Button

She sleeps, loose-limbed and comfortable
deep in her slumbering memories of
self as young, active and nimble, entranced
with everything that came her way.
Just, in fact, as we do. Occasionally she
will whimper during the night, recalling
memories we have no hint of, but distressing
to her in her quiet old age, sharing with us
that singular distinction that comes to all.

She is still active, healthy and engaged.
Though her senses have dulled, not entirely
dimmed to nothingness. Her hearing is
impaired, her sight compromised, but her
unceasing interest and joy in all that surrounds
her remains unimpaired. Her appetite is
strong and her habits subdued, but she is
still the same companion she was decades
earlier when she came to us, a puppy.

We exult in her longevity, praise her spirit,
celebrate her alacrity and willingness to
companion us wherever we go, trusting
to our ongoing dedication to her continued
well-being, just as we do for our very own.
Viewing her utterly relaxed, sleeping in
peace wherever she leaps and settles in the
home she shares with us, we remain in the
present; the future will look to itself.

After The Rain

After the rain driven relentlessly
by a mordantly incessant wind
unleashed its double fury on our
landscape, the clouds darkly
veiling the night-time sky
excused themselves as though
remorseful of the fury vented
unstintingly on the innocence below.

Whisked clear, the winds had
only their singular rants to rave
through the atmosphere, rippling
the detritus rudely left after winter's
departure, tearing fitfully through
the bareness of deciduous trees
awakening to the release of spring.

The woods are rank with upturned
sodden soil, the streams run full,
dark with clay particulates. The
shadows of crows flinging themselves
on the low ceiling of air above, cross
our path as the birds cackle and call,

settle, ruffle feathers and taunt the
season with the impermeability of
their raucously entitled presence.

Don't Feed The Dogs!

It’s become, he thinks wryly, a predictable ritual. He thinks he can get away with sneaking some extra tidbits to the dogs, and sometimes he does get away with it, but more often she snaps at him “Don’t feed the dogs!”. Well, he’s not feeding them, not exactly. He’s demonstrating his fondness for the poor little buggers, surreptitiously reaching under the table while simultaneously appearing to be absorbed in reading his breakfast paper. They wait there, both of them, under the table. They know the game. When he tries to ignore them, after her imperious bark, one of them will nudge him.

It almost makes him feel like a kid again. The way he felt when he was small, when his mother served something disgusting for dinner and he tried to feed the family dog and even the dog wouldn’t touch it. He’d try to secret the stuff beside him on the chair, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice, and when he excused himself later, he’d scoop the goop into his hand and rush into the bathroom with it, to flush it down the toilet. He had convinced himself his mother never knew what he was doing, but he discovered much later she was aware of it, but chose to permit him these little deceits. Satisfied that he would eat some of it, before beginning the disposal ritual.

With his wife it was the same kind of thing. The dogs were overweight, she’d groan, it wasn’t healthy for them. Didn’t he care? Was he looking forward to disposing of them prematurely? Hardly likely; he was as invested in their good health and longevity as she was, just also wanted to treat them now and again. And they knew; they could smell sausages or bacon on the stove of a morning. Pancakes too, they liked those. She had agreed at first that he could chop tiny bits of pancake or sausage or bacon into those little porcelain bowls she used for them. Her mistake. It wasn’t a one-time thing, it became their week-end ritual. And nothing, now, could dissuade them from their expectations.

She was as resigned to it as he was, but she would make him pay for beginning that ritual, now incontrovertibly set in stone. Until the little dogs received the homage due them nothing would budge them from their begging stance under the table. His wife pretended not to see, as though nothing was happening. But that didn’t stop her from snapping at him “Don’t feed the dogs!”

While he read the papers she was immersed in one of her food magazines, flipping the pages, looking at recipes, ogling the colour photographs, enticing enough to make anyone drool. She was devoted to those magazines, fascinated with the recipes, loved the photographs, but did she ever make any of those things for him? Hardly. With him too it was the same thing “Don’t feed the overweight man”. Hardly overweight. Him? Well, hardly. He could lose five pounds, but at his age why bother?

Food magazines in the winter and gardening magazines in the summer months. Poring over the gardens purportedly in someone’s backyard, but hardly likely. They argued over that, too. These were settings, he told her, no one had gardens like that. They were just temporary props, like Hollywood film sets. The purveyors of those magazines well knew that ordinary people didn’t have gardens like that. It was like the fashion magazines with their slim-to-disappearing models wearing designs that would look ridiculous on most people. They looked ridiculous on the models too, but they could get away with it.

Did she listen to him? Never. Just kept turning those pages. And ordering him not to feed the dogs. They weren’t dogs, they were their household companions. If he called them dogs she would snarl at him, demand he speak of them by their names. But her, if she did it that was all right…

She told him the other day about the last telephone conversation with her kid brother. Kind of cut him down to size, she said, the selfish little egotist. Well, sure Kenny was like that, but he was the youngest of her mother’s brood, thirteen years younger than her, in fact. Little wonder he was spoiled, got used to the idea that anything to do with him was important. She would never forgive her little brother for assuming his wife was fine, just fine. When she was reverting steadily to childhood, and neglecting the care of their two infants. And then when she was institutionalized he raised the kids by himself. Kind of. He did marry their day-care provider.

And the kids, as they became adults, had to fend for themselves anyway, because their dad was too busy after all, to give them the attention they needed, and he didn’t feel they were entitled to the support they wanted, so now he’s bitter that they’ve both moved far, far away, both married to losers he didn’t approve of. She just kind of sorted things out, set him straight. Doubtful when he’ll call again to crow about his latest exploits or complain about the latest slings his most recent publication earned him. But that’s the way his sister is. He’ll get over it.

And that’s the way his wife is, he’ll never get over it. She could be pretty devious. Pretend she knows nothing when she knows everything. And in the process catch him with his pants down. Literally - last week-end, as it happened. He has a habit of walking around in the morning in a tee-shirt, fresh out of the shower, and nothing on below. He’d forgotten to roast coffee for breakfast, and because she hated the smell of roasting coffee, he’d taken it into the garage, for the roasting machine to do its thing there.

She also, as it happens, hates it when he wanders around without any underpants or trousers on. Guess his elderly, lean shanks aren’t too sexy, he’d chuckled to himself often enough. When he went into the garage to retrieve the roaster, sans trousers, sans underpants, suddenly the automatic garage door lifted. He could move pretty fast for a 75-year-old, and he did. He couldn’t be certain that no one had seen him revealed in his glorious nakedness, but hoped that to be the case. Could be embarrassing.

Of course she denied she’d done any such thing. So what was he supposed to do, call her a liar? Ask her about that grin plastered all over her face?

He was ordered not to listen to the news in her presence. She deliberately made herself unaware, ignorant of world affairs. She had no intention, she said, of allowing those disgusting things that happened outside her world to invade her consciousness, she had no need of that kind of rude awakening. So if he wanted to listen to news he had to do it as though clandestinely, in his own house. Clearly, being aware of world affairs had become a subversive activity. He felt hemmed in, ignored, put upon.

She was disinterested in his opinion on anything, and never sought it. When he proffered it he was shut down, like an obstreperous kid making a nuisance of itself, trying to get some attention. When she caught him discussing anything with anyone, she would interrupt, make light of what he’d said, inform whomever he had been talking to that he had become tiresomely verbose, and insult his intelligence in front of anyone at all. He thought he would become inured to that kind of deliberately insidious character assassination - from his own wife! - but he wasn’t. It rankled and puzzled him.

Where was that cute little button-nose with that impish grin who had so captivated him? They’d had discussions back then, and they all revolved around their future together. Here was the future and it wasn’t quite what he had envisioned. A companion in old age. A companion he had, but a more reserved, disinterested one couldn’t be imagined. Why did he put up with it?

At night, she still wore the same silky bed garments she had used to when they were young. Once in a little while she would allow him to touch her, but touch was as far as it went. Anything further was ferociously abnormal, disgusting, and he a dirty old man to even harbour any thoughts that she would want to ‘do it’.

Even his daughters seemed to give him short shrift, following their mother’s example, as though he was already entering the state of senility that would certainly soon overcome him completely, rendering him incapable of responding to even the most basic of enquiries. Nothing he said to them seemed to penetrate their consciousness that he was in full possession of all his marbles, that he was well informed and a good source of information on anything. They were as disinterested in his opinions as his wife. They treated him like an old family dog, with the obligatory kiss on forehead.

Not that it was much different with the grandchildren. No boys, all girls, all following in their mothers’, their grandmother’s footsteps, viewing him as an addendum, an odd-fellow-out in a household comprised largely of females. How, he wondered, did his sons-in-law cope? Were they given the same kind of treatment he was now so long accustomed to? Does it creep up so gradually that no one takes notice, until it suddenly looms of such huge importance because everything else has receded, with retirement?

When did his wife enter the hallowed thought-processes of feminism and begin to regard males, himself included, as oppositional oppressors to womankind? Would it have been any different if they’d had sons, instead of daughters?

He had once confronted her with those questions. Or queries approximating those he posed to himself; putting it, he hoped, more delicately, diplomatically, not wanting to risk one of her volatile outbursts of condemnation of all men and him in particular, as clumsy, stupid victimizers of womankind. He’d thought he had given her a good life, inclusive of his care for her and their children.

Her response had been a blank, uncomprehending stare. A shrug. She had turned away from him, muttering something to herself, something he couldn’t quite make out, but the words “idiot” and “impossible” hadn’t escaped him.

His castle was under siege, and he was only latterly fully aware of it, he thought bitterly to himself. Her concerns restricted to the trite and the trivial, they had few common interests. Is there a ‘naturally’ evolving acceptance of lost autonomy that accompanies old age? How long has this decline beset him? He’s just shrugged it off as immaterial to his well-being, while its corrosive effects on his self-esteem had been gradually, inevitably dissolving his character into a ghostly veneer of the opinionated, self-assured man he once was.

Wait a minute, weren’t old codgers like him supposed to “set in their ways”, with the passage of time become insufferably entitled, graduate from solidly opinion-positive to grumbling misanthropes? When had that stealthy role reversal occurred? He, the self-assured principal, she the docile, unquestioning follower?

His attempts to speak with her, to maintain an element of basic human contact had all been shrugged off. What use was he to her, then? What difference if he left? He thought about it, but never deeply enough to consider it an escape route. What would he be escaping toward? A lonely, isolated life, with a few friends whom he might see on the rare occasion? Discounting those who'd already kicked off, he thought dourly.

He wasn’t a joiner, didn’t belong to any clubs, had been content with his work, his family, his hobbies. Never envisioning a time in the future when the first would be gone, and the rest would somehow slip beyond his grasp.

Nothing seemed to interest him any more, other than the currency of the news. It was what held him to the present, what piqued his interest, while irritating his wife who felt he should have better things to do with his time and his brain. His suggestions that they go somewhere together, find a common interest fell on deaf ears. She had her interests, she was busy and engaged - in things that held no interest whatever for him. And even if they did, she would disallow his ‘interference’ in her sphere.

He had begun lately, imagining himself living in a dingy, low-rent single room somewhere, cooking out of a two-burner portable stove, shuffling off to the nearest grocery store for supplies, reading his daily newspapers, going off for daily walks. She’d never allow him to take the dogs. They were hers, although they were theirs. He would have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The thought that emanated from his right shoulder into his ear and his consciousness said “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Its companion, sitting on his left shoulder whispered in response that he had nothing to lose, yet would gain nothing. He had outlived his usefulness, become expendable. He groaned softly, hot tears of regret beginning to form.

A soft hand fell on his shoulder. Warm lips nuzzled the back of his neck, moved to the top of his head. “What’re you thinking, dear?”

Early Spring

This early spring landscape is icily
raw, wind rattling through deciduous
boughs picking and scattering last fall's
dry leaves, rustling them along the hard,
dry ground. The forest, naked
in its revealed awakening, dark
and sere and quite unlovely.

But in the evergreens, bright oases
of dawning green, a light cacophony
of birdsong. The delicate chorus of
twitterings from gathered goldfinches,
returned to mild perches. And the
drawn-out praise of a songsparrow.

The sky encrusted with the flapping
return of gulls and geese, screeching
and calling their supremacy over the
emerging atmosphere. And clouds of
iridescent-dark crows gather and fling
into the air, preparatory to nesting.

Colour arrives splendidly determined
to banish the bleak grey when cardinals
and bluejays return to claim their right
of inheritance of time and place.
Woodpeckers, large and small, red-capped
in brilliant array, clatter their presence.

Baubles, Bangles ...

Baubles, bangles, bright shiny things
he brings me in thought of brightening
my already bright days, forever
mindful of my fascination with such
objects, captivating my attention in
fervent admiration of their shapes,
their light-catching facets, as brilliant
and multi-faceted as as the life we have
shared from childhood to old age, he and I.

Those more evanescent manifestations
of bright, shining moments of our
lifetime of experiences, captured
in memory, their essence of our time
together form a less indelible but
far more remarkable, meaningful
portion of priceless belonging one to
the other, binding us to a unbreakable
link to the past, the condition of life.

Charge Of The Winged Brigades

Neatly uniformed in their timeless
distinguishing markings and uniformly
strident, they fly in orderly platoons,
an aerial armada of resilient, bold and
determined migrants, patterned by
nature to their yearly ritual, crowding
the springtime, sun-promising skies.

At night, furtively-dark travellers,
their enduring mission of return is
proudly evident in their none-too-silent
barks of unitary purpose, haunting
the atmosphere. Their ordered
flanks silhouetted against the moon
in the sky's deep, black cauldron.

Daytime finds them resting from
their fevered flights, serenely afloat
on the great swells of rivers they overfly
in the still of the dark hours. Replenishing
energy, feeding, they await the
gathering gloom of night.

Some of their numbers use daylight
hours en route to farmed fields, to roost
and peck, squat and fertilize; gather in
excited and excitable numbers beyond
count. Awaiting the signal to lift
off in formation, swelling the

atmosphere with the flight of
their restive bodies, wide-spread
wings, coasting; thrusting, parting
the clear air in their existential,
mysteriously-directed mission
of exultant imperatives.

The Aid Worker

She’d never known herself to react like this before. Her mother used to say that there was no force on Earth that would disrupt her daughter’s placid temperament. She’d always had a calm, sane view of things, faced uncertainty and adversity with resolute calm. It was instinctive to her, inherent in her demeanour, something that made people in distress just naturally sense that, and turn to her for comfort and direction.

Where others panicked, she drew on her resources to overcome irrationality and face whatever would come. Simply put, she was rarely fazed by circumstances she felt she could control, and she couldn’t imagine circumstances occurring that she might not perhaps be able to control, but at the very least try to circumvent, or step aside from.

But here, suddenly, she presented to herself as a lump of cringing fear. She was able to keep her fear at a controllable level during the day. No one, looking at her serene visage, particularly in view of her legendary past performance under less-than-ideal conditions, and her well-known ability to step aside from disaster, and deal with it, might imagine her inner turmoil.

According to her fraternal twin, she was just the kind of person who couldn’t say “no”, even - especially - to her own misconceived notions of offering herself as a mediator, a moderator, an interlocutor in places, at times, throughout events that more thoughtful heads would consider twice about involving themselves in.

She was a victim of her own lack of introspection, her inability to view situations in the round, to conclude that her intervention would be useless. In short, he said directly to her, with his cynical voice making no attempt to conceal his contempt for his hapless sister, she was endowed with too little practical sense and too much unwarranted pride.

She was gradually coming around to his perception. But not entirely. Yes, she had her pride, but she had earned the right to be proud of what she had accomplished. But he, never prepared to allow her a sense of satisfaction, would challenge that. Accomplish? What do you fantasize that you’ve accomplished?

“I’ve given people without hope reason to have hope for their futures”, she defended herself.

“Did you, did you now?” His dark face glaring at her, he turned her premise right around, and convicted her, personally, of damaging peoples’ psyches by offering them the kind of hope she had no right to deliver.

“Who do you think you are, Mother Teresa? You give people a nice little speech, handily interpreted by someone paid to do that, and how do you know they’re getting the essence of what you’re saying? You give them a little bit of food, water, pat them on the shoulder, tell them things will get better. And they won’t, not for those people. You do that, and then you withdraw, tell yourself you’ve done something positively spectacular. You can return from where you came, but those people live with the incessant fear of death through starvation or medical neglect or wars they want no part of. What’ve you done in a really practical sense? They have no reason to hope, reality surrounds them, drains them of everything, including hope, and here you come with your Western ideals and ideas, drop by for tea they cannot afford, and promise what you’ve no right to promise.”

“No, it isn’t like that at all! You don’t understand, you’ve never been out there, you don’t know what it’s like, how a little bit of empathy can help people survive impossible situations!”

“Empathy is it? You’re the least likely candidate for delivering compassion to others. Your empathy is a cold contrivance, you’re utterly devoid of feeling for others. Your personality is cold, detached, removed from feelings for other human beings. Do you have any close emotional ties to anyone, anyone at all? You can fool the outside world, even yourself, but not me. I know you too well. You’re the very model of human fallibility.”

“But at least I try! I don’t pack myself into a shrivelled little ball of self-pity. I go out there in difficult places, dangerous places, and try to ease the lives of other people! That’s making use of my inheritance as a human being. I feel responsible for others, not just for myself. I do what I can!”

Finally, recognizing how distraught she’d become as a result of his prodding, he gave way to sympathy, hugged her, and told her that if that was the way she derived pleasure and satisfaction from life, by deluding herself, that was her business. Just get on with your life, if that’s what you want, he’d said, as they parted.

And she did, she’d done just that. And regretted their estrangement, for after that she no longer had any wish to contact him, to see him, to discuss anything further with him. He just did not understand; a lost cause.

She even, when their mother finally died after a long illness, begged off the funeral, since she was so deeply involved in her charitable humanitarian workload and her distance and inability to secure passage at that particular time made it unlikely she could, even in such an extreme emergency as that, attend. She knew she wouldn’t be missed, in any event.

It wouldn’t be the first, nor the last time that she would have provided material her relatives, near and far, relished to be scandalized about. As far as they were concerned, she was merely being true to form. True to form, what was that, exactly? Mapping out a scheme for her life-work and carefully tending to it? Her reputation, where it mattered to her, in the humanitarian-relief community, was intact.

She had faith in herself, in her mission. She knew she wasn’t the smug, self-righteous, superior creature her brother labelled her. Her colleagues knew that, it was made amply clear by their interaction with her, their respect for the quality of her work, her dedication to their common cause. Her superiors knew that, it was why she was entrusted with work requiring a high degree of personal care for one’s safety, along with exquisite timing, an ability to interact with those unfortunates whose need they represented. She had nothing, nothing whatever, to apologize for. She had her reputation, hard won, and meant to keep it intact.

She tried to be as resilient as possible when attempting to view the work of others, less skilled, less devoted than she was, and to view their little failures not with contempt but with a detached critique which she kept to herself. Their mistakes were her lessons. She would proceed with caution and delicacy where they had failed through brash assurance.

There was a kind of prestige attached to her profession, she knew that well. Respect from the world at large for the cadre of professionals whose mission it was to alleviate the plight of those whose lives were unsecured through famine, war, political intrigue, totalitarian governments, oppressive regimes that neglected their people in the interests of furthering themselves financially. She knew the ins and outs of government malfeasance, the pocketing of funds meant to aid and assist a population, feathering the nests of conscienceless politicians.

She knew also that in some peoples’ minds the work of her profession was viewed as a business, a growing, and profitable business, holding the conscience of the world responsible for horrible events, both natural catastrophes and man-made disasters imperilling the lives of millions, to keep funding them and their indispensable humanitarian work.

She knew some of those with whom she worked weren’t quite dedicated to their profession as humanitarians first, employees of aid organizations second. For them it was the salary, the prestige, the travel, the feelings of superiority over those poor huddling masses of frightened, starving, ill people that drew them. She was of the other variety, those who truly cared, who did their best to alleviate that suffering. This was the way she comforted herself in her worst hours. And lately there was a surfeit of those hours.

She’d had her own share of frightening occurrences, had been abducted twice in the space of a decade, by those considering themselves to be political rebels, people who had, without thinking twice, dispatched her driver and her bodyguard - mercilessly killing them, while holding her for ransom. She hadn’t panicked, she had remained calm, even when she was shackled, allowed to walk outside the huts she was kept in for brief two-minute periods twice a day, given foul-tasting gruel to maintain herself, waiting for the ransom to be paid for her release. She had, in fact, empathized with her captors; their plight too was obvious. Later, it occurred to her that she had fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome.

But they hadn’t assaulted her physically, threatened her, simply kept her prisoner until they received the cash transfer they had demanded. She had to remind herself that they had cold-bloodedly murdered her driver, her interpreter. And when she did, she shuddered convulsively, newly fearful of their casual disregard of the value of human life. She could have been raped, repeatedly. She hadn’t been. She was too valuable for what she represented.

She knew though, what life was like for women there, the women of the clans and the tribes, and their children. Tormented by heritage and custom, they had no idea of what in other places would constitute their basic human rights. Within their normal society they had no rights; they were regarded as chattel and treated as such. Little girls underwent disfigurement and worse, with savage clitoral surgery. Whose results sometimes left them incontinent, distasteful in their plight to the men who might claim them.

But here, where she ministered during the day to women clustered in refugee camps, while the factional wars continued, and where she and others like her tried to help where and when they could, and to teach some basic methods of self-help and sanitation, it was like trying to count the individual grains of sand on a beach, an impossible task. How to adequately teach the importance of sanitation with scant water available? How to instruct women on how to protect themselves when their frail dissent meant nothing against brute force? Their basic ministrations of first aid when the professionalism of doctors, well-equipped hospitals, medications were unavailable spoke to the level of their patch-work humanitarian aid.

When they withdrew from the camps at night to the safety of their protected compounds on the outskirts of the city, they knew that the women and girls were vulnerable to repeated rapes. They, she and her colleagues, had eventually talked the mothers of young girls into permitting them to march for miles under the cover of early dusk, to sleep over on the ground of the protected compound, to ensure they weren’t victimized, over and over and over.

She tried to imagine how she might herself react if she had been born into that miserable, primitive social milieu, how she would manage, how she might protect herself, and from what she knew were real life experiences viewed from the outside, from her perch of safety, she knew she would be helpless. And she would be utterly without hope. She could only wonder, mystified, at the placid calm of the women when they were timorously attentive to the quiet instructions they heard. And she recoiled within every time she attempted to help, to instill confidence, when she had none herself. She knew their inner turmoil, despite their surface calm.

She found herself submitting at night, when she should be peacefully sleeping, to episodes of clinical depression. And fought against it, knowing that if she allowed depression and the suicidal tendencies that often accompanied it, that surrender would render her work there useless. She had, after all, fought to be dispatched into this hellhole. She had insisted. She had railed against the injustice of her supervisor claiming she had been involved in too many of these situations, leaving her less capable of coping.

Wrong! She had shrieked. She was strong, committed. Her knowledge and experience were indispensable, and she meant to continue going into those places that haunted her. And there she was, once again, in those places that haunted her. Where nightmares she suffered back home, safe in her own little apartment, enveloped and overwhelmed her, and dragged her into a purgatory she knew hardly even approximated what those women and children lived.

But those were merely nightmares. Figments of her overwrought imagination. Perhaps true to life for the indigent and homeless women and children she ministered to, but never personally had she ever come close to suffering as they had. And suddenly, in her night-time fantasies she was no longer herself. Transformed into a dark-skinned, fearful yet enduring female whose thought processes were unlike any she had herself entertained, she did not recognize what had become of her.

And, when, in the morning, a concerned colleague knocked at her door, finding no response, the door was almost destroyed in the attempt to reach her. Her family back home was advised that death had occurred due to natural causes. A heart attack, they said. A dreadful pity, they said, in one so young. So committed to others' well being.

Dear Brother

Thank you for thinking of me,
sending along your proud
description of your Borneo
bird-sighting trip and your
acquisition of a wood-sculpture
tapir, the exploits involved in
shipping it homeward, and your
remarkable repair of its injury.

You labelled this missive a
"short story", named it The Tapir
and sent it on its way. My response,
after reading the verbose, awkward,
self-celebratory account was of
glaze-eyed tedium, unable to focus
bored eyes to the conclusion.

Which, I trust, was every bit as
gleefully surfeit with ego as what it
followed. Tell you what: at some
future date should I ever succumb
to the allure of distinguishing myself
as a polymath, write a scientific,
botanical treatise, wax soporific on
ecology and send it off to you

preparatory to publishing, I
wholeheartedly invite you - no,
I insist - to criticize that feeble,
hubristic result. Mid-life crisis?
I've had mine, long ago, welcome to
that most classic of life's engagements.
I shall take care not to label my effort
an academic exercise, however.

Febriley yours; grin dear soul and
bear it. Ego-puncturing is also an
art you will admit. Unfortunate,
but occasionally required - as the
occasion demands it - unequivocally.

Earrings

So, there, I got it done. Finally. I actually wanted it done last year. Not just what I got done now, but I thought it would be really different, and I wanted to get my nose pierced. I saw some girls with pierced noses, and delicate little studs in them and I thought it looked really beautiful. So that’s what I wanted. Last year. I told my mom, and she was all right with it. She said she’d look into it for me. She told me not to say anything to my grandmother, and I knew just what she meant. I mean, grandmothers are kind of old and they don’t like things that are that different. I told her anyway.

I kind of couldn’t help it. I’m just so used to telling her everything. She always listens to me. Anyway, I told her, and I knew there’d be trouble. I wasn’t even sure she was still on the line, after I told her. There was this big silence. Then she asked me why, why there, why not get my ears pierced. I didn’t want to, I told her, everyone does that, I don’t want to be like everyone else.

“You don’t? Don’t you realize that by getting your nose pierced you’ll still be like everyone else, it’s just that it’s a different group of everyone elses. You’ll be just another person with a nose piercing. It’s not all that original, you know.”

“I don’t want to be original. I want to be me. And I’m different from most of the people I know. I don’t want to do the things they do. I think I’d look just fine with a nose piercing. Mom said it was all right, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Grandma knows when she’s beat. When to give up. She’s smart in a lot of ways. She said nothing more. But she began sending me a whole lot of Internet sites with discussions on nose piercing. Some of them were from doctors and they had a lot to say about nose piercing, and a lot of it wasn’t very good. From my perspective, of course. And when I went over to visit with them during March break last year, Grandpa started in on me, while Grandma didn’t say another word.

“You’ll be labelling yourself”, he said.
“No, I won’t!”
“You will be presenting a façade that is interpreted as socially different in a not very useful way. A lot of people are put off with that kind of display of difference.”
“I am different!”
“Not in that kind of way, you’re not”, he said. “Just think about when you’re a little older and you apply for a job. Think an ear piercing will influence your selection?”
“I’ve seen girls wearing piercing and they’re working!”
“Sure, we have too. They’re all working at dead-end retail jobs. Is that what you’re anticipating for your future?”

I just hate it when they talk to me like that. If it’s all right with Mom, why do they have to interfere? I should’ve just said nothing about it, until it was over and done with. The next time they’d see me I’d be wearing a nice, neat little attractive stud in my nostril and there’d be nothing they could do about it.

Well, as it turned out, that didn’t happen, after all. Too young, all the places that do those things said. Illegal.

So, a year later, I got my ears pierced. Not the lobes, I didn’t want that. Every time I think about someone wearing hoops, I picture them getting pulled and the ears getting torn or something, it turns my stomach. I decided I’d rather have my ears pierced right at the very top. Mom said that sounded all right. Grandma wasn’t too averse to that, though true to form, she had to question me about - why there? I was pissed off.

When Mom made the appointment she was told there was an age requirement, and I was short a few months to 14. They said that would be all right, as long as she was there with me, and gave her permission. Mom told me they don’t use any kind of anaesthetic there, and they don’t use a punch, but a needle. Sounds kind of horrible, but Mom said it’s all right.

So we had the appointment, and I kind of thought maybe I’d change my mind. I knew it would hurt, there’s cartilage up there, not soft tissue like the ear lobes. That’s what Grandpa said, and I knew that, anyway. When we went into the shop and looked around it looked nice and clean and neat and there was all kinds of stuff to buy, like metal things to dangle when people got piercing on their eyebrows, or tongues (now that’s really gross), bellybutton, that kind of thing. Earrings too, lots of them.

But I’d already bought the earrings I wanted. At least Grandma did, she bought them for me, when we went to Winner’s. She kept picking out these little gold hoops even though I told her that wasn’t what I wanted. She’s really, really irritating sometimes. I saw these 14-kt-gold studs with round zircons in them. I knew they weren’t diamonds, if they were they’d cost a zillion dollars. They were on sale, and those were exactly what I wanted.

The technician who did my ears dropped the backing of one of the earrings. We looked for it, but couldn’t find it. She replaced it with a cheap one from one of her own earrings for sale, and when we got home Mom changed it into a gold backing from one of her earrings. She should’ve given us a discount off the $80 she charged, for that lost backing.

I had instructions that twice a day I had to use disinfectant on my ears, and to clean the earring posts too. I wasn’t supposed to sleep on my side for weeks. So the first night I tried to sleep on my back and couldn’t fall asleep. I tried sleeping on my front and that’s pretty impossible. It worked for maybe a half-hour and then I had to turn around on my back again. I didn’t get much sleep, believe me. Mom told me the next day that I should just go ahead and sleep on my side as usual, she doubted it would cause any problems.

And cleaning my ears? Uh-uh, not me. It’s sickening. Every time I looked at my ears I felt sick. When I saw a drop of blood on one of them, I felt like throwing up. So how’m I expected to clean them? I don’t even want to touch them, it’s gross. Mom has been cleaning my ears. And today, three days after I had them done, she took out the earrings to clean the posts, too. And then she couldn’t get them back in. She just couldn’t find the holes. I kind of panicked. And it hurt. So what happens? Jeff gave it a try and he got them back in. But it hurt, let me tell you. Mom says she’s not going to take them out again until a lot more time has passed. She said I have to turn them twice a day. I suppose I’ll eventually get around to disinfecting them myself. Not yet, though. I can’t even stand the thought of it.

First day back at school after March Break and what do you think Miss McGuire did? Her usual, of course. Nothing like welcome back class. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. No, she tore right into us, calling us stupid and lazy and we didn’t even know where she was coming from. But that’s the way she is. She’s crazy, honestly. I’ve never had such an awful teacher. She does have her favourites and she goes a little lighter on them. I’m sure not one of them.

I could’ve strangled Leigh-Anne. Bad enough we’re no longer best friends. Not my fault, though. I want her to just leave me alone. I don’t need her and she doesn’t need me. Except she says she misses our friendship. She’ll say to me and to the other girls how awful it is that we’re no longer friends. Then she’ll turn around in almost the same breath and whisper to someone something about me. Right in front of me. Or she’ll be rude like you wouldn’t believe. So I just haven’t been bothering even responding to her. There’s just no point.

People just won’t leave well enough alone. They all hate her, just kind of put up with her. And they talk about her behind her back, even though they feel sorry about what happened to her. And they ask me why I decided not to be friends with her any more. I don’t say anything to them. It’s none of their business. I’ve told Brenda, but she’s not supposed to say anything to anyone, and I trust her. I don’t know why they’ve got to bug me about that. Why don’t they go ahead and befriend her if they’re so interested? When she treats them like crap they'll know for themselves.

As if that’s not bad enough; Leigh-Anne and her stupid behaviour on top of Miss McGuire’s rants... Everyone is fascinated with my earrings. All the girls want to touch them. I’m like, forget it, my ears hurt, and if you try to touch the earrings it’ll be painful. Do they care? Even though I tell them that, they go ahead and try to touch them, anyway. Moron - really they’re stupid, some of them.

At gym, Morgan thought she was so smart, she got close enough to pull at my left ear and it hurt so badly I thought I’d cry. I told her she was an idiot. Not five minutes later she did the same thing again, with the other ear, and I swear, I almost slapped her. I should have slapped her, but I didn’t.

No, I don’t have any homework today. I’m reading this new novel by one of my favourite authors, Jodi Picoult. My Mom got it for me at Costco. I’ve got almost all of her books. She’s a great author. One of the women my Mom works with told me about her. I saw the book on her desk, and read the story synopsis and thought it sounded pretty cool. That’s what started me off on her. My grandmother ordered four of the books through Amazon. I’ve got three more left to go.

School Daze

There are some lovely little towns in Eastern Ontario. Some of them have been placed along the banks of rivers of which there are many in that part of the Province. The Ottawa and the Mississippi rivers come readily to mind. Some of the towns have fascinating histories as mill towns, small manufacturing towns, some of them purely agrarian-related, largely serving the adjacent farming communities. Some of them, like colourful, quaint Merrickville, have historical locks and docks on the Rideau River. Others, like Pakenham, have distinguishing features that are quite remarkable, like the five-span bridge, quite an engineering feat of its time, standing over the Mississippi right at the ever-raging, powerful rapids cascading downriver.

Life in these small towns carries on at a somewhat different pace than, say in Ottawa, an hour or more distant by car. And many people who live rurally drive that hour or more from where they live in these small rural communities to their workplaces in Ottawa. Some drive to Renfrew, to Arnprior for work, and some people living in Renfrew or Arnprior or Cornwall will drive right into Ottawa, commuting that long drive back and forth, daily to their places of employment.

The children who live in those small towns attend school right where they live. Be it Almonte or Pakenham, Renfrew or Arnprior. The Upper Canada School Board has jurisdiction in part of that area, and like all school boards it is cognizant of the need of young Canadians to be educated, to be exposed, through good teaching, to all that they will require to know to go on to achieve a higher level of education and finally join the general workforce as educated adults, a credit to their society, to their country.

Many of these schools long established to ensure that Ontario children living in the eastern portion of the province, as elsewhere, do receive a good education. Some of them provide, in fact, an outstanding educational experience for their students, as we learn from an Ontario-based study outlining the successes or lack of, seen among public elementary and high schools throughout the province. Some schools, in some small towns distinguish themselves by the quality of the educational experience they offer to their charges.

And some just kind of plug along. Imagine your child attending a small school, meant to hold up to 250 students, but latterly school enrolment having gradually fallen well below the 200-student mark, classes become combined, so one teacher will provide the educational needs for split grades. It seems to work reasonably well. And there are many teachers who are innovative, patient and determined to discharge their professional obligations to their students in the best possible way.

Some of these teachers are truly leaders in their field, an inspiration to others, doing a difficult and needful job. Some teachers are truly professional in the seriousness of their regard for the students whom they teach. For others it’s just a job. They may have gone into the profession with a high-minded intent, but somehow, along the way, become dispirited and disinterested and disengaged. It does happen. It is, after all, a very high-stress profession. For which teachers in Canada unlike their counterparts in the United States, are generously compensated. Their remuneration is far higher, in recognition of what they are meant to achieve, and in recognition of the difficulties inherent in instilling a love for learning in children, and stimulating it. Or, at the very least, somehow managing not to stifle children’s natural affinity for learning.

Many succeed, some with a great deal of difficulty, and many do not. If a child is fortunate enough, he/she will experience the full range; exposure to well-intentioned but inadequate teaching methods taught by an indifferent teacher; exposure to a perennially-enthusiastic, determined and brilliant teacher who justifies her pride in her profession by discharging her obligations with flying colours. And, of course, everything in between those extremes.

For those children, in their formative years, being exposed to a teacher who is functionally incapable of managing a classroom of lively students without bullying them, without collapsing into a jelly of self-pity, without boring them with her/his personal problems, without failing to adequately ensure that children fully understand one lesson before moving on to the next, the school year can present as a total failure.

Under those circumstances, the school experience represents a tidemark of failure because the teacher has failed to guide the class toward the advances they are required to make throughout the school year. Particularly gifted children, those with a good memory, those with plenty of help from parents who have the time, the inclination, the understanding and the functional knowledge, can manage to retrieve something from the school year. But little thanks due to the teacher.

Parents have a tendency to overlook these unfortunate failures, simply because they recall their own experiences when they were young, coping with a teacher whose abilities and dedication to her task were insufficient to the job at hand. They sigh, recall that they managed to get over it and get on with their lives and trust that their children will, too. Adversity, after all, is no stranger to any of our lives. We must learn, even at a young, impressionable age, - perhaps particularly then to a degree - that life sometimes is a struggle, just as true in the learning environment of a dysfunctional classroom, as it is later on in life when we must balance social interactions and workplace problems to find our own authentic place.

It does, however, behoove us all to give some thought to the tender sensibilities of adolescents, those children on the cusp of young adulthood, still clinging to childhood, confused by the change-over, by their hormones busy transforming them physically and confusing them psychically. They are taught - by example, one trusts - to respect others, to view with a certain equanimity differences between people, and to give equal weight to one another’s right to be slightly different, whether that difference manifests itself by culture, traditions, heritage, ethnicity, ideology or skin colour. Above all, they are taught to be deferential to authority, beginning with their parents, transferring to their teachers, and perhaps culminating with those who have seen far more of life than they have.

Society does have a hierarchy of respect due. In the same token, respect for the individuality of young people, their aspirations and their dignity should be reciprocated. Children are sent to school by parents anxious to ensure their children have the benefit of a decent education. There are alternate options, including home schooling, but there is no opting out of parental responsibility to have children schooled. Correspondingly, parents have a social obligation to have taught their children basic respect for others. Their children have every right to expect that they themselves will be respected.

How respectful is it of the rights of children to be schooled in a functioning environment when a teacher descends to hysterics on an ongoing basis? Accusing her class of stupidity, of failing to obey her injunctions, and treating them in the process to days surfeit with screaming and ranting at them. Collectively and singly. Take, for example, a mixed grade 7 and 8, and you have a room full of pre-teens, balanced by teen-agers. That is a potent mix. But a teacher with a calm demeanour, one imbued with emotional balance and experience in the classroom should be quite capable of influencing her class to pay attention, to settle down, and to eschew verbal outbursts.

With their own teacher continually berating them, impugning the level of their intelligence, screaming loudly for what seems to the class for hours at a time in high dudgeon over what they have collectively, or some unfortunate student singly has done to irritate the teacher, they have her example. When the teacher engages in hysterical outbursts of uncontrolled anger and bullying, how is it a surprise that the class then finds it difficult to respect her?

Of course, if they don’t respect her, they forbear to listen to her injunctions and have a tendency to ‘act out’. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And an endless circuit of dysfunctionality.

And take, for example, a principal of the school who, observing these things occurring - particularly as this particular teacher has a pronounced tendency to send those pupils who have mightily displeased her ‘down to the office’, and occasionally to the attention of the principal, because she is incapable of dealing with them - tries to understand what is happening. Having spoken tentatively to the teacher, and having received the information that the class is impossible, comprised of halfwits and stubbornly-raucous misfits, she decides to take a different tack.

She sets aside time from her schedule to call a conference. While the teacher takes half of the class off to gym, the principal sits down with the other half, those representing the grade 8 students. And she asks them what is going on, and why. Some of the children are silent, reluctant to say anything. A few do speak up, and relate to the principal that while it is true that some of the students are hard to handle, it’s a very few students who are actually trouble-makers. And one of them is a boy who has an anger management problem. Which the principal well knows, having integrated him into the regular stream.

The other students also know this and are careful to stay out of this boy’s way, although occasionally he will swing out in anger, usually at another boy, but occasionally at a girl. That, however, is not the problem. The problem is, one says, that their teacher cannot control her anger, lashes out at them, and upsets everyone unnecessarily. Her behaviour, one girl claims, is far worse than the obstreperous behaviour of the younger boys who are admittedly sometimes ill behaved.

The principal turns her attention to this girl, and asks her if she will elaborate. And the girl does. She speaks her mind and tells the principal that she resents the fact that the classroom is not one conducive to a good learning environment. She is aggrieved that their teacher will not control her physical outbursts which, when they occur, upset everyone. And only serve to further enrage the teacher herself. If she starts out the day in a bad mood, that mood only seems to increase in feverish accusations and screaming the rest of the day.

The principal listens, quietly, thoughtfully. And when the girl is finished, the principal turns to the others sitting there and asks what they think of what they’ve just heard. They are in complete agreement. The principal ends the session, thanks all of the students, turns to the outspoken girl and asks if she is prepared to say what she just told the principal, directly to her teacher. The girl says she is prepared to do just that.

But it never happens. Although directly after this little conference the students who were in attendance spoke among themselves about whether they would see some changes take place, and some of them thought it would happen, some thought nothing would change. The outspoken girl said she thought it wasn’t likely anything was about to change.

And she was right. And, funny thing that, although the teacher continued abusing the class, bullying them, harassing them, claiming they were idiots all, and if a student approached her to ask for help with a particular subject her reward would be a snarl that if she’d been listening adequately in the first place she wouldn’t be asking for help afterward, nothing was said to the outspoken girl.

Fact is, that outspoken girl seemed to be a favourite target of the teacher. Who would speak to the girl disparagingly of her single mother, unable to come to night-time occasions at the school. And who seemed forever openly critical of everything the girl did. Oh, not always, occasionally there was a flicker of appreciation for something the girl had done. Her marks more or less reflected her impeccable slate of completed assignments, and her interest and engagement with those school subjects she found she could relate to readily.

She hated it when the teacher became personal, remarked on things she had no right to do. It wasn’t bad when she was cited approvingly for helping a shy boy find a place for himself in the class. But when the teacher castigated her for breaking off a long-standing friendship with one of the other students, taking the other student’s side in an issue that had nothing to do with the teacher and everything to do with familial abuse which the affected girl carried over into her personal relationships with others, she took offence.

And then, wasn’t it quite amazing when, several months after that principal-student conference, the outspoken girl was called to the office and given a ‘certificate of appreciation’ for having the courage to speak up and give her version of events as they had occurred, though nothing was done to ameliorate the situation.

Table Settings

First off, we should establish that I am a total klutz. Oh, perhaps too generous, not total, just moderately. Set off by the fact that I seem, always, to be in too much of a hurry to get things done. That being said, I become, let’s say, careless. Which is why I have a well earned reputation in this family as being accident prone.

No harm done to me through this process. Rather, it is the tableware that graces our meal-time tables, the dishes, tumblers, cups, saucers that reach their too untimely end. A regular shattering of the peace is considered background music in this household. Be it in our lovely breakfast room, or our graceful living room. We live in a state of graceful loveliness, or would, were it not for my congenital laissez-faire attitude about crockery. Suffice it to say that we go through a lot of change over time in the porcelains we use at mealtimes.

Here’s the odd thing, though. My husband doesn’t mind. He readily forgives my clumsiness. Fact is, dish sets which have become chipped, and/or which no longer have their full complement of pieces are just begging to be sent on a journey out of our house.

Upon which serendipitous occasion my husband can feel conscience-free to embark upon yet another one of his delirious dish-set acquisitions. There are a number of places where he enjoys shopping for dish sets. There was a time when he used to consult with me, but my indifference to the various patterns, colours and shapes was sufficient indication to him, over the years, that he is more than capable of making selections on both our behalf.

I do make a conscious effort to be more careful. And when, for a prolonged period of time, I am able to preserve a set of dishes in fairly good condition, my husband becomes restless and eventually sneaks out on a buying expedition.

He has even been known to come home with several sets of dishes, without just cause. Where to put them? Out with the old, in with the new! He obligingly wraps all the pieces of the outgoing set and hauls them over to the Sally Ann, leaving me to process the new sets through the dishwasher and into our waiting cupboards.

Do I consider this a wasteful process? You bet. Would I be prepared to take more care of our existing dish sets? Certainly. Yes indeed! Better yet, am I prepared to live with well-worn and chipped dish sets for the sake of fiscal prudence? Without question.

That, however, just represents half of this duo, and my husband, while appreciating a new set of dishes for a little while, soon becomes bored - they become a visual assault to his fastidious aesthetic - and off he goes again in search of that beautiful set of dishes guaranteed to make the act of consuming meals even more pleasurable.

Good thing we have an ample pantry where multiple sets can be readily stored. In an effort to keep him from boredom, we use sets turn-about. One type of porcelain dish sets for breakfast and lunch, others entirely for the more serious business of eating dinner.

Still, he sneaks out and comes back home with ever more ‘beautiful’ replacement dishes, even when replacement is not warranted. Do I protest? Need you ask!

Things could be worse. The dish sets he purchases are relatively inexpensive. Take our neighbour who also loves porcelain and lovely stemware and who prides herself inordinately on the sumptuousness of her table settings. The stemware she uses is stunning, to be sure, and she saved $120 per unit she assured me, by assiduously shopping on line.

Unlike me, she is careful with her treasures, and breaks nothing. Until, that is, one fateful dinner party she threw when her dining table actually collapsed, all the dinnerware and stemware slipping inexorably off the longer-perfectly stable surface, suddenly become perpendicular - along with the linen nappery. Six stemware pieces smashed.

I could replace the stemware we use at $1.20 per unit, not she, and she actually had her home insurance pay for replacement stemware. And that’s an entirely other story.

I’m happy to report, however, that my husband finally brought home a set of dishes that I truly enjoy using and am most happy with. Happy also to report that, after months of use, not one dish has been cracked or chipped, not one cup smashed. Yet. Actually he bought two sets. From Canadian Tire. On sale. At $10 each set.

He likes them too.

Life's An Adventure!

Our marriage is five years over a half-century. I’m not certain what sounds better (or worse), fifty years or a half-century. When I turned fifty, aeons ago, I joked I’d passed the half-century mark; thought it was amusing. Until I hit sixty. I remember how grateful I was to my husband when, just before my 58th birthday when I was thinking I would be turning 59, he said no, just 58. I was thrilled; it was the best possible birthday gift. I thought I might be sliding into senile dementia, believing I was a year older than I really was.

Funny thing is, I’m not really, not really-really that old. Actually I’m not old at all. If I were, I would feel old. I’d look old. I don’t. Either feel or look it, that is. Fact is, age isn’t a factor in my life at all, even though I was so glad to regain that errant year, if only to grab another year’s experiences and experience.

I still have a letter he wrote to me when we were fifteen, and I was away for a week at a summer camp. The mangled syntax recalls his voice soft with the mush of goofy puppy-love. The sentiments that of a boy reaching beyond himself into manhood. I have another letter, one I wrote to him seventeen years later, when we were 32, had three young children, and he was away at a conference-workshop for a week. My letter informed him among other things, that our youngest child had just lost another tooth and he was totally focused on finding a dinosaur egg, because one of the other children in his grade 1 class had sworn his father told him there were plenty around for the picking.

When we were young, I would call him ‘honey’ and ‘dear’, and this used to irritate my father no end. No bees buzzing around him, no antlers on that one, my father said. What?

I’ve always loved him madly. Even when he was a callow, a truly callow youth, and I had my doubts. I’ve never hesitated to tell him that I love him. Except once, that I can recall. That was well over a decade ago one September, when we were canoeing the Bowron Lakes circuit in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia with our youngest son, a biologist. Took us nine days to canoe the circuit; lake to lake to river to lake to river to lake. Spectacular environment, surrounded by mountains. And cold, at the three-thousand-foot level. It rained every bloody day. Rain down below, but on the mountain peaks, there appeared a spreading cone of snow. Even our son was discouraged and he’s the original Outdoorsman. I wasn’t, oddly enough. Discouraged, I mean; we were well geared for the weather and despite the rain managed to dry our tent and sleeping bags in occasional sunny, windy periods. Until the rain hit again, and it did; again and again.

True, all that paddling from one lake to another, one camping spot to another did weary me. And the incessant portaging. At that time of year there weren’t all that many others and they were mostly adventurous young Europeans, whose paths we would occasionally cross. That trip was also the first time I'd ever heard a screech owl. It had been on our first night out, raining heavily, dark as all get-out, and we were huddled in our tent, wondering what we could eat for dinner; no opportunity to do any cooking, when suddenly a heart-stopping, liver-shrivelling, lunatic, high-pitched, strung-out scream petrified me into silence. I got used to it over the days that followed. Got used to other owls that seemed to follow us at night, when we ventured past our camping spot to the boxes upon we sat and shat.

Getting the food out of harm’s way each night was a joy. Most sites had a long ladder which you would position against a tree, haul the food pack up and hoist it between two trees on the ladder-like shelf placed there, bridging the trees, for that purpose. Remembering, of course, to lay the ladder back down. Sometimes, rarely, a camping site devoid of handy trees would boast a large iron safe for the food pack. The safes looked rather the worse for wear, having suffered obvious insults from irate bears.

We often looked up the mountainsides through binoculars, hoping to see a grizzly (at a comfortably safe distance). On one sandy beach we once came across the sharp hoof prints of a moose, and mingled with the prints those of a wolf. Eeech! The imagined scenario that resulted was that of mangled and bloody carcasses, but there was nothing left other than the marks we'd seen to indicate nature red in tooth and claw had resulted.

Before we’d set out on this adventure, I had asked the outfitter if pepper spray might be a good idea. Earlier, we had watched a mandatory safety video to give us an idea of what we might encounter on our journey and warnings about grizzlies loomed large, as did my resulting worries about them. The outfitter looked at our son, looked at me, then told him not to worry. He could always outdistance his ma should we venture across a hungry grizzly. Very encouraging. At some portages we did see others clanking along, sporting bells to warn off bears.

More harm came to people from other sources, however. At one juncture we watched from shore as several people were taken out of the circuit via a parks patrol boat and we conjectured hypothermia. Another time, a couple smashed a wonderful (borrowed, as it happened) cedar-strip canoe on a snag by treacherous rapids in a bottleneck of one of the rivers, and they were brought out. On that same stretch of rapids we managed to manoeuvre successfully enough, but dusk was fast falling and we knew we’d have to take the first available campsite. We did, and what a site. From hell it was. The only place on the entire circuit where we had to clamber up a formidable bank to get to the tree-blown campsite, hauling the canoe halfway up a ledge to secure it for the night. Clambering up and down that bank for potable water was fun, as was washing; us and the dishes.

This site had welcoming hosts as well, hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies - again the only site we came across thus equipped. As we were grumblingly settling up for the night and cooking dinner, we heard the backwash of paddles rounding the bank in the dark and hailed a brace of young Austrians who happily accepted our invitation to join us and share the meal my husband was cooking.

Funnily enough, we loved all the meals he cooked and he detested them, ate only enough to keep him going while we wolfed everything down. He doesn’t care for pulses and legumes, and we’re wild for them. Two days later, that same young couple ‘rescued’ us after a particularly difficult day-long paddle, another storm in the offing, dusk falling and no camp site. When we finally reached one it was theirs and they invited us to share, offering us hot, sweet tea to revive our flagging spirits and aching, frozen limbs.

Oh, that allusion to the one time I decided I didn’t love my husband? Well, the last day of our circuit found us (me) exhausted and eager to re-establish permanently on dry land. We had paddled down the Bowron River, come too close for comfort to a moose cow and her calf (to my way of thinking; my husband and our son kept paddling determinedly toward it, curious to see how near they, we, could approach before the cow reacted), then entered the last, vast lake and, determined to reach our destination in as little time as possible, we were paddling smack through whitecaps in the middle of the lake in high winds. The wind took my words into the ether as I screeched at my husband to paddle alongside the shore and he refused, feigning deafness. We survived, somehow we survived.

Much as we did three years earlier when we alpine-camped on Long Mountain about three hours’ drive from Vancouver, near the Stein Valley. We were just two years shy of 60 then, and although we’d often mountain climbed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, (cheerily singing ‘I Love to go a’wandering, along the mountain tracks’ when the children were younger) and I always carried a small knapsack, I’d never before been geared to climb with a full-size backpack containing sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses and clothing. Light by comparison to what the others carried, but a new experience for me. At one point, when we were climbing over a rockfall of square boulders each the size of a car (named, improbably, the Gates of Shangri-La), and the top of my pack almost bounced me onto rocks below, I truly wondered at my sanity.

When we’d gained height close to the mountain peak, a blue-green, clear glacial lake just below us, it seemed worth the effort. Kind of. The scramble down to the frigid lake to wash (wash, hah!) or retrieve water for cooking was not one of my favourite activities. A glacier slowly melted into the lake; its soft, distant thunder lulled us to sleep that night. The tent on a shallow slope, (the flattest part of the mountainside we could find) we gradually nudged the edge of the tent through the night.

Next morning we took a day climb, coming across other glacial lakes, another glacier abloom with red algae, and an altitude which afforded us a view of unending mountain peaks across the Stein Valley. The afternoon sun slowly disappeared as a thunderhead appeared in the distance. We took the hint and hurriedly retraced our ascent to seek shelter in our tent. When the storm hit it was fierce, the rain pounding our innocent little shelter, winds howling mercilessly around the mountain. We survived that one, too.

Cripes we survived lots. But life is an adventure, right? We used to wake up really early on week-ends when we lived for a while in Tokyo, so we could take the subway, take a bus, take a train all for the purpose of exiting the city. We’d see intrepid Japanese bent on the same kind of adventure as we, but they dressed like western big-game hunters, really getting into the spirit of things. At the half-way point in our transportation web we would meet up with other members of Friends of the Earth, a friendly, casual group comprised of 50% Japanese, 50% Australians, Germans, Brits, Canadians like us.

Typically we’d set out for a forested mountain. On occasion we would see tea houses set into mountain niches; we would see signs warning to beware of monkeys; we would see stone lanterns set aglow between bamboo trees; once we came across a giant Ginkgo tree reputed to be two thousand years old; once a shrine with a gigantic pair of sandals said to have been worn by a Buddhist monk who had walked from China to Korea to Japan to deliver his divine message. That’s dedication, that’s determination, that’s no mere hike.

Years ago we drove from our base in Atlanta on our way to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where we meant to enjoy snowshoeing in the Great Smokies. Close to our destination we reached the national park whose highway would lead us to Gatlinburg. We’d been that way before without incident, but this was winter in the mountains and where below it had been raining, up above was sleet and snow. I cursed the park rangers who could have stopped us, but did not. We began to see cars ahead of us sliding on the icy road. I had never quite known fear like that before, certain that there wasn’t much to keep us from sliding right off the edge of that mountain into the abyss.

Big help, there were two park vehicles ahead, rangers trying to get people to turn back. Turn around on that narrow, icy road, good luck to us all. We tried, got stuck, our son got out on the road to push, and I became an hysterical babbling idiot, intent on being as big a help in such situations as usually I somehow managed. We finally descended successfully, snow still thickly falling, took another route and lived to experience excellent snowshoeing conditions, later in the week, once we were settled into our rental accommodations, even dipping under a frozen waterfall on a wondrous winter trail, surfeit with giant tulip poplars laden with snow.

Our latest adventure? Gatineau Park has become our adventure venue of late. Oh well, we needn’t even venture that far, relatively speaking. Aren’t we fortunate, we have a wonderfully wooded ravine accessible by walking across the street where we live. Adventures? We’ve had them. Still do, on occasion. They are decidedly less strenuous and potentially dangerous.

Impressionable Rites

Nothing particularly exciting
but definitely it is enticing
to enter a winter-weary wood
where snow and ice are steadily
disintegrating into slush and muck,
just for the pleasure of witnessing
that inexorable, seasonal change.

In those hidden valleys where
spring sun does not penetrate
the pace is slow, the snow piled high
the frozen trails of icy rot challenging
to the venturing foot. It is the changed
sounds of returned bird life; goldfinches
slipping through bare branches
trilling, that so transfixes us.

The sight of green, luminescent
fungi climbing the bark of a tree,
the newly-released ferns, brightly vibrant
the soft plush green of mosses, wild
strawberry plants and grasses alive
in the dark, wet soil of early spring.

The hoarse chorus of crows
racketing above, the tapping of
woodpeckers - all - the Pileated giant,
the Hairy and the Downy, industriously
oblivious, intent on their harvest.
Their red caps, from size to size,
fiercely drumming tree bark.

Spring's choreographed awakening
includes the streams of madly rushing
water, clattering and sparkling over the
aggregation of winter-felled limbs,
swelled by the melting snowpack.

And the delicate ballet of the
Mourning Cloaks, those dainty
winged wonders, swirling and twirling
on the slightest of breezes, invested
in their seasonal mating dance.

Dispatches and Arrivals

Goodbye, sleet, freezing rain events,
icy roads, ice fog and traffic accidents.
You will not be missed. Nor will those
ferocious winds, gustily reaching
out of the far northern regions of
our Globe. The incessant snowfalls
blanketing urban areas, isolating rural
ones, causing electrical black-outs,
long commutes, short daylight hours,
chilblains, colds, flu, soon to be
relegated to the past of winter's
unavoidable seasonal miseries.

Welcome, and so good to see
all those arrowhead collections of
geese creasing the sky with their
migrating lines homeward bound.
The first eagerly-brave robins, the
mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds,
goldfinches, arrive with nature's
clockwork seasonal reversals,
delighting her creatures, all. The
groundhogs making their first foray
into a snowless landscape, homeowners
raking winter-sodden, compressed lawns.

Children ambulating home from
school, jackets shed and unheedingly
dragged through detritus-packed streets.
Gone the hockey nets and snow sleds,
skates and skis and snowshoes hung 'till
snow returns. Out with the soccer balls
the basketball hoops, and skipping ropes,
tricycles, scooters and bicycles.

Conifers look greener, deciduous
on the cusp of budding as their sap
leaves roots to reach upper stories. As
housewives begin spring cleaning
rains wash away the dust and dirt
winter has left behind, spiriting spring
bulbs to awaken, bugs and butterflies
to activate their wakening presence.
We are suffused with expectations...

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.

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 if 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.