Recuperation/Recovery # 5, including A Celebration Breakfast

Background to this post:

I woke up this morning at 5:06.  I had slept since something after three.  For me this was a good stretch of sleep.  I didn’t turn on CNN, or CBCNW, or CTVNC and actually wondered about putting my head back down to sleep some more; after all, I had already watched the stiff little marionette figure of Paul Ryan address the predominantly blond female and mostly pudgy and nondescript male inhabitants of/participants in the 3-day RNC infomercial and listened to the commentaries of the insipid Piers Morgan with his assortment of beer drinkers at the CNN Grill as they analysed Ryan’s lies (like accusing Obama of closing the Janesville GM plant when it  was actually the Bush-monkey who did), his half-truths, empty platitudes, and assorted pandering to whatever the party strategists figured was needed last night.

I decided to snuggle down, and let my own mind and body decide whether more sleep was the answer.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I had things on my mind and that I could do some more sleeping later before E. came over for EFT so I sat up, slid my feet into my sandals, noted the brightening bluish light to the east, collected the debris from my 3 a.m. snack, and headed downstairs to prepare a new picnic for this new morning, the second last day of August, with its touch of summer’s end in the air.

Before I ate anything I thought of the deck of cards in a drawer and played a game of Patience on the dining room table.  The game was taught to me by my grandmother and I played it in her memory (she died in 1970 the same week Lorraine and I were married, during the October Crisis), and in memory of her daughter, my mother, who died on August 27 of last year (see RECUPERATION #3).  If you understand the game at all, you will recognize that I had one move left to make (in column 2), but after that the game was finished, four diamonds up.  Then I was free to eat.

It is now 6:43.  The sun has risen and illuminated our bedroom, shining on my Egyptian fabric piece and Lorraine’s Tunisian desert photo, and on the chakra garden that has been with me more than two months now.

Actually it is now 2:22 p.m. ADT, an auspicious sounding time, and I have just woken up, after a morning when  I have eaten some, slept some, drunk some, and been treated to a celebration breakfast (see Recuperation #6, not yet written, on the amazing and immediate effects of vemurafenib, a new drug for treatment of metastatic melanoma  like mine, produced by Roche and provided/sold as Zelboraf).

 

I have just looked at my sitemeter, which reads 482 visits this month (you are reading a non-viral blog here!), noted that our son JE was one of two visitors to the site today, read Fareed and Saleha’s kind e-mail from Kabul, signed on to an Avaaz petition, and photographed a message of love from my 5-year old granddaughter. 

And now it’s time to get to the post:

RECUPERATION #5 – Remembering who you are:

I believe it is important to remember who you are and to understand the continuity of self from as far back as you can trace it to the present moment in order to be more present in the world, whether it is the recuperative journey I am travelling in/on at the present or any other activity/focus/perceptual awareness I am engaged in (if I am starting to sound prescriptive or tendentious or proselytizing here, please forgive – or, at the least, humour – me for the moment).

In my EFT session with E. this morning, she finished the session with” “Backward visualize to a time when you were at optimum health, and bring that forward to now.”  I did what she suggested, going back to a summer 30 years ago when she was just three, and felt a stream of energy move through my body from my feet to my head, and it was a good thing.

I have not been reading a lot on this journey (other than Al Jazeera online and The New Yorker), but I have been exploring over the last few days some areas of my bookshelf for some treasures from my past and present that help remind me who I am and have been. 

Although the list is long, I’ll try to keep the entries precise, and please remember that these entries are descriptive of my recuperation/recovery process and not prescriptive – you don’t actually have to look at any of them.

Here’s the list:

THE LINES OF MY HAND by Robert Frank (1989) – look in the section “IN NOVA SCOTIA Canada” for “words”, “for my daughter Andrea who died…”, “POUR LA FILLE” on the following page, “sick of goodby’s”, “4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME   4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME”, and “HOSPITAL” that includes this message: “THE WIND WILL BLOW THE FIRE OF PAIN ACROSS EVERYONE IN TIME”.  Go there if you like.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje (1992).

.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED by Anne Carson (1998), another great novel, this one in verse.

UNDER THE ICE by Alden Nowlan (1961), inscribed in blue marker, “For my son, Johnnie, with love Alden Nowlan”, and I wonder where is Johnnie now and think of Frank’s works about Andrea (mentioned above) and any works he made about his son Pablo (both of Frank's children were young when they died).  I also remember finding the section in the Dalhousie University stacks in 1964 where Nowlan’s books were lined up and I remember living inside them for days.  This book is from my late father’s collection and I do wonder if he bought it with me in mind.

DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES by Alice Munro (1968), a wonderful bunch of very short novels.

PLAINWATER by Anne Carson (2000), a gift of poetry and prose given to me by my old friend Udo (a small prescriptive note: read “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother – pp. 245-260 – before reading NOX).

NOX by Anne Carson (2010), a book of loss housed in a box.

THE COLOUR OF THE TIMES: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RAYMOND SOUSTER by Raymond Souster (1964) found down the stacks shelf from Nowlan, another place to live for a few days.

THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald M. Allen (1960).

THE POETICS OF THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald Allen& Warren Tallman (1973).  A companion piece to the one above.  It was edited by Warren, who was on my thesis committee and who organized a memorial service at UBC for Charles Olson at which I wrote a short poem involving the moon that night, the constellation Orion, and The Aspy Fault which is a connecting earth line between northern Cape Breton and Gloucester and read as part of the service.  I never met Olson.

THE BROKEN ARK: a book of beasts, poems chosen by MichaelOndaatje/drawings by Tony Urquhart (1971).

HIS IDEA by Robert Creeley, photographs by Elsa Dorfman (publication date is shown as 2 March 1973, my 28^th birthday), includes the following: 

"Note read re
letter of Lawrence’s

to Mrs. Aldous/Huxley? That
films are obscene

if when the young
man and woman come home,

they masturbate one by one.

Not so --
if they make love.”  

I did meet Creeley.

LETTERS FROM THE SAVAGE MIND by Patrick Lane, “a loon/without wings/wanting to fly/recording letters/from the savage mind”, “This book is for Red Lane/The/Carnival/Man” (1966).

MEXICO CITY BLUES (242 CHORUSES) by Jack Kerouac (1959).

And there are two additional books not included in the image:

FIRST VOICE by J. E. Field (1991), with the following dedication:
"TO ROGER
MY DEAR FATHER
WHO SHOWED ME THE WAY"
It also included a longer personal inscription in blue ballpoint.

THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927 – 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1995) with “At the Fish Houses” (pp. 64-66), “Cape Breton” (pp.67-68), “First Death in Nova Scotia” (pp. 125-126), and “The Moose (for Grace Bulmer Bowers)” (pp. 169-173), as well, of course, as “One Art” (p. 178).

  

A Brief Footnote, or Paradise Lost?

After posting this morning a fairly detailed tribute to the attractions and quiet beauty of Çiralı and enjoying a wonderful breakfast here at Baraka House, we decided to drive in to one of the markets by the bridge in downtown (so to speak) Çiralı.  The road is not wide anywhere along the seashore and you always check carefully before pulling out because there could be cyclists or pedestrians or cars or small trucks.  So I did check, and something was clearly coming.  The first thing that crossed my mind was that a Boy Scout group was parading through.  It was the berets, the khaki shirts, and the red neckerchiefs that did it, but then I realized these were men, not boys, and something else was going on; they were, in fact, jandarma, serious people you don't mess with here.

We sat in the car, waiting for a break in the parade, and wondered.  We wondered even more when a small squad in riot gear went by, their clear plexi shields at the ready.  What was this?  Some big jandarma paddy wagons were next, followed by a couple of TV cameramen, many people walking, then two big flatbed floats with large excavators on board, and then more jandarma.  This was not cennet gibi; this was the big mean world of confrontation between people and state marching into Çiralı.

Finally the road cleared, and we asked a young German woman who had been walking and taking pictures what was going on.  She told us that the local citizens had blockaded the bridge this morning in protest against a planned government move to tear down some houses and maybe some trees.  She said that her boss, who owned the pansiyon where she worked, had been arrested at the protest and thrown into a vehicle with many other local citizens.

We asked at the shop and learned only that there had been a protest, that it was a buyuk problem (a big one), and that it seemed to have been caused by buyuk para (big money).  We drove around the back road to try to find out and saw the two empty float trailers down by the football area but no sign of the excavators.  Coming back along the sahil yolu, we came to crowds of people and cars with jandarma lining both sides of the road outside Fehim Pansiyon, the first place we ever stayed here in Çiralı.

Later Ihsan told us that there was a problem with some people's deeds to their properties and that some of it had to do with orman (forest) being improperly used (olive and citrus groves, pansiyons, etc.).  It seemed clear that there may be a push going on to change the character of Çiralı by pushing small operations out and letting big hotels in, and clear that many people were very unhappy.  We learned later that some or all of Fehim Pansiyon was torn down, even though there were guests staying there, and that Peace and a couple of others were gone or going.


There is much concern and puzzlement here and many conflicting stories, including that many businesses had no deeds to the property they were on and that the government had offered the land to them.  Who knows?  There are two newspaper stories here and here (for Turkish readers, who probably know much more about this than I do) and a typically poor Google translation here (for non-Turkish readers like me, and you'll have to scroll down a bit to find it).


So we still swam today, still walked way down to Olimpos and had a picnic supper there, and still photographed the ancient harbour and ruined walls and doorways from Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, and Ottoman times.  

The whole place is still magical, still beautiful, but also now somehow a little more ephemeral.

International Women's Day

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day, the 100^th of such days, which makes it an exceptionally good day, one to cherish.

I had one new message in my G-mail this morning, and it wasn’t an ad from Staples or hotels.com or Amazon, the kind I always delete; instead it was from D., a Turkish student I worked with in high school who is now in the first year of a Masters program in Gender Studies.  I was, as I always am when I hear from D., delighted; it is a treat to get a message from someone who is so intelligent, so literate and literary, so aware, and so fiercely good at what she does.  Susan Sontag once said that she would buy any publication that had work by Anne Carson in it, as would both D. and I, but one day equally wise women will say the same thing about D.’s work.  Having a message from her early today was an especially good omen for this year’s Women’s Day.

I am in the atrium of a university library as I write this, waiting to meet M., an undergraduate student I have worked with before.  M., who is also enrolled in Gender Studies and is, she informed me earlier, the only Chinese student who has ever enrolled in the program, e-mailed me at my Yahoo account to set up a time to get some editing help with a paper she is writing.  I like working with M. because she is intelligent and perceptive and enough of a nonconformist to study something other than Computer Science or International Finance, and because her view of our culture and gender issues in it are always worth listening to.  I also like her quiet and self-effacing humour, her composed sense of self, and her determination to learn and to understand.

I spent part of the morning at the Refugee Clinic working with M.L., a refugee claimant from Mexico who wants to improve her English.  With the use of Babel Fish and her Spanish-English dictionary, she told me that she wanted to learn what was the first thing she should do to improve her English.  I had no answer for her, so we talked and wrote together, and gradually she became more confident about what she already knew and what things she could do to put it all together as a new speaker of English.  It was great to see her courage and determination in her pursuit of greater fluency, the same kind of courage and determination she has needed to build a life here for herself and her family.

I remember in the late 1990’s thinking and saying that the biggest achievement of the twentieth century was the victories of women in their fight for the status they deserved in our world and that my hope for the twenty-first was that we might begin to see the results of that achievement.  It has been a slow and gradual process, one that is far from over, but my experience of today tells me how lucky I am to know women like the ones I worked with and thought about today.

It is now the evening of International Women’s Day.  The bright and sharp-edged new moon I saw a little earlier has dropped out of sight here, but that same moon has shone and will continue to shine on all the women (and men) of this world until the day finally ends somewhere far to the west of here.  When tomorrow’s sun rises we will all embark on the 101^st year of International Women’s Day.  I’m proud to be a part of it.

February 11, 2011

I came back from the Pockwock Lake trails in Mount Uniacke and planned to write a post on the joys of cross country skiing, even when you’re out there skiing alone.  The words and images were in my head as I skied and also as I drove home listening to K.D.Lang, lulled perhaps by my own endorphens.  When I got here, I brought my gear in, cleared the skiff of new snow off the walkway and entrance, made a small sandwich, poured a shot of Jameson’s over a single ice cube, put on a dry t-shirt, fired up the computer, and turned on the TV.

When I left this morning for Uniacke, the Friday midday prayers were finished in Egypt, and protestors were reported to be heading for the Presidential Palace and the State TV building, as well as filling any space that was left in Tahrir Square.  I knew that the Palace was surrounded by the Presidential Guard and that the military had asked the demonstrators to go home.  And I had seen the coverage of the speeches of the two corrupt old henchmen, Mubarak and Suleiman (this one a shameful bearer of the great Sultan Suleyman’s name), as they made their speeches in a desperate attempt to hang onto power, and I saw the anger and disgust of the protesters when they heard what was being said.

As I drove out to Uniacke to see my old colleagues at the school and check out the last of the students who might still remember me, I worried what the military might do today.  Would they, if ordered to, attempt to dispel the demonstrators by force?  And if they didn’t, what might happen then?  I couldn’t imagine Mubarak and Suleiman, who had seemed so out of touch with the demonstrators and why they were there, actually coming to their senses.  And I feared for the people of Egypt who had risked so much to be there and to stay there.

On the TV I saw Robert Gibbs saying good-bye to the White House press corps as he prepared (I guess) to go and do something else.  And when the computer came up, Al Jazeera was very slow loading, so it was the CBC site that told me Mubarak had stepped down.  He had stepped down!  I was elated!  He was hiding out in Sharm El Sheikh.  The thirty years of Mubarak were over! 

Since there was no one here for me to hug and kiss and share my joy, I danced around a little by myself and then sipped my whiskey, ate my sandwich, and thought, Hooray!  Hooray for the brave people of Egypt who stood up, sat down, slept in the treads of the US-made tanks, sang their songs, waved their flags, and refused to leave until the change they needed started to happen.  And it did happen!

I haven’t figured out exactly why I care so much or why this seems to mean so much.  I didn’t like Egypt when we visited five years ago because it felt as if every bit of its heritage was up for sale or sold and because it seemed so corrupt and so beat, and I’m not sure that I’d like those aspects of it a whole lot more now.  But I am happy for the people of Egypt, unaccountably happy really, for what they have accomplished in the last eighteen days. 

There is something about this revolution that is profoundly emotional as well as profoundly political.  And I think that something happened there today that we may be talking about for a long time.  Here is one interesting take on it, and there are any number of other careful and thoughtful analyses to be found at the Al Jazeera site.  Check it out!

I remember walking into the staff room at Uniacke District School on September 11, 2001 and telling the teachers there that I thought the world had changed that day.  It is interesting that I was in that same staff room today, almost ten years later, another day that the world has changed.  Only this change is different and this time I have a small hope that it changed for the better.  My fingers remain crossed for Egypt, and for all of us.

Close to Tears

It has been a rough week, one that has kept me close to tears at times, even though I have little or nothing to complain about in my own life.

On Tuesday morning I was doing my regular shift in the laptop lab at the Halifax Refugee Clinic when a young woman came upstairs to use a computer.  She was Ethiopian, a human rights activist there who had completed a semester of study here in Nova Scotia and then been told that she must report to the Security Services when she returned home.  Needless to say she has not returned, even though she has a husband and two young sons there, and is looking at making a claim for refugee status here.  The impossibility of her situation, and her sad quiet courage in the face of it, left me moved and close to tears, just as I had been for days thinking of the desperation of life in Egypt and the courage of the demonstrators there.

On Wednesday I watched coverage of the pro-Mubarak thugs riding into Tahrir Square armed with swords and sticks and attacking the peaceful protestors.  This was after I had marveled at the admirable restraint shown by those protestors, their quiet determination and persistence in the face of a stubborn and implacable foe.  As Lorraine said every time some television commentator spoke about an end to the protests, “They can’t go home.”  And they haven’t, in spite of the violence of Wednesday’s actions and the danger they were in.  Whenever I think of the lives we observed in that poor beaten down country and of the courage these protesters show, I am moved again and find myself with that familiar thickening of the throat as I am close to tears.

Today I had a wonderful ski with my brother and his wife through a long and beautiful trail under blue sky and bright sun on perfect snow.  After that we went to a fundraiser called Coldest Night of the Year at the Fo’c’sle Tavern in Chester where lots of local performers were playing and singing.  I was taken by a rocking rendition of Bob’s My God They Killed Him, a young girl soulfully singing Summertime and Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone, some nice blues riffs, and good beer and pub snacks. 

The place was packed, and I watched a couple come in, she slight and covered with a head scarf, he tall and solid, both possibly Egyptian.  They were different from everyone else in the crowd as they stood watching and listening, and I wondered what meaning they made of our rock and blues and folk nostalgia.  Then the choral group that had been singing old sentimental favourites closed their segment with Hymn to Freedom (you can hear Oscar Peterson play it here, and Dione Taylor sing it here – listen to these and you too will be close to tears). 

The conductor pointed out that it was in honour of African Heritage Month, and I thought about Africa.  I thought of its northern edges with their quiet and determined revolutions, its Ethiopia where the ruling party gained 99.6% in a recent “election” and secret police can detain or disappear people they don’t care for, and the Diaspora that uprooted so many of its people but ended up enriching the lives of us non-Africans so hugely, and once again I found myself close to tears. 

I have no answers to any of this, and I know that tears are not enough, but I can pay attention and help where I can, and I can hope for a better week and a better world.

The Party’s Over

It’s time to call it a day.

One of those days was last Tuesday at 10:30 in the morning when I lined up with forty other new Canadians from twenty-one different countries to have our documents checked prior to the Citizenship Ceremony where we would all be sworn in as Canadian citizens.

I shook hands with Her Honour Linda Carvery, the Citizenship Court Judge, who presided over the ceremony and granted us our citizenship.  When she asked me how long I had been in Canada, I told her 64 years, a slight exaggeration because I landed in Canada on March 15, 1947 and did spend five of those years living in Türkiye.  Then I reminded her that it was her decision that allowed me to become a Canadian and thanked her for it.

I also shook hands with the CIC Director, two Members of Parliament, a Municipal Councillor, a city policeman, a Mountie who had what looked like a knife scar in his right cheek, and a young boy who gave me my own flag.

Finally I joined two other new Canadians who went up to the front at Her Honour’s invitation to help her lead the singing of O Canada.  I was happy to be there, though the young man from Burundi and Ms. Carvery, herself an accomplished jazz/blues singer, didn’t really need my voice to make it an enthusiastic rendition of our anthem.

The other day, or actually night, was Saturday when the real party started, our celebration of my new Canadian citizenship.  An eclectic crew of family and friends, that included a variety of citizenships and statuses, showed up with food and drink to welcome me and wish me well.  When I was called on to make a speech I wasn’t sure how to begin so I started to sing O Canada.  The whole crowd joined in with melodic gusto, though our numbers were fewer when we sang it en francais.

I don’t have images of the party itself (most were too busy talking to take pictures), but it was a good time, I think, and I did record some floral arrangements, a few gifts, the Canada windsock by the door, and our Christmas wreath which just happened to have the right colours for this occasion.

So, Canada, here I come, I’m one of you now.  The party may be over but it ain’t time to call it a day.  Not yet, eh.

My Maple Leaf Card

It’s official, I picked it up today, my Maple Leaf card, so I am now a certified Permanent Resident of Canada, also known as a PR. Hooray for that, I say, though you might wonder if you saw the image on my card why they decided they wanted to make me permanent since I look neither very happy (the passport photo guy wouldn’t let me smile) nor open to making significant positive contributions to my new homeland. But there we are, so for all of you Canadians out there, I am now one of you! Or, to be more accurate, I almost am.

The next step of course is to get my Canadian citizenship, so I can vote and carry a passport like yours and feel I truly belong here (just like my mother and six brothers and wife and three children and three grandchildren and sundry friends and acquaintances and neighbours). But then getting my citizenship is another story, much longer than this one, and it will just have to wait for another post.

The front of my new card, besides the very stern image of FIELD ROGER MICHAEL, has a tiny Canadian flag in the upper left corner, a stylized Canada goose in the lower right (just above the cute Canada printed with an even tinier flag over the final a), and a silver maple leaf just below centre with built in holograms of other maple leaves and the Canadian coat of arms. It’s a sturdy card, and I will carry it in my wallet as a symbol of my sturdy (and stern) patriotism.

The back of the card tells even more, in very small type, about FIELD ROGER MICHAEL:

Height/Taille 179 cm
Eyes/Yeux BLUE/BLEU
COB/PDN BMU (translation: Country of Birth/Pays de Naissance BERMUDA)
PR Since/RP Depuis 15 04 1947
Category/Categoire XXX/XXX

The second last line above tells it all: it says I’ve been a PR since April 15, 1947, which is a very long time. The problem has been that I haven’t had a card to say so since I mislaid my original Landed Immigrant card a few years ago and have carried around a well worn notarized copy of it and my Bermudian birth certificate (also mislaid), which looks like a page from a late Victorian ledger. So now I have my new card to prove that I am truly and officially a Permanent Resident of Canada, at least for the next five years, at which time I may have to renew it if the citizenship thing doesn't work out.

I am puzzled, though, about that last line, my Category/Categoire. Does XXX (the English version) indicate that I’ve been a PR for far too long? After all, it is coming up to 63 years since I was granted status as an immigrant here and maybe my time and Canada’s patience is running out. And what does XXX (the French version) signify? I should have asked J., my CIC officer and greeter today, because she would have been bilingual, but I was so happy to have the card that I didn’t even look on the back. So I think I’ll have to take my Category on faith, unless I can find some other PR’s like me and check out the backs of their cards.

So if you see me walking a little differently over the next few days or even weeks, with a little more bounce in my step, it’s because I am now a PR, I live here, and I’ll happily show you the card to prove it.

All we need now is for our government to do something to make all of us Canadians proud -- just don’t hold your breath right now waiting for that to happen!

Whence cometh our hope?

Last night at dinner with friends and acquaintances the conversation was pretty much continuous, wide ranging, and consistently both engaged and engaging. This morning Lorraine commented about the fact that no one there had mentioned Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo. It hadn’t occurred to me, perhaps because I was either engaged or engaging, but when she mentioned the fact it did also strike me as odd. It wasn’t that we didn’t talk about politics at all, as there was some discussion of Ron Graham’s article on Michael Ignatieff, but the implicit ironies of Obama’s speech never came up. And when I checked just now on Al Jazeera for some commentary, the America’s Blog piece, Obama’s Big Sellout written by Teymoor Nabili, turned out to be about Wall Street and financial bailouts rather than a reflection on the saddening aspects of that Peace Prize speech.

So there it is. He made his speech, or, to be more accurate, he delivered his lecture. A very thoughtful and capable young student we know in Istanbul posted a Facebook comment: War is Peace. And Lorraine and I talked not about Orwell, but about the end of hope. It was not a statement of despair, and not in fact the end of all hope, but the end of hoping for some change for the better to come from the USA. The fact that the person, that smart and engaging young guy who had once seemed so eloquent and charismatic and inspirational, became President, the President, and then became so entangled in the convolutions of American style legislative bartering, that he had to deliver a speech to appease his opponents at home rather than talk to the world about hope and possibility, was profoundly saddening. It was less an opportunity missed than it was a hard slap of cold reality in a difficult world. And a statement of something that has been lost.

It was not really such a bad lecture/speech. You can find the full text here, and it's definitely worth a read if you missed it on Thursday. It was thoughtful and deliberative and carefully constructed, as I suppose it needed to be in this political world, but the fact that it was more about justifications for the use of power, military power, economic power, American power, than about meaningful reflections on the use of that power and exploration of peaceful alternatives was deeply disappointing. You can’t see it in the text but you can in the look of the crowd who were listening, the deep impassivity on their faces, a suggestion that we were not the only ones saddened by it.

Lorraine talked about a time long ago when we did look to the US for ideas and ideals, where there was some hope, perhaps naïve, but it was a hope for something good that might come from there. It’s not a place to look for hope right now and probably never will be again. And so the question, with its resonances of the King James Version of Christianity, is this: Whence cometh our hope?

It’s a good question, no matter the version or language, and there are some good answers walking around out there, though none are easy. I’m not going to get into them here, because that’s another story, or bunch of stories, but I do just wish that on Thursday Barack Obama could have found a way to be at least a part of one of those answers.

Me and Canada Day

Today is Thursday, the day after Canada Day, the 142nd birthday of this country. On Tuesday, the day before Canada Day, our local CBC station ran a story about a man who has been a landed immigrant in Canada even longer than I have. As I remember from the news account, he landed in Canada some time in the spring of 1946, probably at the Pier 21 Immigration Shed (now an Immigration Museum), the same one I arrived in about a year later. He was the son of a Canadian serviceman and his Scottish war bride, and, like me, he always thought he was Canadian – a citizen of Canada, that is – until he applied for a passport and found he wasn’t.

I landed at Pier 21 on March 16, 1947 and my card indicates “ADMITTED NON-IMMIGRANT"; a month later my parents received a card dated April 15, 1947 that said “LANDED IMMIGRANT”, and that is the status I have had ever since. I believe that the man on the news has applied for his citizenship. By my reckoning he should have had it long ago since his dad was a Canadian, but perhaps he didn’t ever apply for it. My situation is a little different. It is my mother who was and is Canadian, as were her mother and maternal grandmother, and I couldn't inherit her citizenship because I was born before 1949 when that law changed. My father was British, though he himself became a Canadian some time after immigrating, and I travel on a British passport, since Bermuda, where I was born, no longer issues its own passports. Last October, after sixty-two years as a landed immigrant of Canada, I decided I should make my association with this country more permanent and official and I applied to become a Canadian citizen.

So, I am looking forward to being a real Canadian and will certainly post an account of that occasion here when it does occur (the CBC story talked about a 12 to 14 month processing period for applications, so it may not be soon!). However, I did my best to celebrate my adopted country’s birthday yesterday. I went for my first Canadian outdoor swim yesterday afternoon at Caribou Park Beach, even though the wind was pretty fierce out of the north, the air temperature was about 18 degrees, and the water felt about the same. I ate, with my Canadian wife and Canadian friends, a large and fine bowl of lobster bisque (lobsters landed at the Caribou government wharf on an inlet of Northumberland Strait) made with Canadian Carnation milk. I toasted, albeit with an Italian pinot grigio, the joys of my adopted country and thanked these fine Canadians for sharing their celebration with me. I joined them for a very Canadian driftwood bonfire on their beach and applauded the small but spectacular fireworks display. And I slept in my MEC sleeping bag, soundly and proudly Canadian.

So, Happy Canada Day – may there be many more – and maybe next July 1st I will sing O Canada, our home and native land, (you can listen here) as a legitimate citizen of this large and mostly fine young country!

Lest we forget

The top story on Al Jazeera this morning was titled, “Gaza deaths dog Israeli Military”. It is a sad, but not surprising, commentary on the Gaza action which lay so heavily on our minds and hearts from Boxing Day on until finally it more or less stopped. It is easy to forget. Signs of spring appear, you play with your grandchildren, you go to artists’ talks, you cook dinners for family and friends, you spend time choosing which of all the possible things you’ll write your next blog post about, and you forget, if you are not careful to remember, that terrible things happened to innocent people in Gaza. This story is an important reminder.

The verb in the story’s headline is an appropriate one, suggesting as it does some kind of pursuit, not the annoying persistence of a puppy tugging at a pant leg, but the relentless running of a pack of dogs after something, in this case, some truths about what happened. It reminded me immediately of Waltz with Bashir (see the trailer here), which we saw Monday night, a profoundly moving exploration of what can happen when young men carry guns for their country and meditation on what using that gun does to the one who holds it as well as to those unfortunate enough to be on the other end of the barrel. It is a film to be seen in its entirety, and not just for the powerful opening sequence of dogs running through streets to stop outside the window of a veteran of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982.

It is hard to know who will provide the dogged persistence needed to uncover the wrongs that were inflicted on civilians in Gaza earlier this year. I for one am grateful to newspapers like Haaretz and news sources like Al Jazeera for reminding me not only of what happened in Gaza but what continues to happen, and to Ari Folman for a film that explores difficult things with thoughtful compassion for everyone damaged by the making of war. It is too easy to forget.

Hillary in Ankara

I looked at the news tonight and saw that Hillary was visiting Turkey. Not only that, I learned that the President (that’s what she called him, but we all know she means Obama) was going to visit there in the next month. Later on Newsnet we saw her tell the young Turkish interviewer that he would visit in the next month or so. Maybe not April but still soon and a significant move in the large picture of the new administration in the US.

It reminded me of a visit Bush made when we were living in Istanbul. I remember up at Taksim Square and along Istiklal Caddesi the posters that consisted of a head shot (not one that George W. or his handlers might have chosen, I’d guess) with the words “Bush gelme” plastered across it. My Turkish has never been great, but I did understand the imperative form with negative suffix of the verb gelmek, which means to come (when the guy is helping you park your car there, he shouts “Gel, gel!” as you are backing in); the Turkish protesters had neatly pre-empted the old “Yanqui go home” by telling Mr. Bush to not even bother coming.

He didn't heed their admonition and most Istanbulers, if they could, simply got out of town when Bush came – it was a NATO heads of state meeting, I think – and you certainly can’t blame them for it, because so much of the city had to be shut down for security. Some people suggested that they (the Americans, that is) were going to bring one of their huge carriers into the Bosphorus and moor it just off Cirağan Palace, and we tried, from our vantage point just along the shore at Ortakŏy, to imagine how that floating arsenal town would look there. However, that plan, if it was ever a plan, didn’t float (you might say) and Bush came in by helicopter from Ankara. At any rate, in advance of his visit – and, of course, the visits of all the other NATO heads – all of the Bosphorus ferries were tied up for the duration and essential streets all over the city (two hundred or more, we heard) were closed, so you can imagine the vibrancy of a city like Istanbul being stifled and shut down for a visit no one seemed to want. We also got out of town, but we wished, like so many others, that Bush could have read that simple message and stayed home so we could have done the same!

I will be interested, next time we go to Istanbul, to see how the new President is viewed there. I don’t know whether there was the same sense of jubilation that we felt here on election night, but I can guess that there was a large sigh of relief in Turkey, just as there was all the way around the world, and I would wonder if the Turks, who are, like the Bedouin and the people of Newfoundland, the most welcoming people I know, might be putting up posters, even knowing what kind of security shutdown their lives would face, with one of those now iconic portraits of Barack and the message “Obama hoşgeldiniz”.

As is always the case, we will see. Until then, don't forget to celebrate International Women's Day on Sunday for the hope that women consistently bring to our world, in spite of the odds.

FOOTNOTE: At a fundraiser tonight for LiveArt a young man who admires Elton John sang these words: How wonderful life is while you're in the world. It made me want to pay tribute here to one of the many people for whom this is true in my world; you can get an idea here.