose just how far they want to allow readers to go before buying.
Eventually that space will also allow readers to purchase print and ePub editions of The Mural Gazer. D2W books complement their print editions, giving readers who like to read on screen the option – they don’t replace hard copy editions, which will long remain the preference of most book lovers.
The capabilities we’ve shared will be the subject of future posts in the Books Unbound series. The objective of Direct-to-Web publishing is to make it easier for readers to buy books and authors to share and sell them.
Sustainable Literature is the goal.
We’ll delve more deeply into the features of a D2W publication and how the reach and scope of literature can be broadened through the use of digital and online technologies in future posts. In the meantime, thank you for visiting what is, in fact, a Direct-to-Web book in the making: Books Unbound.
It’s impossible for me not to anthropomorphize the hummingbirds that hover around our balcony feeder, sipping nectar… after all, I’m only human
Anony Mouse
“Grampa?”
“Yes, hon?”
“Where do all the dead birds fall?”
We were walking hand-in-hand along the gravel path between Porter’s Farm and the suburban fringe of Chemainus when Amelia asked me that. The sun’s rays warmed us with dappled light; a small herd of cows and their calves gazed at us from under the shade of their cedar tree; a rufous sided towhee chided from inside the bordering blackberry bush… “Kreeek! Kreeek! Kreeek!”
I didn’t know what to say, so parried with, “What do you think happens to them, dear?”
She looked at me not quite disdainfully, but in that precocious, knowing way of hers. Teasingly. Amelia is not one to honour the twisted ways of wisdom. In her world, Grampas must be challenged. She knows exactly what’s going on when an old man answers a question with a question, and was going to make me squirm.
If someone else had accompanied us on that walk, I could have deflected her curiosity their way, broadened the shoulders of responsibility. But we were alone, Amelia and I. We’d walked all the way from the Campbell family’s ‘West Coast Terminus’ to ‘the bench’ up in Wu’laam Wood, Amelia skipping and jumping over the roots and ruts that bisect the path, me tripping over them and grinding my teeth, trying hard not to curse out loud.
The Bench was where Amelia’s great-grandad, Eleanor’s father, went to sit and think. It’s most probably where he formulated his final, inevitable conclusion, alone, the detritus of innumerable falls littering the forest floor around him, compacted into its very soil. Frank was a walking-talking contradiction. He loved the forest, but not the tangle of roots and branches that burrow and stretch into its earth and sky. His future – ours too – was planned and measured inch by inch, all its precedents and possibilities accounted for so that the bonsai of existence made some sort of sense besides tortured beauty.
“Grampa!” Amelia pouted.
I gave her my best impression of a baffled look.
“Where do they fall?”
“Who?”
“The dead birds!” she tugged, insisting I smarten up and stop procrastinating.
My own grandfather, Hollis Henderson, would have had an answer. “Down the cat’s gullet,” he might have said. Or “Into the hunter’s sack.”
And if you questioned his no nonsense logic concerning falling birds, he’d have another example to share, and another. “But, Grampa, there’s millions of birds, and they all die, don’t they? And I hardly ever see a dead bird when I’m walking around.”
“Chickens in the pot,” he might say. Or “Hawk’s got the chicks.” Or “Hit by cars.” Or “Fell into the forest where you’d never see ‘em. Froze to death on the wing.” Grampa Hollis could think up as many millions of ways a bird might die as there are dead birds to ask about. “But it all amounts to the same thing,” he’d say. “Their hearts stop beating and that’s the end of ‘em.”
Maybe I was asking the wrong question? But Grampa Hollis was long gone before I could figure out the right one, and Gramma Henderson, too, buried by his side just a few blocks away from the Campbell family’s ‘East Coast Terminus’ in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
We have a bird feeder hanging from a branch of the vine maple out in our front yard. Every morning I shuffle out in my rubber sandals and dump a measuring cup of ‘Festi-Vol’ bird seed into it, then clang shut the lid and hang it back up. Dark eyed juncos, black capped chickadees, sparrows, stellar’s jays, doves, robins, flickers, wrens, they flit and flutter about nervously, balancing hunger, fear and aggression in their intricate avian ballet. And from the gutter over our front balcony we hang a feeder topped up with sugar nectar for the hummers to sip.
I try not to, but can’t help anthropomorphizing our ‘feathered friends’. Never mind that they’re jostling for position, that they hunt and kill, bicker and bluff, I still smile stupidly every time… thinking them ‘sweet’ and ‘cheerful’. My drinking buddy Greg has an antidote for my doting: “Imagine those suckers big as dinosaurs, say big as your lovey-dovey friend tyrannosaurus rex, and you’ll get over your infantile fancies mate,” he says. “They’d swallow you like a beetle or feed you live to their ravenous chicks.”
Which sort of puts things into perspective. “Like, how often do you see a dead worm, or ant, or deer, or rabbit, or raccoon my friend. Almost never, with the exception of road-kill, of course, when we blundering humans smush them with our tires, and are too stupid to stop and gather up the guts for our cooking pots… collateral damage, if we think of them at all, that’s how we do it.”
I like Greg. We get together once a week or so at the Horseshoe Pub and bend our elbows.
“I know where all the dead birds fall,” Amelia piped up.
“Oh?”
She smiled primly. It was my turn to wait for an answer.
“Well?” I nudged.
“We don’t see them because they fall up instead of down,” she pronounced.
“Ah!” I agreed, wondering, if that were true, why ostriches decided to give up flying?
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Where do all the Dead Birds Fall? There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
University was wasted on me, pretty much, but one thing I did learn was how to throw together a pretty mean Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie. That was my specialty, laid claim to as my signature dessert on the potluck circuit.
For those who’ve never tasted one, Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie can only be described in superlatives: scoop the concentrated flavour from a can of Eagle Brand sweetened, condensed milk into a bowl; add a squeeze or two of lemon from one of those plastic bulbs, shaped like the real thing; glop the whole concoction into a pre-baked Graham Cracker crust; top with canned cherries – glossy-red as Marilyn Monroe’s lips; shove your culinary creation into the fridge (not the oven, stupid) et Voila!
In my day that passed for an enlightened-male version of ‘adept in the kitchen’, that and – when occasion warranted – an easy-bake lasagna. Whenever I got invited to a potluck, and on the odd occasion even when I hadn’t been, I would bring along an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie – usually one whipped up fresh that very afternoon.
Between potlucks I lived pretty much on coffee, Kraft Dinner and cognac – the three essentials of a wannabe bohemian diet. I rarely entertained. People would drop by, we’d sit around and ‘rap’ aimlessly, maybe eat out if we could scrape together enough moolah… but entertaining, I had learned after a couple of awkward experiments, was out of the question. My place was too small.
The kitchenette gave way with no clear demarcation to a combined dining-living-bed-study room. The bathroom, located at the other end of the kitchenette, just past the stove, I shared with Chloe, a second-year anthropology student, who rented the suite opposite mine. Instead of being fitted with locks, the bathroom doors – one on each side, opening outward – were secured when ‘in-use’ by a hawser, hooked to mine on one end, hers on the other… pretty much a failsafe system unless you both happened to be groping your way to the toilet at the exact same 3 a.m. instant to piss or puke or whatever.
Our experiences in student digs eventually coagulated into my dissertation on the nebulous quality of privacy, which I described as ‘a state defined by the negative space surrounding it, and the intrusions that ultimately destroy it, friends being the worst culprits…’ To that I would add, ‘…inconsiderate friends, who have confirmed me in the belief that the very notion of friendship is, in the end, self-contradictory…’ a sort of agreement intended to make pleasant the mutual annihilation we all engage in, trying – and inevitably failing – to achieve reconciliation en route to the ultimate vanishing point that is our common destiny.
As for society, that’s nothing but friendship writ large, riddled with lies and steeped in deception. At least with friends-in-the-flesh the possibility of innocence and occasional respite exists, something society does not permit. Even so, the likelihood of betrayal can only be avoided in the illusion of an afterlife, never in the here-and-now. In the here-and-now it’s quite likely better and certainly more productive to have more enemies than friends.
Chloe was one of the few exceptions to that somewhat skewed description of human relations. It’s hard not to be intimate – in a friendly way – when your bathroom doors are connected by an umbilicus of rope.
But I must continue to digress. Let’s take the sanctum sanctorum of dreamless sleep as an example of how evanescent the state of untroubled inner repose really is. Dreamless sleep can be exploded at any moment by: a telephone’s alarmed ringing; the fat guy next door firing up his flatulent Harley; the dog jumping up on the bed and scratching his fleas; a terrorist attack; the sudden manifestation of an uncalled for dream about things as impossible as they are horrific, or embarrassing, or both; the sensation of choking on your own vomit (which unfortunately did not awaken Father when his time came, a fact Mother interprets as divine retribution, even though she doesn’t believe in ‘all that crap’ about God).
There’s any number of irruptions that can burst the sanctuary of dreamless sleep. My favourite is Chloe spooning close, her familiar forearm and hand cradled in my waist.
As a for-instance from my BC (Before Chloe) past, I was wakened one morning to the sound of workmen jack hammering cobbles in the courtyard below my University Boulevard digs. Normally I would have accepted this intrusion with the intense equanimity of a Zen master, aware that the stings, itches and bites of existence are mere illusions within the equipoise of my standing cosmic wave. But I had a fucking hangover to sleep off and their harsh rattling reminded me painfully of the fact, so I jumped out of bed, marched over to the kitchen window and bellowed “Fuck you!” into the irritated dawn, then slammed the casement shut. The glass shattered, cascading into the netherworld, adding an ethereal, tinkling contrapuntal to the gruff laughter of the crew down there.
As another for instance, take the ever present threat of Aphrodite, of her bare footed dance and its accompanying music, insinuating itself into the folds of dreamless sleep. If you’ve never seen her, if you’ve only ever been enticed by her cheap, designer avatars, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. That’s okay, Mac. I don’t mind being considered crazy; quite the opposite… what scares me is the likelihood of becoming sane. Aphrodite is a sigh, a scent, a brilliance in your neurones, the antithesis of sleep. She has the peculiar and deeply disturbing quality of being able to awaken you even in moments when you think you’re already fully awake.
Janice, although less annoyingly intense than a pack of Neanderthals with jack hammers, and not exactly Aphrodite in the flesh, did invade my private space with her peculiar charms. The jangle of her bangles aroused me in waking and sleeping moments; I sensed the swaying of her hips the same way a shark feels the throbbing of a ship’s engines propagating through ocean undercurrents from miles away. She was enrolled in the same 100-level Sociology course as me. Turned out she lived just a couple of blocks away with a friend, and that the two of them were having a little get-together, and of course I was welcome… they’d heard about my Cherry-O-Cheese Pie, and asked me to ‘bake’ one for them.
It shouldn’t have been so easy. I remember thinking: There should have been some reticence shown by one or the other of us, even if the invite didn’t signify anything other than friendliness, politeness, perhaps even a wretched variant of pity. That I desired Janice on a visceral level couldn’t be denied, which in my case meant a form of atonement was required, a spark to ignite the sex laden vapour swelling dangerously inside my skull, into a poetic vision.
That she had responded to my incipient urge could reasonably have been predicted under the first law of sexual thermodynamics, which states: Chemistry asserts itself no matter how awkward the circumstance, and in inverse proportion to human resistance – all we can do is learn to manage its chain reactions with some degree of decorum and grace. Aplomb, I think it’s called. I would eventually do a dissertation on the relationship between misogyny and a pathological fear in some men of Aphrodite’s power. I got a fucking F for that effort, I think because my professor – a woman – felt it inappropriate for a being with a penis to express that kind of view.
Janice and her friend Corinne co-existed in a space not much bigger than my own, but with the addition of a bedroom, separated from the dining-living-study room by a tie-dyed silk curtain. “Whoever gets tired first, or needs some privacy, gets the bedroom; the survivor sleeps on the futon,” Janice said, patting the cushion between us. Aside from this musical-beds arrangement their mode of living seemed similar to my own.
The evening began with the two of them making a fuss over their new friend, then teasing me about my dessert offering – an anticipated segment of the Cherry-O-Cheese Pie ceremony was the amused commentary it invariably drew from hosts and fellow guests alike. Wisecracks about its caloric content, diabetic tendencies, and the level of culinary skill required to ‘bake’ it were de rigueur and I received them graciously, overplaying my hapless bachelor role shamelessly. I hadn’t cottoned on yet to the fact that savvy women – the kind of women I liked – might amuse themselves with a kitchen bumbler, but the day was dawning when they’d only get serious with a guy who could actually cook, or offer the reciprocity of dining out… frequently and preferably expensively.
Even before I knew I was serious, my romantic inclinations toward Janice had flopped, which tinged her acceptance later that evening of an invitation to dinner at my place with a hint of malicious treachery.
The centrepiece of their soiree was a chocolate fondue, which Corinne set on the table ceremoniously. I found fondue etiquette amusing. It evoked the image of a polite tribe, stabbing cubes of pineapple and wedges of strawberry with forks the length of surrogate spears then popping the boiled victims of their civilized savagery into their mouths between words, in the midst of sentences. These morsels they washed down with quaffs of wine, gulps of beer, or sips of coffee for the abstemious.
Conversation raged. “What’s your major?” “Did you catch the Joni Mitchell concert?” “He’s such an idiot, I hate his classes!” “Where did you get that scarf? It’s beautiful!” The dinner party babble drifted in and out of consciousness, filling the interstices between Janice and me, helping us ignore the tension. We chatted with each other, flitted about, engaging others, but no matter where in the room we were, we remained moths, locked in each other’s brilliance… or so I thought. Problem was we’d got beyond small talk too quickly and now things were getting awkward. The urgency of the situation couldn’t be broached around a fondue pot with a paper plate of no-bake cherry cheese pie balanced on your knees.
“Got to go,” I said right after dessert.
Janice looked surprised.
Who can say what triggers the question – what precise balance of mental and emotional self-delusion results in a positive read, leading to the conclusion that a woman is receptive. I’m not an expert in such things. I don’t have cause, or the need to brag. All I know is the moment seemed right, so before Janice’s look of surprise at my sudden departure morphed into a frown, I invited her to dinner at my place, then waited for her response with the unwavering anticipation of a male praying mantis.
She looked even more surprised, her eyes widening like a cat’s. She could simply have declined – mid-terms, fatigue, a previous engagement, no reason at all – but instead she said: “Sure, do you mind if I bring a friend?”
“Corinne?”
“No, he couldn’t make it tonight. His name is Paul, I think you’ll like him.”
~~~
The thing about Cherry-O-Cheese Pie was its simplicity. Everything needed to make one was listed on the labels of select tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk. Mother stapled one of those labels to a page in the scrapbook where she collected her recipes – in a manner of speaking, she passed it on to me. I say “in a manner of speaking” because she still keeps that scrapbook on its shelf in the cupboard above the stove – the one where you can only fit odds and ends because the oven hood’s ventilating duct takes up almost all the room, and because the cupboard’s hard to reach, especially when you’re five-foot-four in circumference as well as height. Before Dad finally did get driven out of the house, to the room he rented on the other side of town, he took to calling Mum ‘the human beach ball’. Never to her face – except that one time – but for the benefit of us boys.
I suppose what he was trying to do in his underhanded way was warn us against the hardships of marrying the likes of our own mother – perhaps against the institution of marriage in any of its various forms, unless you happened to be such a prude that you considered it a pre or post-requisite to the ‘sex act’ in any of its diverse forms. “Jerking off; no hands” was my father’s final word on the subject, a pronouncement he also avoided repeating in front of Mother.
She never gave me her archetypical version of the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie recipe but did pick through the tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, stacked on the shelf at Steinberg’s, and find a label with the recipe on it. “Here,” she said, plunking it down on the kitchen table during one of my visits home. “You’ve seen me make it often enough, all you have to do is follow the instructions. You can’t go wrong.”
Mother was right, too, as she usually is when it comes to things that simply require doing: washing a floor; hanging laundry to dry; picking kale from the back garden; making an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie; taking out the trash. If Mum ever had an imagination, she got over it young, like so many other things children of the Great Depression had to cure themselves of at an early age. Dad used to talk about the Depression as if it was a thing of the past, only existing in faulty memories (‘brains like scratched records’, was how he put it) and dusty photo albums; Mum perpetuated it, lived it, the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie fitting in as an ‘affordable luxury’ for us kids.
~~~
Funny, no matter how often I see a recipe I can never remember what goes into the bowls or in what order to coagulate into a Cherry-O-Cheese Pie. Mum never has to thumb through her book of favourite recipes; she just needs to know it’s up there in her cupboard, the yellowing formula for cherry cheese pie pressed between its pages, to carry out the Cherry-O instructions perfectly every time. I never got round to it, but did think of doing a dissertation on The Sanctity of Belief, inspired by Mum’s unerring certainty when it came to Cherry-O-Cheese Pie.
My shortcoming in that regard might possibly be considered an excuse for knocking on my side of Chloe’s bathroom door the day after Janice accepted my invitation to dinner – if, in fact, an excuse was needed. Maybe I really didn’t have all the ingredients it took to make an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie in my cupboard.
“Hello?” Chloe said.
“Hi Chlo, mind if I disturb you?”
She laughed, just like always when I used that line, the same way a car starts when you twist the key in the ignition, so I pushed the door open and stuck my head into her kitchen.
“I’ve got company coming over tonight and I’m making cheese pie and lasagna,” I said.
The layout of Chloe’s apartment mirrored mine, but that’s where the similarity ended. She kept her place organized and tidy: pots and pans hung on pegs beneath the cupboard opposite; the sink standing empty, a washcloth folded neatly over its faucet; the linoleum countertops uncluttered and wiped clean.
Pictures hung in groupings on every available surface. In the kitchen, beyond the pots and pans, a collection of food and farm images: still lifes of fruit and vegetables; a medieval feast; Third-World farmers scratching at baked hardpan with sticks; a woman’s glossed lips about to kiss the rim of a steaming latte cup.
The dining-living-bed-study room’s south wall featured landscapes: a vineyard sunning on a steep Italian hillside; a lighthouse standing guard on a windswept British Columbia coast; a ruined stone cottage in the Peak District of England’s Midlands… scenes where only the evidence of human habitation remained, the occupiers of the land having been vaporized or beamed up en mass to some undisclosed Nirvana in somebody else’s dream. Chloe said she wanted to go to all the places on her walls.
The east and north walls, which bracketed her sofa-bed, formed a sort of shrine to the world’s religions: a poster of Salvador Dali’s Christ floating horizontally into the vortex of gravity; a gaudy bas-relief Krishna, seated on what looked to be a rustic throne, raising his pipe to his blue lips; Buddha, cross-legged, hands folded into his lap, above what would be the head of Chloe’s bed if the sofa was unfolded; Shiva dancing on the scattered bones of New York City’s Wall Street; Venus emerging from the Aegean Sea on her clamshell.
“So who’s coming over?” Chloe asked.
I stepped from the bathroom into the kitchen. She sat at the dining room table, surrounded by piles of books, a binder opened in front of her. Chloe peered out from the encircling literature as if it was a fortress, she being the guardian of its secrets.
“A friend I met in Sociology class the other day and her boyfriend.”
Chloe raised her eyebrows and smiled inscrutably – one of those smiles that might have said, I know something about you that you don’t… or then again, might have signified, I want you to think I know something about you that you don’t. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to love that enigmatic smile of hers. I see it all the time – am caught off guard by haunting memories when she’s not around – as if we were embracing, and she was smiling over my shoulder, her sigh a whisper in my ear, a sound imbued with deeper meaning than words can ever tell.
“Would you like to join us?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes!”
Her smile broadened into something more emphatic. I blushed. Could tell she knew everything – every fucking thing!
“Sure,” she said. Easy as that, as if neither of us had ever entertained a moment’s hesitation or tinge of doubt… as if there had never been a need for me to think up a hypothetical missing ingredient – the additive that was supposed to make my dinner with Janice and her beau complete.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Cheese Pie with Cherries on Top. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
Can political debate can be summed up in the words ‘F**k you!’?
Saw a pickup parked outside a house in Chemainus the other day, behind it a hedge with a Canadian flag draped over it like a banner. In the window of the pickup, a sign said ‘Fuck Trudeau’.
Like most polite Canadians I have tried to ignore this bit of crass, childish incivility, but my conscience keeps telling me: “Say something! When democratic values are being undermined by the behaviour of a radical minority, we have to speak up. Our silence gives their claims credence.”
Let me begin by saying, I can’t put a sign up in my window saying “Hooray for Trudeau” I was deeply disappointed – felt cheated actually – when he didn’t move to implement proportional representation after having promised to do so before he became Prime Minister in 2015. His party’s progress on issues like climate change, poverty and homelessness, to name a few, has been ineffective… and so on.
But he’s a duly elected MP and leader of the party that has formed our government. So when I direct an epithet or slogan his way, I have to remember I’m not addressing him, personally; I’m talking to the Canadians who continue to support him as Prime Minister, and in fact the vast majority of Canadians who believe in democratic institutions and abhor the possible alternatives.
Let me be blunt. If I say ‘Fuck Trudeau!, I’m saying ‘Fuck Canada!’
Canada isn’t a place; it’s an idea. The fundamental concepts we share are a set of values and beliefs about how we make decisions and settle disagreements. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a democracy. And, of course, civil disobedience is a valued part of the political spectrum. It’s at the far end of the spectrum, however, and descends into darker and darker shades of grey when it becomes uncivil, disorderly, disruptive, threatening.
The irony here is, those who claim to be the heroes of the Freedom Convoy can just as easily be tagged the harbingers of repression. When a minority – supported largely by funds from outside our borders, and many of whose members espouse ideas that are repugnant to most Canadians – impedes the day to day functioning of a city, governments at all levels have to enact measures that are outside our democratic norms.
The same is true when a group threatens to disrupt emergency response services throughout the country, if charges are laid against one of its members and a court of law decides those charges warrant prosecution. As with government, our judicial system is not a thing; it’s a legal code we agree to as citizens, and any actions aimed at thwarting the enactment of our laws brings us closer to a state of lawlessness.
Freedom is the obverse side of a coin whose main currency is ‘responsibility’. I am responsible for the well being and safety of my community and the community of communities called Canada. I am responsible for abiding by and upholding the standards that make Canada a peaceful, privileged nation.
I’m not alone when I say the behaviour of some Freedom Convoy supporters has diminished the pride the rest of us can take in Canada’s flag. Most of us don’t take pride in a country where the level of political debate can be summed up in the words ‘Fuck you!’
