OMIGOD! Friends...!

 

That was a really, really dumb thing to do. Kind of malicious, too. That part of it doesn’t surprise me, seeing who it came from. You’d think she’d have more sense. On the other hand, no, it’s completely in character. That’s how I feel now. If you’d asked me a year ago I would have defended her. But not now. We’re in a different ball game, so to speak.

Back then, we were friends. More than that, we were best friends. And now, nothing. Not exactly nothing, she’s in my face all the time and it bugs the hell out of me. I keep telling her to just back off, leave me alone, but she just won’t. She’s a prime-time bitch, that’s what she is.

I felt really sorry for her at first. Maybe not exactly sorry, but kind of bad, you know? Like, we had a lot going together when we were friends. We could depend on one another. So I thought. Sure, she was kind of goofy sometimes, what old people call a Tom-boy, but so what? That aspect of her character was attractive to me, I liked it. She wasn’t like everyone else; she had something different about her. We did share that; we were both different. We just didn’t go with the flow, know what I mean?

Anything that’s ‘popular’, I just won’t have anything to do with it. I hate it when everyone does the same thing. People should use their individuality, we’re all different even though we’re all alike in certain ways. We should cultivate those aspects of our personalities, I think, that are unique to us. So, I liked her goofiness and we had a lot of fun together.

Right now, though, where I am at this very moment, I’ve come to a conclusion that would never have occurred to me before. Sometimes we laughed together, and sometimes it only seemed as though we were laughing in tandem. Sometimes, though I wasn’t aware of it back then, not entirely -- sometimes I laughed at her. Big difference.

Anyway, we didn’t mind being odd-couple-out, because we had one another. We had four years of being one another’s best friends. I was steadfast, more or less, though I did deviate from time to time, and hang out with some other kids, and that really pissed her off. But guess what? She did the same thing, so big deal. My Mom always said to me that I should fan out a little, get to know other girls a little more, not to judge them on surface issues. I hate to admit it, but sometimes she’s right.

The last two years, though, grades 7 and 8, we were pretty cool together. One thing I’ll never forget, when I first came to the school after we moved to the area, everyone was just too stuck-up to speak to me. She’s the only one who did. I’ll never forget that. I was so grateful to her. And even when we weren’t so close as we were later, I never forgot that about her. But a lot of things happened between then and now. Almost five years, for one thing, but a whole lot of other things, too.

No one could believe it when she told Todd that Morgan was getting ready to dump him, and then she turned around and told Morgan that Todd was getting tired of her and was ready to call it quits. I can’t understand why either of them believed her. She was just jealous of them, I guess. But if either of them had any sense they would have realized that neither of them would ever treat her as a confidant. They weren’t especially friendly with her, to begin with. Seems she planted a nasty little seed, and even though they found out later that she was lying, things were off between them.

And that was really too bad. She went around boasting to everyone about what she’d done, thought that was pretty smart. I just ignored her, didn’t say much of anything, just shrugged. She thought by doing that people would admire her, and I wondered where the hell she was coming from with that, but didn’t say anything, because that’s around the time when things began cooling off between us.

So she thought she was pretty smart, getting Todd and Morgan to break up. I thought it was cretinous, to tell the truth, because they really liked each other, they shared the same interests, they were both jocks and lived close to one another, the same neighbourhood, and they were kind of cute together, know what I mean?

So wasn’t she surprised with the reaction she got when she proudly informed everyone of what she’d done. All the girls were incensed that she’d do something like that, even the girls who didn’t like Morgan. No one would talk to her. Me, like I said, I didn’t care all that much. She and I weren’t talking much to one another, anyway. Because she’d been talking about me behind my back. When I found out I went right up to her and asked why she would say those things about me. Without batting an eyelash she just said, why not, it’s true. So what can you do about someone like that? She made her own bed, I let her lie in it. Before, I would’ve defended her, found some plausible excuse for her behaviour.

She didn’t much like it, being estranged from me, and suddenly because of her own stupidity, everyone keeping their distance from her. She became the class pariah, everyone was angry with her, the guys and the girls both. She hardly anticipated that kind of reaction to her little bit of emotional manipulation.

So she invented a story of what I can only describe as brotherly love, otherwise known as incestuous abuse, telling everyone that she was a victim, and because of her state of mind resulting from that she wasn’t herself and that accounted for what she’d done.

Of course everyone was immediately contrite, and ready to forgive her anything, as though they needed to make amends to her for behaving so coldly toward her. I know her family and I know that none of what she said actually happened. It’s just that it was the only thing she could think of that would make people feel guilty about isolating her, about blaming her for what had happened with Todd and Morgan. Even they felt horrible for her, and went out of their way to try to make her ‘feel better’ about herself.

When I told my Mom, she laughed and said sooner or later that tangled web of lies would come back to haunt her. Not that I tell my Mom all that much. Just some things, to see her reaction. I don’t always agree with her conclusions. But it’s interesting. On this occasion, there was no arguing with what she said.

I don’t, actually, myself, like to say things that aren’t really factual. If I’m really pushed into a corner I might try to pass one off, but carefully, nothing too stupid. This latest stupid stunt did the trick for me, though, and I felt it was past time to make a clean break. Not that I initiated it, I didn’t.

But that’s what catapulted me into a new set of friends, people whom I really like, though I‘d kind of given them short shrift up to now. I thought they were stuck-up, just too fixated on themselves, but I learned otherwise. It’s like my Mom said, it was about time I reached out a little more, broadened my horizons, made other contacts and friends, rather than rely on my, what she called ‘close-minded vision’ of other people based on initial impressions.

And all of a sudden I began to notice things. Of course this really has nothing much to do with my new friends, the girls that I’ve really come to appreciate. Of whom there’s one exception, who drives me absolutely insane.

There’s two Brendas, one’s now my absolute best friend, the other drives me to distraction. It’s like this kid doesn’t have an original thought in her head. She keeps pumping me for my perceptions and attitudes, and then she reflects them. My Mom tells me that's a symptom of a sincere form of flattery. Means nothing to me. I'm just irked all to hell by this kid.

She’ll say something when the group of us is together, something that sounds profound, coming from her, and I realize she’s just repeating something I said to her the day before. She follows me around like a little puppy, it’s really, really irritating. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I don’t say anything, but I can’t respect her, one little iota.

She doesn’t seem to do that with anyone else, just me. Why me? I wish she’d just kind of go away. Follow someone else. Stop cozying up to me. I don’t like it when she does that, it makes me nervous. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m just going to get so annoyed by something she does that I’ll blurt out how I feel about her. And I don’t really want to do that.

It must be awful, after all, not having the mental capacity to know what you like without asking someone else their opinion, and then repeating what they say. My Mom said it’s probably a symptom of low self-esteem, but I don’t care what it represents. It makes me nauseated, and I wish she’d just go away.

Good thing we’ve got guys around, to break the tedium of girls’ stuff. I find they’re just easier to get along with. They just take you for what you are. You don’t have to prove anything with them. And they’re a whole lot funnier, too, the way they crack jokes like it’s the most natural thing, which it should be.

Not like the girls, always looking for meaning in stupid stunts, ready to jump on someone for something said in all innocence. I guess I’m a lot more reticent with the girls than with the guys, come to think of it.

What I really meant to mention, though, is how I’ve been noticing lately how talented Corey is. Funny I never noticed before. But that guy is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who could skateboard like he can, throw that basketball right into the hoop every blinkin' time, skate rings around all the other guys playing hockey, exhibit such grace and skill playing soccer. And he’s no dummy in class, either.

I’ve also noticed that he’s always looking at me. I guess I wouldn’t notice that if I weren’t also kind of looking at him. He’s got this cute smile when he sees me looking at him. I feel like smiling back, but I don’t.

And I wonder what he’s thinking. He’s a little more reserved than the other guys, and I like that. It’s the way I am with the girls. I’m just not a joiner, more of a loner, myself, even though I do like to be around the other kids. On my terms.

I don’t try to ingratiate myself with anyone, and they all know that. He’s cool, I like that, isn’t anxious to be on anyone’s team, seems like he’s all right with his own opinion, not caring all that much if he seems different from everyone else. That’s me, too. I make up my own mind and I don’t care what everyone else thinks.

My friends keep sending me invitations to join them on Facebook. Well, I’m not interested in that, and I know everyone’s got a Facebook account but me, but that doesn’t bother me. I just think the whole idea is kind of stupid. It’s just not what I’m interested in. I’m cool with keeping in touch with my friends, but this whole social network stuff is gross, fine for whoever likes it, but that’s just not me.

I have to admit I'm always texting my friends. We text constantly. Just something we do. I like that, because somehow it's become a part of my life, and it's fun to keep in touch, just flash one another these silly little messages back and forth. But that's different, in my opinion. Anyway, I have no intention of broadening my social networking as it were, to include another 'window of opportunity', as some of my friends say, to keep in touch.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m being noticed more and more. And that’s cool. It wouldn’t be if I didn’t like whoever it was that was doing the noticing. But in this particular instance, I like that he’s sending me all those signals. I just wonder why he’s taking so long getting around to doing something concrete about it. 

 

 

The Sky's Parabola

The great parabola of this
winter sky has surrendered
to countless nights of snow
tumbling through the atmosphere
from the cover of grey clouds
unleashing their burden
on the world below.

The landscape a monochrome;
muted, yet dazzling-bright.

Trees and shrubs muffled
in a crystallized flood of
frozen moisture, standing
ghostlike and eerily mounded.
Solemnly beautiful, eye-
graspingly exquisite in bondage
to nature's winter choreograph.

The air is charged with ions
of quiet energy, as ripples
of wind bear down on the
glazed arras. Frozen pads of
snow from overhanging branches
embroidering the underling
blanket of smooth perfection.

 

Our Year In Tokyo

Tokyo is where I read ‘The Pillow Book’, ‘The Tale of the Shining Prince’, and ‘The Dream of the Red Chamber’, and where I felt the alluring mystique of the east enfold me in its gentle clasp. Camellias bloom in fall, azaleas in spring and ornamental kale is planted alongside winter sidewalks. Jungle crows caw atop the water tower in the compound where our house stood and on the metal rooftop of the house sheltered in the compound where feral cats slink along alleyways.

Initially, we lived at The Pegasus Apartments close to Aoyama dori. At night we joined throngs of pedestrians on tranquil autumn evenings. Bicycles, motorbikes, motorcycles are entrusted unlocked, to parking areas. Ancient bonsai sit on sidewalks adjacent cramped homes. At night downtown scintillates in neon blaze. Strolling broad boulevards we pass impressive hotels, the Imperial palaces and upscale shops. Deeper into the city, constricted streets force vehicles to proceed with caution. Most residents live in crammed concrete apartment blocks. Futons hang out the windows of each tiny apartment during the day creating doily-festooned facades. Firefighters garbed in white moon-man uniforms hand-pull wheeled gear into these unnamed, numbered streets when fires erupt. At intersections stand cobans, box-like structures manned by police, area maps on the walls. If in doubt, enquire.

Traffic is heavy but accidents few, car horns rarely used. When drivers stop for red lights, they turn off the ignition (a long cultural memory of WWII scarcity). Most cars are a variant of cream or white. Black cars are driven by the Yakuza, the Japanese criminal element. Japanese taxi drivers are uniformed in cap and white gloves, wielding feather dusters to flick dirt from their vehicle interiors. Should a few centimeters of snow fall in winter panic ensues, chains are fitted to tires.

Buildings under construction or renovation are enclosed in scaffolding, (far predating the West which eventually emulated them); engulfed in huge white tarps. Construction workers wear white coveralls, soft helmets and white felt boots with cleft contours resembling camels’ feet. Roadwork takes place at night, the restored surface opened to morning traffic.

Tokyoites are polite and reserved. The standard response, answering the telephone is “mushi-mushi?” No one can explain what it means. There is a collective quiet in the city, despite its size and habitation. The exception to the general hush is a melodic chime heard throughout the city at five o’clock. This is my signal to walk to a little corner store for the Maiinichi shimbun English-language newspaper. There are street vendors hawking roasted yams. Impulsively, Japanese engage westerners -- complete strangers they may come across on the street -- in public discourse, happily grasping the opportunity to practice English.

Tokyo summers are unrelentingly hot and humid. Exiting air conditioned interiors -- for those fortunate enough to own window air conditioners -- one recoils upon reaching the street as though slapped with a scalding, wet towel. Before long, drops of perspiration appear on bare arms. Every block or so throughout the city large automatic street dispensers vend hot tea, coffee or cold sport drinks.

Daily food shopping prevails. One visits the fruit- and vegetable-monger, the rice shop, teashop, fishmonger, florist, hardware merchant. Shop fronts open to the street, are shuttered at night. Since leaving Japan I’ve never tasted fruit so sweet, vegetables or fish as fresh. The bustling, expansive markets near Ueno Park offer food and clothing in bazaar-like abundance.

Tokyo boasts singular districts of shops devoted to cookware, footwear, meats, fish, books, electronics, and motorcycles. The city’s neighbourhoods resemble an assemblage of multitudinous villages. There are kissaten (coffeehouses) and soba (noodle soup) cafes; temples and shrines, parks and botanical gardens with ponds full of giant gold, silver, and orange carp.

In Yokohama we visited a doll museum. Close by we entered an antique shop and there I bought my very own Gosho Ningyo, a fat-faced, ornately dressed doll astride a hobbyhorse. Bordering the Pacific Ocean, Kamakura is a city of temples, one devoted to the Great Daibutsu, a towering bronze Buddha. Another temple is dedicated to a Buddha accredited as the protector of lost babies. Tiny replications of Yesu are placed around the temple grounds and people leave babies’ playthings and clothing in poignant remembrance of babies and infants that never progressed to childhood and maturity.

In a cupboard in our foyer a large black bag sat on the floor. For special occasions. It held some canned food, flashlights, first-aid kit, water bottles, hard hats, and candles. That was a life-preserving emergency kit in case of earthquakes. I liked to ‘forget’ its presence. And although we knew we should stand in a protected area of the house during an earthquake, somehow we never did. On those occasions when one occurred, we would sit there, facing one another, absorbed in the strangeness of the house, the ground beneath it, shaking ominously, a rattling heard from the kitchen, pictures wobbling on the walls. When, on occasion, it happened outside, it was even stranger, and we were transfixed by the sensation charging the atmosphere about us, wondering when it would stop, if it would stop, and finally it did. The earth did not open to receive us. Then we would wonder when the next one would occur. Where would we be? How long would it last? Then we forgot about it.

We joined an international travel group, Friends of the Earth; comprised mostly of Japanese, some foreigners, and traveled week-ends by bus at a gathering spot once we cleared the immense city of Tokyo itself by bus, train, or subway to visit tea plantations, traditional Ryokan (inns) and once to Hamamatsu, where the annual traditional kite festival takes place, rural communities vying against one another, manipulating giant kites, lines arrayed with knives. The winners, whose kite survives airborne, exult in their martial skills.

With that same group we traveled the coast to Okuyama, staying overnight at a Zen Buddhist temple nestled in the hills and forests outside the village. There, in the inn, bathers scrub themselves seated on little stools before entering the steaming communal bath. One sheds slippers for wooden clogs to enter the communal bathrooms, balancing over floor-level 'toilets'. We slept on futons in a tiny tatami-matted room and rose at five in the morning to take part in the morning’s Buddhist service. I thought my legs would never recover from assuming the Lotus position.

In the sprawling Temple buildings, one adjoining another, I discovered echoes of Umberto Ecco’s Name of the Rose. Following a breakfast of miso soup, rice, raw egg and chai, we wandered the Temple grounds and heard, from an embankment towering above us, a divine chorus of men’s devotional voices. As we followed a narrow dirt road toward the village, two tonsured monks in flowing robes passed in a Mercedes Benz, waving to us.

We joined Friends of the Earth and took a series of subway trains, buses and railway trains, passing outlying communities, finally reaching trailheads where our group of about a dozen dedicated mountaineers would ascend mountains to explore landscapes infinitely dissimilar to any we’d trekked before.

To again stroll Omotesando on a Sunday, or Shibuya, or Giain Higashi dori; to promenade along the Ginza, or through Ueno Park under cherry blossoms; to see the Temple of the 47 Ronin where the earth shuddered underfoot, or the Asakusa Kanon Temple by the Sumeida River where the Floating World of the Geisha once flourished - is to dream. 

 

 

The Photograph

 

 

It is a fearsomely haunted photograph. She detests it when her unwary eye lights upon it. But its removal is simply not possible. Her reaction to the photograph is utterly irrational, she knows that. With her lies the fault, not with the photograph. The photograph is one taken of her only grandchild, early in the school year, one of the many she has acquired over the years, each one representing another grade at elementary school for her now-13-year-old grandchild.

This one is different. From the moment she saw it she felt herself recoil inwardly. Outwardly it was as though nothing was amiss, she accepted it gratefully, found an appropriate frame for it, and set it beside many of the others, sitting on a small oval table. Actually the frame was somewhat inappropriate. It was far too elaborate. It celebrated a photograph that she found frightening. It awakened in her a minuscule worm of fear that wriggled along her intestines. She hoped it would never find its way to her heart.

Her heart had felt utterly broken when she’d seen that very same pose for the first time. But that was a temporary heart-break, unavoidable since most people, she was certain, likely reacted the same way. It was a piteous thing to behold that photograph, of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood with that wistful smile making an effort to appear confident. The girl/woman was not very attractive in the conventional sense; her features were too coarse. And her skin pigment, along with her features betrayed her ancestry. She was a member of a visible minority among whom there were many extraordinarily beautiful men and women.

This girl/woman had not been blessed by her particular DNA, with graceful, delicate features. The manner in which she brushed her long dark hair to a side was unusual. As was her pose, tentative and hopeful, as though she were saying ‘here I am, I trust you, I would so much like you to like me’.

Reading the newspaper accounts of what had befallen this child was painful. Reading of her parents’ anguish was dreadful. The girl had been horribly unhappy, wanting desperately to be accepted by her peers, and prepared to do just about anything for that acceptance. An acceptance that teased and eluded her. Girls can be extraordinarily cruel to one another, so much for the gentler, weaker sex. They form little cliques of privilege and exclusion.

She should know. Although she was now in her 70s, her childhood remained vivid, though tamped down deep in her memory cache. She had been an outsider, aching for acceptance. She knew she was different. She had no wish to be the same as other girls, even those she admired, for the glossy straightness of their hair, for their developed body shape so unlike her own, for their uninhibited and easy manner, also unlike hers. She was content enough with what she was, it was just that she saw no reason why she shouldn’t be accepted as she was.

But that’s the way society is; if someone is ‘different’ in any way, they’re held at arm’s length. Politely, for the most part, but pointedly excluded. But there was never anything ‘polite’ in the manner in which young girls chose to exclude those they found wanting in all the values however shallow, that they held dear. The kind of exclusion they practised was a cutting, hurtful, deliberate one. And the more one attempted to ingratiate themselves into the favour of those who shunned them, the more despised they became.

So she quite understood what had happened to that poor young girl whose photograph appeared again and again on the front pages of the newspapers when that horrible event had occurred. Gradually that same photograph began to appear progressively back into the middle, then the back of the news pages, in smaller columns as the immediate horror of her fate became assimilated into the general public’s mind as yet another misfortune occurring to yet another of society’s unfortunates.

It was only when the investigating police eventually were able to piece together all the events that had led to that girl’s grisly murder, and the principal characters involved in her death were apprehended, charged and held pending trial that the story moved from the back to the front pages again. Always accompanied by that truly pathetic photograph. A young girl with hope for the future in her eyes, belying her timid demeanour. The reader was able, if he or she wished to do so, to look long and deep at that photograph and envision what might have been on that child’s mind.

To complement the anguished story that came tumbling from her bereaved mother’s voice. Of a disturbed child who no longer took pleasure in her extended family, refused to attend family get-togethers. A child who arrived home from school dispirited, desperately unhappy, and unwilling to discuss anything with her frantic mother. A young girl torn between her parents’ heritage and culture and customs, and that which she saw around her every day of her life, in their adopted country.

A young girl alone and confused and pining for a friend to give her the emotional support she so badly needed. If there were other girls in her situation attending the same school, looking themselves for comfort and support as might have been possible, they did not manage to link together. Perhaps to do so in their thoughts might have been to doubly point out their isolation, to encourage the others who rejected them to sneer in their direction as birds of a feather flocking together in their dejected outsider status; deserving of one another.

She was well aware that she was imagining what life was like for the girl. Everything might not have been so awful for her. There might very well have been times and places in her life when she felt happy with and within herself. Not desperately caring about the impression she made on other people, not caring so deeply about what they thought of her, not investing so much of herself in yearning after being what she clearly could not be.

From the reportage, and the story that evolved of a lonely young girl and the girl’s mother’s inability to understand why her daughter was so bereaved over her status at school, this, more or less, was the tale that evolved. A girl unable to change her heritage, her genetic code that presented her as so different from all the other girls, the imprinting on her psyche from exposure to traditions that came so badly in conflict with the social ease she saw all around her, trying to mingle with girls - and with boys - her own age, but whose backgrounds were so polarized from her own.

She was seen as unattractive, clumsy, uninteresting. Simply no one they wanted to have around them. A hanger-on that turned out to be a dreadful nuisance, whom they simply could not rid themselves of. Their snubs and their indiscreet and sometimes too-pointed references to her as a dumb clown, clawed deeply into her heart, but she persevered. She was certain that with enough self-abnegation, enough forgiveness, enough demonstration of her commitment to their agenda, whatever it was, she would be accepted.

She would be content if she were to be accepted even as a fringe member of their groups; the larger one, or any of the smaller ones, the smart cliques of the beautiful, the talented, the ego-driven. Was it not ego that drove her too, to insist that she be recognized as an individual, as someone worthy of notice, as someone whose wit, weak though it seemed at times that they simply ignored her cleverness, could join them? Couldn’t they make an effort to tolerate her presence?

She was even prepared to accept that she was viewed as pathetic; if so, could they not feel some compassion for her, and on the strength of that, allow her to join them? The thought of the girl and her psychically-precarious life flooded her mind sometimes. She had thought of her often with a depth of sadness that surprised her, since she was, after all, a stranger who lived half a continent away.

But then, then came that photograph of her granddaughter. Her beautiful, vivacious, clever and gifted grandchild whose every photograph was a gift to be treasured, carefully placed in family photo albums, and within frames to grace furniture tops and the walls of her home. Each representing a different stage in her growth from babyhood to infant, to young child, then elementary school. And now, preparing to enter high school. She could hardly believe the time that had elapsed between the present and when she was in that delivery room, the obstetrician late, and the nurse refusing to believe that her daughter had already dilated.

Oddly enough her own daughter, the young woman who was then giving birth to her daughter, arrived into the world in roughly the same manner. That doctor too had arrived too late to assist at the birth. She’d been a young woman then, not quite 25, and she hadn’t found giving birth to be horribly difficult; it was a natural process, after all. When the anaesthetist arrived on the coattails of her too-late-in-arriving doctor, the man had actually wanted to administer her anaesthetic. The doctor hemmed and hawed, and examined the afterbirth. And was tight-lipped with the nurse, who had been an experienced midwife in England before emigrating to Canada, who had delivered her little girl.

The almost-too-late obstetrician who had finally arrived to see her granddaughter emerge into daylight and independent breathing had been a woman. Hardly seemed to make a difference, male or female, she thought, they were all the same.

And there was her grandchild, a tiny, skinny baby with seemingly elongated feet and fingers on her delicate hands. She weighed a bare 5.1 pounds, slightly less than her own mother had. They were not large people. The examining hospital paediatrician had accused her daughter of taking drugs, using alcohol while she was pregnant, to account for the baby’s slight weight. Neither of which had ever been used by her daughter.

And now, thirteen years later, there was her grandchild, taller than her mother, towering over her grandmother, with the full contours of an adult woman’s body. Perched on top of that body was a sometimes-child’s mind. Capable at times of surprising her, though by the acuity of her vision, her assessments of situations and peoples’ intentions. She was an emerging adult. Suffering pangs of social uncertainty. She herself was never very good at giving that kind of advice. Advice her granddaughter never sought from her mother, only her grandmother.

All those photographs over the years, of the child in various stages of development. And then that last one. It was the pose. And the hairstyle. Both of which were not typical of the girl. Why on Earth had she been posed in that manner? These photographs were all taken by professional photographers who had contracts with the school board. These photographers schooled the children in how they should pose. Never before had she been anything but proud and pleased with the result of those photographs.

Until this one. That very same pose. And so oddly, the face in the photograph, though that of her grandchild, has assumed the look of that horribly murdered girl; yet a child morphing into adulthood. She has tried, time and again, to shake sensible thoughts into her head over that photograph. She has done her best to avoid looking at it directly. Of course she could simply take the photograph away, discard it, but there is a sensibility she cannot quite identify that stops her from doing this simple act that would give her relief from her unwanted thoughts.

All the more unwanted since for the last few months she has been regaled on an almost daily basis with a litany of grievances that her grandchild reveals to her. It began with the revelations that her formerly firm bond of friendship with a young girl and fellow classmate whom she herself was fully acquainted with, had somehow gone awry. Her friend, she moaned, was behaving oddly, uncharacteristically and she couldn’t understand why.

“Well, just ask her!” was her emphatic response. It seemed reasonable enough under the circumstances; they were best friends, had been almost inseparable for years; her granddaughter had even brought her friend with her to stay over at her grandmother’s house during the summer months where she had observed the tenor of their friendship at close hand.

“I can’t!” she wailed. “She’ll just deny everything! She’ll tell me there’s nothing at all wrong. And then she’ll ask me what’s wrong with me. She does that. If I ever ask her anything she always does that. She implies that it’s all in my mind, but I know better. She’s different, kind of standoffish, I can’t understand it.”

“Friends, you know, feel comfortable in confiding in one another. If something seems to be wrong, they feel they can rely on one another. That’s what friendship is, close friendship. You have to feel confident that whatever you say to your friend will be taken seriously. You’ve got to confront her, carefully, about your observations and weigh what she says.”

“Grandma! You’re not listening to me. I might as well be talking to my mother!”

“I am listening to you. I just don’t understand how you can be such close friends for years and then suddenly claim you can’t communicate!”

“Well, that’s just it, don’t you understand? I can’t figure out why all of a sudden she’s clammed up, closed herself down, shut herself away from me.”

There was nothing she could say that helped really, because it appeared her granddaughter had already tried everything she suggested. And then, over the course of the next several months, a rapprochement appeared to have occurred; their former friendship resumed. To her questioning, her granddaughter said it just wasn’t the same. There was still something wrong, something unspoken, a quiet reserve, despite her normally ebullient friend’s welcome reversion to her previously known personality, there were times when her friend lapsed into quiet, sullen moods and then they quarrelled when she asked what was wrong, and her friend snapped back “Nothing! Leave me alone!”

Months later the brooding persona gained a victory over the normal carefree one, and once again the two girls became distant from one another. The pain in her grandchild’s voice about this reversal struck her as though she was herself experiencing the misery described to her, vibrating in the girl’s voice. Her imagination took her down the road of her granddaughter becoming depressed to the point of danger. Could she be exhibiting symptoms of mental disease brought along by this dire disappointment? Could the loss of her good friend drive her toward a dangerous loss of mental equilibrium?

She chided herself for overreacting. She knew as well as anyone how teen-age girls revelled in drama, enjoyed feeling downcast and depressed as they coped with the changes in their hormones. When she expressed her misgivings to her daughter she was rewarded with a look of disbelief flooding her daughter’s face. “I’ve told you, Mother, she’s a drama queen. She wants attention. She knows she’ll get it from you. You’ve always supported her irregardless of her behaviour. She’s selfish, thinks only of herself. I’m trying to get her to manage her emotions, to channel them into a realization that others have needs too. She has to be more empathetic toward others. She’s manipulating you, can’t you see that?”

No, she couldn’t see it. She could hear the genuine misery in her granddaughter’s voice. Heard the complaints of the confusion that the re-emergence of distance between herself and her friend had caused, and it worried her immensely. Even while she could recognize her daughter’s perspective, and admitted to herself she was likely more intelligently diagnosing the situation.

In the months that followed the emotional schism between the two girls became irreconcilable. They spoke curtly to one another, the veneer of civility barely concealing their new aversion to one another. It was clear to her, however, from the way her grandchild described their daily encounters at school, and the recounting of the cellphone text messages they sent back and forth to one another, that the other girl was also suffering.

She did her best to encourage her grandchild to be more generous to her friend, try to understand what she had suffered, in the hope that reconciliation might be possible. And her granddaughter, in a huff of self-righteousness reiterated all the times she had made the attempt, apologized, hoped that their relationship would be restored, only in the end, to be rebuffed by her friend.

“Wasn’t my fault she was raped by a family friend”, she finally said. The first time her grandchild had voiced that dreadful word, she thought her head was in a spin she might never recover from. She gagged at the very thought that her grandchild even knew what the word connoted. And that it had happened to her friend, another 13-year-old; simply untenable.

She tried to reason with her granddaughter, telling her that a horrible event like that would simply destroy a girl’s self-esteem, her very soul, alter her for life, make her incapable of having any kind of normal relationships in the future, and that she should have more compassion, be less concerned about how her friend’s coping mechanisms were impacting on her personally.

The girl was adamant. She didn’t care about the rape. It was a horrible thing to have happened to her friend, yes. But she had to get over it. She could have informed her right away, when it had happened, and she would have tried to help her. But she hadn't, she had told others first. And she refused to feel sorry for her girlfriend, that wasn’t the right thing to do, she insisted. It would only encourage her to keep feeling sorry for herself. She had to get over it, get on with life. She wanted to help her pick up the pieces, but not at the cost of helping her friend dissolve into a jelly of self-pity. She was seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis now, and that kind of professional treatment would help. So why was she continuing to be so horrible?

“Horrible? How’s she being horrible?”

“She’s rude to me. Behaving like an absolute bitch. One minute she’s my friend. And the next she’s a nasty, mean-tempered bitch. I’ve told her that I want her to stop that. She’s just not listening to me. One minute she’s saying awful things about me in class right in front of other people and embarrassing me and next thing I know she’s asking me to go out with her to help deliver papers on her route. I just don’t get it.”

And she revealed to her grandmother that she had begun writing a diary. At least that’s how it started. The entries, however, expanded, and she incorporated into those entries other peoples’ perspectives and attitudes. She ended up writing a novel, she explained. Adding to it on a daily basis. Her grandmother felt relieved. Her granddaughter, an avid reader and sometimes-writer, was engaging in a creative, cathartic act of self-discovery and self-help. She was pleased, and praised the girl.

She said how much she was interested in what she was writing, and that caused a withdrawal. What she was writing was for no one’s perusal, it was only for herself.

“Does it help?” her grandmother asked. Does it give you satisfaction to write like that?”

“Well, yes, it does. And it’s kind of interesting. I’ve been adding characters, and using their voices to give a fuller meaning, a depth to what’s happening.”

That really impressed her grandmother. She was delighted that her grandchild had chosen this kind of creative way to deal with her unhappiness over the loss of her friend. Trying, through this method of introspection and altered perspective with the use of other ‘voices’ to gain a degree of understanding of how what was occurring would represent how others felt. She felt confident that through this method, and time elapsing, her granddaughter would manage to weather this emotional storm.

Day after day the grandchild filled her grandmother in with her restive, unhappy recounting of the misery that her school day represented. Everyone in the class, including the teacher by then, knew about her friend’s dreadful misfortune and they wanted to know why the former two best friends were no longer inseparable. The questions came thick and fast: “what’s wrong between you two?” and “why aren’t you being supportive of her?” and “what’s going on, anyway, don’t you feel badly for her?” To all of which queries, her granddaughter responded simply, telling her questioners that it was a private matter.

Eventually, the grandchild asked her grandmother if she’d like to hear a few passages of what she’d written and the grandmother leapt at the opportunity to discover how her grandchild was handling her problems. There were some passages from time to time over the course of the weeks that followed that pleased the grandmother mightily. She praised her grandchild for her growing literary abilities, for her discerning mind, for her ability to grasp the issues and make sense of them.

And then, finally, came the day when her granddaughter read out to her grandmother the beginning of another chapter that read something like this: “She prepared herself for school, remembering to put together her lunch, stuck her binder with the notes she had compiled the night before, studying for a geography test into her backpack. And then, last thing, she went into her father’s cupboard, felt around on one of the top shelves for what she knew rested there, and finally the cold, hard steel slipped into her hand, and she removed it and placed it into her school bag, along with her books, her pencils and erasers, her homework from the night before. She shrugged into her winter jacket and ran out to catch her school bus.”

The grandmother felt her blood run cold. There was a silence, and she wracked her brain; what would she say? Come right out and ask why that? Point out that this could be no solution? Ask her what she had been reading of late to bring her to that kind of conclusion?

Reason prevailed. Her grandchild had no father; hers was a single-parent household. This was a child for whom physical violence was abhorrent. She had never even seen a firearm in her life, of that she was certain. This was a strictly academic exercise.

“Sounds fine, Dear”, grandmother said to granddaughter. “Good work. You’re refining your creative abilities. I’m proud of you.” 

 

 

 

Generations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taller, healthier, larger, smarter
they're the girls hatched a mere
dozen years ago, miraculously
presenting themselves as the future
on our doorsteps. A healthy self-esteem
not yet unduly burdened by personal
constraints of responsibility, but
leavened by an inherent sense of
entitlement, they try the patience of
their elders, while yet astounding
with their laid-back self-assurance.

A robust view of one's natural self,
they are not yet hung up on appearance,
just attitude. A remarkably self-assured
surprisingly perceptive crew. All too readily
puzzled by the slow minds of their elders.
Who plod along, attention devoted to
one task at a time - to which the young
wonder at wasted opportunities.
Triple-tasking is de rigueur - nifty
lap top used to view DVDs, while
simultaneously playing chess, and
assiduously text-messaging.

Food is vital to assuaging sudden bouts
of hunger requiring instant remediation.
Food does not include forbidden textures
of "mush", or "squish"; horribly distasteful.
Inclusive of cucumbers, tomatoes, mushrooms,
avocados, broccoli and tiny cabbage-sprouts
that absolutely reek of outhouse essence.
Bodily emanations are a matter of great
jocularity, and bathroom humour has its
place in polite society. No sooner is the
adolescent (reluctantly) seated to breakfast
than does the query "what's for lunch?" erupt.
No sooner is lunch absorbed than the
focus turns on dinner's minute details.

Bed-making is an absurdly unnecessary
occupation; hanging clothing a waste of
precious time, emptying the kitchen sink
of dishes a real drag, and garbage removal
utterly gross. Parents are sadly clueless
about music and the relevance of
inconveniently obsessive opinions and
misunderstood impressions. The infant of
the cradle and primal dependence has
transformed relentlessly into society's
sage, its setter of trends, its manifest
role in the insidious upset of unworthy
society's mores and tedious customs.

 

 

 

Notes On A Diary

 

It may have been the last thing on her list, but it was never left behind, even when she was away from home for a day, a week, it made no matter. Often enough in the past, it had accompanied her when she knew she would have at times to carry it when even a few ounces of additional weight would make a difference. When she had gone with her husband canoe camping and packs had to be portaged for example, on overnight alpine camping hikes, or on holiday vacations where they lived in cramped little wilderness cabins for weeks at a time, to be close to nature. There were times when she’d had to shelter her diary from rain and wind while writing into it each day’s reckoning.

She was meticulous about chronicling everything that happened during the course of a day. Well, perhaps, not quite ‘throughout her life’, since this hadn’t been a childhood, an adolescent or even an emerging-adult habit. She couldn’t recall when it had occurred to her that she felt like writing down a small and concise account of her everyday thoughts. She was a reader, so it was entirely possible she had been impressed by something she’d read. It was such a Victorian pastime. Hardly reflective of what people did in the era in which she lived.

But she had become devoted to that small, daily task, and each night before falling asleep, she would reach for that diary and record within it all that had occurred of note that day. Why she did that was beyond her; no one would ever be interested in reading her observations. It was a kind of mental discipline, therefore. And it had a certain interest; she could look back at any date previous to take closer note of what had occurred at an earlier time in her life. Trouble was, she was usually too busy to engage in that kind of recorded introspection, so that aspect didn’t quite make sense.

Her husband’s favourite observation was that such habits become ingrained simply because people were creatures of habit. Habit was comforting, emotional, certainly not particularly rational. So then, she owed her devotion to habit, not a very revealing or bright thought. For what was the larger purpose? It had once been a discipline of the leisured class, those with a classic education, the literary and academic-inclined. She was none of the above.

On a smaller scale of everyday living, she could roam about in her diary if she so felt inclined, to jog her memory about something she’d planted in her garden. The successes and failures she mentioned were sometimes helpful. She was sometimes curious about year-to-year weather and comparisons were amusing. She occasionally ran across notes to herself in significant months that were useful. On a larger scale, she would simply prefer not.

She must have been around her early twenties when she first began maintaining a diary. Her first diaries -- and fact was, she no longer knew where those early ones ended up -- were written in those small, colourful booklets with “My Diary” printed brightly over the cover. Good for a year of scribbling. At some time she had ditched those and decided to use black-covered 8-½” by 11” lined notebooks. Each of those was good for at least three years of daily notations. She’d assembled quite a collection. She rarely looked at the older ones, but occasionally at those that dated from within the last five years. They represented a significant time in her life.

Why would she want to refer to what was within them? She might look through any of them noting the chronology and suddenly come across an observation, a perception, an accounting that would deliver a painful pang of regret. She wasn’t a masochist, after all. She didn’t need the help of her diaries to recall the things she would prefer not to recall.

Those events she would dearly love to lose, but they refused to leave her at peace with herself. The diagnosis that Erin, at age 15, had contracted diabetes. Her daughter’s illness, her hospital stay. Where her body's descent into metabolic breakdown had been halted, and she had been taught the fundamentals of self-care. But Erin resisted, she refused to accept the lifetime verdict of spontaneity removed from her future. The need to weigh everything she did, everything she ate, the constant blood tests, the never-ending doctors’ visits. Above all, the emergency trips to hospital so she could be re-regulated. She resented that imposition on her life, railed against the unfairness of it all, bemoaned the fact that all her friends were carefree and she no longer was.

That wasn’t a fun time, not for any of them. She and Peter had panicked the first time Erin had convulsions. They did all the wrong things, frantic to help, aghast at their daughter's unconsciously-violent flailing. Her blood sugar had plunged too low; Erin had injected too much insulin. She did that kind of thing, liked to play around with the insulin, inject too much and then 'compensate' by eating all the forbidden things that would send her blood sugar soaring. Her endocrinologist warned her time and again, after each of those wearying emergency-room trips, that she was weighting her future against a long life. But kids think they’re indestructible, and nothing they could say or do or promise or beg made any difference to Erin. She was born defiant and that’s how she died.

They had been so relieved when she found a really decent, level-headed man after all the others she’d brought home that were so obviously no match for her quick intelligence. He truly cared about her. So much so that he gradually, even before they married, took over the coaching they’d always done with Erin, to try to make her more aware of what she was doing to herself. Somehow, she didn’t mind it when Lloyd did that. She smiled her sweet acquiescing smile at him, and actually listened to him. By the time they married he knew as much as they did about helping Erin control her diabetes. And he took it seriously.

Not all that seriously, though, to prevent them from conspiratorially disregarding what the gyn-obstetrician and her diabetes specialist had warned, that she was under no circumstances, to think about having children. Her body, ravaged by years of neglect, wouldn‘t be able to withstand the hormone changes, the rigours that pregnancy would impose on her compromised system.

She rarely sees her grandchild. Lloyd did love Erin, she’s certain of that, but it had turned her stomach when before a full year had passed he married again. They had two children of their own now, and Erin’s daughter. She couldn’t blame her son-in-law’s new wife for wanting to shut her out. She’d probably behave just the same, wouldn’t abide the thought of an earlier wife, wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that earlier wife’s parents. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

At first Lloyd had been good about bringing the child along for brief visits. And he had faithfully sent along the latest photographs so she could see how Erin’s child thrived, a loved child. She could see Erin in her motherless daughter, and the pain was so intense she could hardly make herself look at those photos, even though she had framed several of them and they hung prominently on her bedroom walls, alongside those of Erin at the same age.

Her bedroom, no longer their bedroom. No point brooding about it, but she couldn’t help herself. She was not fun to be around, and she could hardly find fault with her friends whom she now rarely saw. They’d done what they could to help her adjust. But none of them had experienced quite the downfall she had. She found she had nothing any longer to share with them. With their own ups and downs they managed to make a life for themselves. Her, not so much.

From time to time she would glance at those empty diaries. She’d bought a whole whack of those black-covered notebooks. They came in sets of five, cheaper that way, and last time she’d bought two packages. She had worked her way through the first set of five, and part of the second set was still neatly plastic-wrapped. They sat on her bookcase, neatly, tidily, among all the filled books, and her personal library of reading material. And when she last glanced in that direction and realized what the unused books represented in terms of years of writing, she thought wryly to herself, she would never fill them all. The empty notebooks would most certainly outlast her.

She could, if she really wanted, pick up the diary corresponding to the correct year and month and day, and read her entry that observed how odd it was that Peter had wanted to discuss a really peculiar subject; what did she think of the possibility of a man loving two women equally? He’d hastened to add that he had seen a film on his last business flight, and that had been the story line. It had moved him greatly. He wanted to know if she thought that might be possible -- in theory, of course.

“Depends on the person, I guess”, not thinking deeply about it, not really interested even as an abstract imagining, it held no interest for her. “I couldn’t imagine it, myself. I mean, if you love someone, how could you match that love with someone else? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“No, no, I guess it doesn’t. But what if someone who was normal in all respects, had a long and fulfilling marriage suddenly discovered that he was attracted to another woman. And that happened despite that his feelings for his wife hadn’t changed one iota. Do you think that’s possible?”

“No”, she laughed, and poked his ribs. “I can’t for the life of me understand how you get yourself so emotionally involved in film plots. They don’t reflect real life. And they deliberately appeal to the wistful male longing to look around…”

He’d laughed at that. And then the subject was dropped.

But it was picked up again, at a later date. And then she knew it hadn’t been a theoretical query, months earlier, that he had been probing, trying to ascertain from her reaction how she might feel when he finally revealed to her that there hadn’t been a film with an odd plot, that it was himself he was speaking of.

“I wasn’t looking for anything”, he explained ever so earnestly, a genuinely worried look on his usually placid face. He was responding to her disbelieving rejection of his revelation that he had been seeing another woman.

When he had tentatively broached the subject, obviously no longer willing to lead a double life, one she hadn’t even suspected, she had recoiled, felt her body turn cold and her face hot. He had reached out to her in a supplicating way, as though willing her to understand -- and she had thrust his hands away from her.

Her head reeling, her mind numb, anguished, she had turned away from him. And, back turned, in a quiet voice had urged him to tell her everything. She needed to know everything. He was obviously alarmed at her reaction. How had he expected her to react? Rationally, to a purely emotional twist? He was telling her that the compass of her life had turned without her even being aware, and suddenly the props that held up the life as she knew it, had collapsed.

He’d pleaded for her understanding. He hadn’t meant it to happen. It just did. “Did it?” she responded, head pounding, feeling that she needed to turn on him, lash him with her voice, tear at him with her fingernails, pound him with her fists, knock out of him the lies he was spewing.

That was then. The pain had dulled considerably, but not the raging feeling of betrayal; worse, the fact that he now had a new family, two infants he shared with a new wife, while she had been left with nothing. Bitter didn’t begin to describe how she felt, unable to shake the fog of misery out of her life. She had a right to be bitter, she told herself. She had nothing to anticipate, no hope for anything. Her future yawned before her, its great empty maw a brutal tease, reminding her of what she once had, had taken as her due. And now, nothing was due her.

What kind of life was that?

She tried, occasionally, to brighten up. Call one of her old friends, make a day of it, lunch and shopping and that helped for as long as it lasted. They all knew better than to venture enquiries. She returned the compliment, unwilling to hear anything that would tear her façade of indifference and leave her naked, revealed as a pitiful mass of self-pity.

It was, she knew, their old friendship that left her few remaining friends feel sufficiently indebted to the past that they would show up. Even when she presented herself with her old smilingly vivacious face, all made up and dressed to the nines, she was aware of that fog hanging over her. She knew they could feel it; it was a palpable presence.

She would enjoy her day out with her old friends, return to her home, putter about doing meaningless little things, prepare for bed, and reach for her diary. Her diary was, in fact, all she had left. It was her contact with life, with the life she’d had. Writing dutifully onto its pages was cathartic; oddly enough allowing her briefly to purge her body of all the resentment, the nauseating self-pity, the horrible regrets.

Finally, one day she set about collecting all those remnants of the life she’d led. Those she could find, in any event. She had ten in total, and she tossed in those that had never been written upon, those awaiting their quotidian turn. The fireplace whose use she had neglected for so many years now proved its utility. And as she watched each of those memory-deposits burn, one each day, until they were nothing but ashes, she gradually felt a weight of remorse, loneliness and sadness lift. When they were all gone, she felt vastly different. She felt naked but vibrant, alive. It felt good to feel like that again. She’d almost forgotten how it could be.

When, eventually, someone ventured to call police because she hadn’t been seen in public for an awfully long time, there were no more diaries, there was no more her. Life had held some promise for her after all, one that led a trifle more precipitously than for most, to that inevitable, final journey.

She understood finally that she had no need for companionship, because no one takes that journey other than alone. 

 

 

Suddenly Exuberant!

Expectation flings itself into the
very air we breathe as we set out
into a woodland ramble. The ineffable
fragrance of spring tantalizes our
winter-wan sensibilities. Even those
prevailing winds, so cuttingly cruel in
dark months of bitter cold, ice and the
gentler persuasions of snow covering
the landscape has recalibrated
its ferocity, become even-tempered.

Snow is fast escaping into melt,
funnelling down hills into the valleys
hosting rivulets, creeks and streams,
all rushing pell-mell into rivers and lakes
and ultimately the seas themselves,
succumbing toward a gentler, kinder
atmosphere we dream of in dark months.

The bare limbs and branches of
deciduous trees recall their spring
and summer glory of green canopies
and sap begins to stir from roots to
trunk. Maple trees invite gentle
taps in exchange for sweet syrup.
Small, furry creatures rejoice,
abandoning winter shelter to
seek more clement pastures.

Migrating birds infuse the newly
receptive arras with their transcendent
spring trills. Spare pickings at
first of dried seeds, cones, berries
and hawes, but a finer feeding theatre
awaits on the near horizon of time.

We watch chickadees hesitate,
swoop low on branches in response
to our quiet shhshhshh, anticipating
the seeds and nuts we leave behind.
Those they descend, condescend to
claim, they fly off with, firmly secured
in tiny beaks. All others destined to
become the prized possession of grey,
black and red squirrels, chipmunks.

Where snow and ice have receded
bright green moss and ferns
celebrate their release. Lichens, grey
and green, tan and pearl, stipple, patch
and decorate tree branches. Conifers
hold aloft their brightly needled flags.

The clamour of silent cheers that
infuse all living things as nature
progresses toward its Spring Equinox
enlivens these days of ever-fresh
anticipation; from subdued to
suddenly ebulliently exuberant!