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!

 

This Restless Planet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are of Planet Earth, our home
providing the only refuge we shall
ever know as infinitesimally irrelevant
creatures, less than a random
afterthought of nature's punctilious
design; flecks on the endless landscape
of this ever-expanding universe.

A universe so vast and incomprehensible
our finest minds struggle to achieve
their hypotheses of how and why a
collegium of everything erupted from
nothing whatever but the immensity
of dark, dust-and-ice crammed particles
hydrogen atoms bearing the nucleus of life.

We cling to the carapace of our Planet
manipulate and alter what nature permits
and settle ourselves into the incredible
lightness of time and light-years' distance
from our primordial existence. We know
what we see, feel, hear and experience
and shun acknowledgement of our frail selves.

Nature reminds us through the medium
of her atmospheric and geological tool box,
wiping the slate of her features clean,
sending typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes,
cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis to
rouse us from our undeserved complacency
to the terror of our tenuous existence.

 

How's Your Life, Luv?

 

It’s been a bad couple of weeks. Bad? That’s putting it mildly, it’s been beyond shitty. The Old Bag has been cutting his hours. He’s supposed to be on from noon to nine, but she’s sent him home early three days so far this week. Like, how’s he supposed to pay his bills? His car payments, for example. So all right, he has the money, he isn’t short, but why should he be penalized because they‘re slow? He’s her best man on the floor for the big stuff. She makes no secret about that. Everyone knows it.

What she should be doing is sending half the other staff home, the guys who don’t function the way he does. He’s the store’s hotshot salesman, so what the hell!? And it bugs the hell out of him when she asks in her special way “How’s your love life?” Right after telling him he’d be short another day. That’s her not-so-discreet -- as in secret message -- letting him know he‘s on for that other evening shift. Then she winks and says see you later, luv! Quietly, so no one else hears. Like it’s a big secret.

It wasn’t so bad at first, once he got over the fact that she wasn’t the counterpart of his fevered nighttime sweats. But given his ideal he wouldn’t be in that situation to begin with. She wasn’t a bag or a hag, but she was old, must be as old as his mother, sure she was. A shared chronological age was all she had in common with his mother, though.

A whole lot better looking than his mother, and really kind of with it, but for Chrissake! Her hair is completely white, a cap of white hair sitting over her smiling face. She’s always smiling, like she’s always pleased as all hell about herself. Maybe he’d be smiling all the time too, if he was the store manager bringing in the big bucks, making decisions, taking credit for everything everyone else does.

When he asked her about the short hours she smiled at him. What the hell! Then she gave him a lesson in fairness; everyone should share the burden of cut hours. Except her, of course; she was immune to the sacrifice she expected of everyone else. In a spirit of fairness.

It was the Olympics, everyone was glued to their friggin’ television screens, watching Canada get hammered. Right; some of the events favoured Canada with enough medals to keep the country from utter desolation on the world sporting scene. Enough of a boost to keep all those everyday sports and at-home boosters from venturing out on Canada’s true everyday sport of shopping. The lack of customers makes for a long, boring and unproductive day, no doubt about it. He was finding himself yawning, forgetting to do things, bored right out of his skull.

And then in comes this old couple he sees from time to time. Interesting how really old geezers think they know something about computers and software. The old girl prissily refers to ‘random access memory’, and the first time he heard her he kind of gawped, wondered what the hell she was talking about until it occurred to him, and he laughed, patted her in a congratulatory manner on the back and recommended she just refer to it as RAM in future; everyone would understand.

He remembered them because they always came shopping with two little dogs in shoulder bags that they stuck in the shopping carts, treating the dogs like they were kids or something. That’s all right, he liked animals, didn’t bother him. Didn’t bother anyone, since other customers always made a beeline for the dogs to chuckle them and it lent a kind of relaxed air to the environment that could only be good for customer relations. That’s what Mrs. Becker always said.

Mrs. Becker; that’s how they were supposed to refer to her. Although when it came to more personal things, outside the shop, they could call her Sheila. Outside the shop Sheila could be anyone’s idea of a prim and proper matron, just as she was generally seen in the shop, as its manager. For her age, really good looking. Which was why, when he was first employed there fresh out of high school graduation, and after a couple of college courses in computer sciences, he was flattered at her attention.

Fact was, he was nothing to look at. Worse than that, he looked kind of peculiar, he knew that. Good reason to avoid looking at himself in mirrors, although he was sometimes taken by surprise when he saw his reflection and his reflex was just as he imagined most other peoples’ was. He was short, stumpy, straight-down, with a really stupid-looking face with a wide, piggy upturned nose. But he could handle himself, anyone wanting to jeer at his looks at school soon found out he could take care of himself.

He had his mother to thanks for his looks. No wonder there was no father-figure as he grew up. Must’ve been a one-night wonder, the guy must’ve been plastered out of his mind, and his mother would never, ever let him broach the subject. He sure tried, over the years, then was forced to resign himself to the understanding he had one parent and one only. Even his grandparents would never stoop to enlighten him, their mouths would tighten, and they’d shut right up. That was a long time ago.

Anyway, that was all history, and it was what was happening right now that bugged the bleeding hell out of him. His night classes had been going all right, he’d get his paperwork eventually. He wouldn’t always be working at the store. Another year or two and he’d shake the dust off the place and move on. He could hardly wait. Until then, he had to plug away. That’s what he usually told himself, anyway. Then he kind of dropped out of that, too.

Oh yeah, that old couple yesterday, looking for another computer. So far they had bought a desk top years ago for her, and over the space of another two years, two desk tops for their daughter. In between they bought computer desks, chairs, all kinds of stuff. Nice to have parents to buy stuff for you, like the stuff they got for their daughter. Who needed them, and couldn’t afford them because as a single mother (!) she had too many expenses, worked too hard, and needed some help. Printers went with the desk tops, and expensive software; Microsoft’s Office Professional. He’d been impressed, nice sales. Right, the old man got a mini-lap-top for himself with a good sound system; to listen to NPR radio, he said; sole use.

Then in the summer they brought their granddaughter in with them to look around at laptops and the kid knew what she wanted, a pricey Toshiba. Without blinking she had it. Yesterday they were back again. This time looking for a laptop for their daughter. Asking about the Office Professional software they’d bought the year previous, wanting to avoid shelling out another $700 for the goods. The three licenses that came with the original one had already been downloaded.

Hell, he hadn’t even known three licenses came with that software. The old girl asked if the daughter could download it a fourth time, and he’d said it was only legal to download it once. When she questioned that he went over to one of the display computers and Googled “Microsoft office professional”, then became acutely aware that the woman was hovering right beside him, intently watching. She saw, just as he did, that the suite came with three licenses, or two, or one, depending on price. He kept trying to position himself, feigning that he wasn’t aware she was there, ogling the screen, but she just moved to the opposite side to continue watching. And what he feared, happened. She spotted the software at discounted prices. She questioned him about that; why their store sold what they wanted for $700 and there were Internet sites selling the same thing for less than half.

“Upgrades”, he shrugged, “that’s all they are, not the full program". But he knew that she hadn’t been convinced by the look on her face.

When they looked at the computers, she wanted specific attributes, and rhymed them off, while her husband stood by, looking vaguely lost. Toshiba because, she said Consumers Report claimed it to be the most reliable, and Intel, not Athlon processors, and nothing under a 500GB hard drive, and oh yes, a 17” screen. Almost forgot; a built-in modem.

“No one has those anymore” he said dismissively, “that’s old technology”.

“Right” she responded, “but our daughter has dial-up service, she lives in the country”.

He felt like snarling at the woman, took a breath, and said, well, have a look at these. ‘These’ were Acer, HP, Gateway, but no dice. Had to be -- honestly he heard her say ‘a Toyota’. He picked up at that and felt kind of good as he said to her “hey, you don’t want one of those, they’re on recall”. That got a bit of a laugh out of them, and he figured maybe they would overlook his earlier clumsiness.

He was hoping Sheila wouldn’t ask him how his love life was today. He just wasn’t in the mood. Not that the prospect never excited him; just not now. And he was feeling a little edgy about that woman. Like she was just kind of crowding him. Every time her heard her accented British voice speaking discreetly to one of the others guys he hoped against hope that she would be repeating that mantra: “how’s your love life?” She fancied herself, she had told them once, a Bohemian. Between them, the guys wondered whether there had ever been a Mr. Becker. The other guys, it was no secret; they’d been through her mill themselves. They kind of begged off, one after the other once they were able to convince her they had girlfriends. Either that or find employment somewhere else.

God, he’d been so damn excited when he bought his car last year, a small Mazda. He owed the job that, at the very least. He loved that car, always wanted one, now he had it. But he hadn’t had it six months before Sheila figured she would get herself the 2010 model a couple of steps up from his. And he didn’t know why, but it bugged the hell out of him. Like she was trespassing on his territory. Of all the makes for her decide on, why the same as his? He’d shown it off proudly in the parking lot, felt like he was a spark alight, he felt so light and good and pleased with himself. Now, it seems almost tarnished.

He knew he was being childish about this. Sheila wasn’t so bad, she could be thoughtful sometimes and she did try to be helpful. It was no help to him, though, that everyone was aware he was the only one left of the group to continue servicing her. He’d tried to squirm his way out of it without being too obvious, by letting some of the other guys know that he was getting into a serious relationship with a girl he’d met at night classes. Of course they had no idea he’d given up night classes in favour of home study and a correspondence course, continuing his courses on line.

As far as they were concerned -- because he told them so, in generous detail -- he had met Francine during classes, and they gradually began to hang out together. It had started with a coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton’s, progressed to an on-campus pub, and they’d then gone out to dinner a few times, and seen one another on the week-ends, as well. Not that things were serious-serious, just kind of nice and slow and comfortable.

Was she a looker, they wanted to know. He was prepared for that, whipped out a photograph he’d taken. Of Francine, of course. Francine, his girlfriend who was a really good looking woman, and smart too, and amazingly, more than happy to be around him. He was sure that at first a few of the guys thought he was hoaxing them, but of course, he kept telling them about different events they’d gone to, at the NAC, GCTC, and of course Scotiabank Place, to see a few Senators’ games, a few live performances.

And then, of course, word leaked out and Sheila became aware of his special relationship. At first she chided him that he’d said nothing to her about it.

“How long?” she’d asked him. “Four months, and you didn’t say a word of it to me? Playing it close to your chest, were you? Did you think I’d mind?”

“No”, he said humbly, “I didn’t think you would be thrilled about it though, given our … um, special relationship.”

“You silly kid. Don’t you think I’d be thrilled for you, after all this time, that you’ve found someone? I am thrilled about it, I think it’s terrific,” she said, the last time they were together at her place.

She asked him how far the relationship had gone. Whether there’d been some intimacy, which, after all, would mark the success or lack of, the relationship as far as she was concerned. Him too, actually. But he said, no, things hadn’t moved that far that fast, yet. She was a quiet one, religious, you know?

She laughed at him. “Religious, is she? You think that translates to no sex? You just haven’t approached her the right way about it. You’ve always been too shy. Case in point, how long it took me to convince you to haul your ass first time around, over here.”

And she gave him generous advice, how he should approach the delicate matter of getting a little more intimate with Francine. She studied Francine’s photograph and said how pretty she was, reminded her of how she looked when she was young .. And then paused as though waiting for him to say something like she’s still good looking - which she is … or that she’s better looking than Francine, anyway. But he didn’t. They were all used to him clamming up anyway, from time to time.

So here he was, in a bind. The Francine story seemed implausible even to him, but they bought it. And now he didn’t know where he could take it. They’d want to meet Francine eventually, arrange some group get-together for one of the holidays, they always did, and he’d always begged off because he was the only one who didn’t have anyone, so he’d had to go along with Sheila, everyone pretending that was OK, like they were a couple or something and that grated on him like he was a fish caught in a net, and he wanted to chew through that netting and escape.

Sure, he could escape. Nothing could stop him from just one day telling them all that would be his last day there. He was resigning his grand position as hot-shot numero uno salesman, and looking elsewhere for employment. There’d be questions but he could handle them. But wow, wouldn’t he miss them all. Come to think of it -- and he didn’t often, they were just about the only friends he had. Leave that place and he’d be on his own, without anyone.

Except maybe his mother and the less said about her the better. His life was a balls-up he thought glumly, he’d done a right royal cock-up, to paraphrase Sheila. The anatomy of his discontent, he shrugged. Life's a bugger. 

 

 

Beware The Soul's Corrosion

 

Be aware, take care to distance
oneself from the soul-corrosive
presence of unregenerated
misanthropes lest the pathology
that destroys their humanity
seep into your defenceless
conscience, destroying that
treasured humanitarian perspective.

Yes, humankind is fatally flawed,
afflicted by its own drear and dreadful
fallibilities; even so, there abides
within us all that priceless spark
of mutual care, dimmed by events
beyond our reckoning but rekindled
when dire need presents.

It is they who find fault, sneer
and express their utterly belittling
contempt, who leave the world
embittered. Not those, albeit
flailing helplessly against fate and
humanity's failings who leave a
better place when they take their leave.

Combine an iconoclast and a
misanthrope and you have
that rarest of all thinking creatures
like Samuel Clemens who, while
despairing yet delivered a message
to posterity that the struggle to
overcome our baser instincts is
never over, yet never in vain.

Favour yourself and take counsel,
there are always ways and means
to be sought and ample needs in
thrall to conscience. Step away from
the dark, brooding hater who can
see no function in guiding himself
away from desolation of mind and
condemnation of humankind; leave
him to his festering soul's collapse when
reasonable and patient discourse fails.

 

 

The Art Lover's Paradise

 

Moses receiving the Law from God on Mt. Sinai.

The next panel is essentially a single scene. Moses stands on Mt. Sinai, receiving the ten commandments from God, as the frightened people of Israel gather below. The turmoil of the crowd is contrasted with the majestic nature of the law giving, far above the cloud-like treetops. The story of Moses' successor Joshua is in the adjacent panel. Joshua directs the crossing into the promised land, across the miraculously dry River Jordan, as tribal members gather stones for a memorial monument. At top background, Joshua and the Israelites march around their first conquest, Jericho, as its walls crumbling at the sound of their trumpets and shouts. Jericho resembles a typical Italian hill-town of Ghiberti's day.

He hesitated only briefly. Not because he was thinking of the vitally important meeting that he’d set up in another one of his discreet business deals. It was the doors of the impressive building he stood before that grabbed his aesthetic sense of appreciation. But he would not waste time looking at them closely. Not that it was a waste of time, for it most definitely was not. Simply because he loathed being taken for a tourist. That he mightn’t be anything else but a tourist given his appearance in an Islamic country in the Middle East would be automatically assumed, he merely shrugged off. It was his gut reaction to being identified as such, his antipathy toward that feeling that compelled him to linger for the briefest of times, before continuing.

The doors, incredibly thickly-layered slabs of faintly gold-hued glass with their laser-impressioned stylistic Art Nouveau design, were breathtakingly beautiful. He’d seen them before, in photographs, but seeing them there, right before him, in touch-close proximity was far different. They glowed with an inner force of majesty, the relief-work subtle, embellishing the inner-depth, illuminating a sweeping glory of notionally-perfect nature at its finest. That the doors bore, seemingly, little stylistic relation to the Islamic-tinged architecture of the building itself seemed peculiar, a little jarring to his sensibilities, while at the same time impressing him with its transcendent beauty.

It was almost -- though not quite -- like the feeling of awe that had transfixed him, standing before 11th-Century Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, in the Baptistry in Florence, years ago, before he was so conceitedly sensitive about appearing to a critical onlooker like a tourist. He was a tourist back then, even though he was there also as a businessman, just as he was now, in Dubai. Then, he had been young and unaffected, and he had stood amazed before the giant splendour of those immense portals with their Medieval gilded-bronze panels illustrating Old Testament episodes.

He thought, briefly, as the great glass door swung effortlessly inward directing him to the interior of the hotel’s lobby, how more apt it might be if these glass doors had also been etched to commemorate biblical-era themes, given that Islam took to itself much of the earlier Old Testament towering figures of epiphanies leading toward and reflecting monotheistic belief. As a secularist himself, it was the outstanding sociology of human traits demonstrated by those old tales that fascinated him. He had studied sociology as a young man; he understood the pathologies of mystic belief leading to fanaticism that robbed humans of reason.

As he entered the lobby with its soaring, glass-enclosed atrium, simply understated in the height and magnificence of its sky-reaching ambition, he quickly glanced about. It too was vaguely familiar to him, for he had been given the opportunity to study its lay-out. The interior appointments an amazingly bold contrast to the simple vertical walls. Translucent marble floors, alternating immense white-and-black squares. Huge palms in equally-impressive ceramic planters. Outsized, extravagantly-carved and gilded easels adorned with putti, carrying gilt-framed Rubenesque-type paintings. Free-standing alabaster Romanesque pedestals and plinths holding larger-than-life-sized marble busts reflecting Greek antiquity. And the immense oriental porcelain vases stationed ostentatiously around the immense chamber. The provocatively opulent display simply floored him.

The impossibility of waterfalls cascading down the glass walls of the atrium was compellingly intriguing. He wondered how they managed to do that, as he briefly watched minuscule and occasionally not-so-small colourful aquatic creatures tumble over the walls, washed over by the waterfalls they remained trapped in for perpetuity, before he was able to tear himself away. He took especial note that very few people deigned to notice the display. Clearly, it was beneath them to gawk at what might appear to be beyond one’s biological imagination.

He had to actually force himself to peel his eyes away from the spectacle. All the more so that a shifting crowd of people garbed variously in kefiyehs, Western-style suits like his own, casual street wear, and more formal clothing as though the wearers had stepped directly out of a high-style clothing magazine, kept their eyes averted from the displays. In small groups, voices discreetly discussing social issues, and in single array, people streamed in and out of the immense lobby. Leaving him, a dapper, distinguished-appearing individual as no one to particularly stand out in the crowd.

The anomalous situation of his being there, of the international elite that crowded the city made wealthy by its siting and its natural resources, struck him, as did the presence of all the overwhelming displays of art and architecture. Medieval and Renaissance Italy, wedded to its love affair with excellence in the arts owing much to its great patrician noblesse oblige. Contrasted with the Arab Gulf States enamoured of their new economic status, eager to display their immense fossil-fuel-based wealth to the world, possessing anything that echoed excess.

Odd, he thought, the edifice exterior reminiscent of the region's fine archaic architectural tradition, yet its interior an unsettling jab, as though to express a tinge of triumph; western art absorbed by the orientalism of conquest in all spheres of human endeavour.

He shrugged that idle thought away and confirmed his reservation at the front desk. The young woman, with flowing dark hair, uniformed in a designer-inspired outfit flashing a pacific, welcoming smile. And an archly discreet comment in French-accented English, that "Monsieur" would find his accommodation on the 21st floor superlative.

"I'm most certain I will", he responded dryly, waving his hand toward the impressive lobby display, remembering to flash his own disingenuous smile at the beautiful countenance that surveyed his own with a disquieting hint of interest. Doubtless, he told himself, she's seen the world of entitled presence pass by her casual scrutiny.

Such people always raised an uneasy awareness in him. The servants, as it were, of the privileged, yet confident enough in themselves that they were not intimidated, felt at ease in the presence of power, prestige, celebrity, wealth. His problem? Too old-fashioned, despite his continentalist sense of equal entitlements.

His wife -- his second wife -- kept telling him he was getting a little old to be involved in this business. Their children -- not his older son and daughter, but the infants he’d had with his second, younger wife -- needed their father around; they hardly recognized him, she said, when he was home. Which was rather overstating the case, since his forays abroad had become less frequent as the years progressed.

He loved her, and he loved his kids, but he also loved his job. The younger cadres had a lot to learn from him. He’d had experiences they could only dream about. There weren’t that many of the old school around who could challenge his reputation. And he felt jealous of it, wasn’t quite yet prepared to retire. He was not all that old, after all. But it was true, in this business you had an advantage if you were young, aggressive and not easily deterred from your goal.

Import-and-export was like that. He had always been intrigued by the world of art, antiquities, the Renaissance, the Baroque era, and he soon discovered in his market research forays, that other people too had a yen to acquire faux works of art for themselves. It had become his business to search out top-quality replicas of noted art; paintings, statuary, objets d'art, furniture, oriental rugs.

He’d been just about everywhere in the world, in his years as a professional, spoke a half-dozen languages, had contacts - discreet, of course - just about anywhere, everywhere. He liked to think of himself as a modern-day incarnation of the hardy travellers engaged in trade and commerce who travelled the fabled Yellow Silk Road. He favoured small local workshops with an emphasis on creative hand-work and avoided mass-production enterprises like the plague.

On an entirely other level, he worried back and forth in his mind the personal problems that plagued his consciousness. His kids growing into this world of international intrigues. A growing threat from countries resentful of their disempowerment in a new, barely-disguised era of economic imperialism. Facing off against a tide of religious fanaticism spurred by resentment and an unassailably incandescent drive to exact revenge from their purported oppressors. The real problem as he saw it, was the misidentification of their real oppressors. But, it was ever thus.

He might hope his children and their children would inherit a better world, but nowhere in his experience was he ever able to detect a better world lingering hopefully on the outskirts of the dysfunction readily identified across the Globe, ready to enter at even the barest glimmer of opportunity. Humanity, he thought grimly, as he did increasingly, was propelling itself unerringly toward utter disaster. It pained him to think of his innocent kids inextricably tangled in this chaotic mess the world had made of itself.

As he entered the elevator, he compelled himself to turn from the personal to the practical. All the preliminary work had been concluded. The game-ending meeting was scheduled for early the following morning. That’s when the final transaction, the agreement, to be signed on the dotted line, would take place. Nothing like the import-export business to bring personal relief from boredom. Why that should be, he wondered, was curious, since this was most certainly not a boring time in world history.

There, he was going off on one of those personal tangents again. He mentally shook himself back into the public persona that he was always so careful to convey; that of a successful businessman working in an elite environment. And that was very true, every bit of it. He took note of others sharing the elevator that ran up one of the glass walls of the atrium. Peering down from the glass floor of the elevator, it seemed to him that the swiftly receding spectacle somehow resembled history; fleeting, painfully beautiful, illusory.

He took the same care to avoid making eye contact with those sharing the elevator space as they so meticulously did. With the exception of a young couple holding hands and whispering what might very well be sweet nothings to one another, no one else spoke. It was not a completely silent environment as the elevator moved swiftly upward however; there was a barely-heard musical background, the kind of white sound one expects everywhere.

When he disembarked at his floor, he appreciated the soft ambiance of muted lighting, softly pastel-painted walls, ornate mirrors hung at intervals, and yes, that white background music drifting down the hall as he himself did, looking at the numbers, then slipping himself into his suite. He discussed with himself the pros and cons of eating in the suite, or going down to one of the hotel’s restaurants. As he was musing on this, a discreet knock at the door, and his suitcase was brought inside by the bell-hop.

Who insisted on showing him about, as though he could not possibly manage that on his own. It would make for a more expansive tip, he knew, and he couldn’t after all, begrudge the fellow. Whatever he made he likely sent home to the Philippines. The glass-walled exterior of his suite was impressive for the view it gave him; desert on one side, ocean on the other. He could almost swear he could see in the far-off distance, flares coming off oil rigs; now that was most certainly a mirage. Closer to the hotel, within the city itself, the landscape was brilliantly verdant, Paradisaical, it seemed.

The suite was beautifully appointed, as one might anticipate, reflecting any expensive accommodation at any of the world’s premiere hotels within cities of note. But he’d seen these interiors before, and as far as he was concerned, absent a few decidedly mid-eastern touches, they were all the same. Reminding him that he might begin to admit to himself that he was finding import-and-export wearing a bit.

Maybe he was, after all, too old to continue. Perhaps it was time he set aside his ego, consider his legacy to have been set in impermeable stone, and retire. Really, he shook himself, his thought processes were galloping away in the direction of the irksome. And he wondered what the hell was wrong with him?

He wasn’t tired, since it had been a series of relatively short flights, but time-consuming withal; he'd been away for the better part of a month setting up ... background. But he thought it best, given the oddly introspective state he found himself in, to perhaps isolate himself, and order from the room-service menu. To better compose himself.

Tomorrow’s meeting was an important one. His business was highly reliant on the success of such contacts and the future contacts that might result from them. Tomorrow’s contact was a wily and admittedly successful professional in the trade; he needed to be as fresh for the meeting, as resolutely committed to a successful outcome as with any previous such conferences.

And he had slept well enough, as it happened. Showered, did a few push-ups, carefully consulted the full-length mirror in the marble-clad bathroom and found his reflection more than satisfactory, then dressed himself, made a critical call on his cellphone, and sat down quietly to reimagine the scenario before him.

When he entered the hallway it was still quite early; obviously too early for most, for the corridor was clear of any one else, but for two people casually striding down toward a door not too far from his own. They were not together, but were walking several paces from one another. He recognized them both. Had taken note of their presence yesterday afternoon after he had signed in at the lobby.

He took a few paces forward, then stopped. Watched in hushed silence as the tall young blonde woman approached the door, while the man who stood close by her now flattened himself against the wall adjacent the door, just as he himself was now doing on the alternate side. The woman looked at him enquiringly, and he nodded, whereupon she knocked, lightly, at the door. No response. Another, slightly more assertive knock.

A sleep-muffled voice responded. The woman’s softly seductive voice responded to the man’s enquiry. A few minutes passed in silence but for the faint shuffling sounds in the suite’s interior. Finally, the door was opened a crack and a man’s voice spoke again. The young woman spoke in the affirmative, and the door was opened sufficiently wide to admit her. Which was when the young man deftly shoved it, so it had the effect of knocking the breath out of the man inside, holding it in its half-open position.

While he was struggling to regain his breath and get back up on his feet, they all three swiftly entered and softly closed the door. He locked the door. Slipped the hypodermic needle out of his breast pocket, while the young man held the struggling man in his tight grip, and the young woman whispered assuring endearments to the stranger who had trustingly opened his door to her. Whatever she said did not assuage the man’s fears, and his eyes were dark depths of despair before he lost consciousness.

“This one“, he observed quietly to his two companions, "appears not to have invested himself in martyrdom. He does not appear prepared to enter Paradise, to greet his adoringly dutiful virgins, as is his rightful claim. But that”, he laughed deprecatingly, “is for the foot soldiers, the credulous simpletons delusionally enthused by the promise of God-sanctioned sex, not the veterans who own to no such illusions.”

David beheads Goliath.

Full of detail, because of its low position, the last main panel at left features David's defeat of Goliath. As David decapitates the fallen giant with the latter's sword, the Israelite army under King Saul take heart and press forward to victory against the disorganized and demoralized Phillistines. The battle scene is starkly realistic, and reflects Venetian/Ottoman battles of the day. In the background, a victorious David brings Goliath's head to Jerusalem, a large walled city not unlike Ghiberti's Florence.