The Time of the Magic Light

After supper tonight Lorraine and I went for a walk. It hadn’t started to get dark yet, although the sun had set, as we walked up the hill towards York Redoubt. I noticed a couple of places next to the road where the maple leaves had started to turn red, and then I saw a small mountain ash, also known as a rowan tree, loaded with clusters of bright orange berries. In that moment the berries were glowing almost as if they were illuminated from within. I said, Look at that, and Lorraine replied, Yup, it’s the magic light time. I looked at the sky and at the light that shone from it, even without the sun showing, and then at my hands, which also seemed to be glowing with inner light and colour. It really was the magic light time, the time that Lorraine is always looking for when she wants to make a photograph, the time when everything glows.

We live in a northern clime where the time of magic light is stretched out a little by the angle of the sun as it sets, so that we have a longer twilight time than places farther south. Some people call this time the gloaming, a northern word, Germanic in origin, that is connected with that glow I was talking about. So tonight we were walking up the hill in the gloaming, and the mountain ash berries caught my eye in the gloaming. There were no photographs tonight, just the brightness of some autumn berries, but the magic light was there, and the world glowed.

In Palmyra, our oasis home in Syria, the twilight is shorter, just as the glow before sunrise is shorter, than here in Nova Scotia. But that doesn’t mean there is no magic light there. In fact, out in the desert the stillness that happens as night is falling has a magic of both light and feel. The wind usually falls away, and there is a silence out there. It is quiet and restful, and that world also glows.

A few kilometres from the town, the sun sets behind a distant ridge of hills, and the magic light time is extended a little more than if it just dropped behind a flat desert horizon. It was the perfect time for making photographs, Ghassan and Mohamed’s figures glowing as they walked away from the camera, and the silence falling all around us. Right after we finished photographing there walked a camel, followed by another, and another, until there was a long parade of camels, including a few spindly-legged babies, on the edge of a low rise with the sky glowing behind them. The world seemed to be holding its breath, with just the silent steps of the camels walking past us, silhouetted against that evening sky. The magic was not just the light, but the wonder of those camels walking through our world. (If you click on the image above, you should be able to see it bigger.)

Where are they going? Lorraine asked Ghassan.

To their home, he said.

And we saw their home, a depression of soft sand near some tents we later came to know as Atala’s, before we drove back to town in Ghassan’s truck, to wait for the next magic light time and for Lorraine’s next photograph.

Blessings

Today has been a day when I have been made aware of blessings in my life. It started most significantly this morning when I attended a mental health conference here in Halifax. My intention in going was to hear Dr. Stan Kutcher speak about mental health and illness in young people. I went because I met Dr. Kutcher just over ten years ago when he has the lead doctor on our son’s medical treatment team at 6 Lane, a closed ward at the Abbie Lane Memorial Hospital, a hospital for treatment of mental illnesses. I remembered Stan’s attention and intelligence, his way of talking about mental disorders and our son’s condition, and his acceptance of Lorraine’s and my presence in Jon Eben’s hospital life and on/in the ward far beyond the boundaries of visiting hours. He was not the only person who was instrumental in Jon Eben’s recovery, but his role was key to the process, and we have always considered ourselves blessed that our postal code led to Stan Kutcher becoming Jon Eben’s doctor.

Stan’s talk was great, just like the other talks I heard him give many years ago. He has a way of making sense of the mysteries and helping us who listen find our way through the incredible turmoils and complexities of mental health and mental illnesses by his clear, informed, and down-to-earth approach. So I was blessed today by hearing his talk and by his reminders of what we can, and need to, do in order to try to make the environment we live in a better place for dealing with mental disorders and helping people who suffer from them; and I was blessed by the memory of our son’s illness, his recovery, and his present state as a loving and caring husband and father.

I have puzzled over the words “bless” and “blessed” and “blessing”. I want to avoid religious connotations, because I don’t especially care for the idea of some person or deity bestowing, like a kindly parent, some benefit or beneficence. To me the blessing is implicit in the thing or act itself and what matters most – in fact, the only thing that matters – is the consciousness or awareness of it. The fact that it comes to us in English from the French verb blesser, to wound, is significant. We are blessed through wounding, though I might take this to mean a wounding of our consciousness, a breaking through to a simple awareness of the blessings we have.

At supper tonight I told Lorraine, as I have said various times before, that I thought we were very lucky. She agreed. It was an evening, the first that needed a candle this season, to reflect on blessings, our blessings. I had a list in my head, today’s list. Some things on my list were probably – no, definitely – on Lorraine’s as well. Here is a partial list:

• our three grown children, and their loving partners, each of whom is a person I am proud to be connected to, each of whom brings his/her caring presence and attention to this sometimes difficult world;
• a handful of blackberries, so ripe they fall into your cupped palm, so sweet you can’t describe it;
• our three granddaughters, aged four, two, and one, each of whom is a privilege and a wonder to know, to hang out with, and to observe;
• a northern sky with clouds moving toward dusk, the light of it;
• two friends and former colleagues, who have been trying without success to have a baby, now in their fifth month of healthy pregnancy;
• steamed ruby chard with a little butter, honey, and balsamic and fresh bread;
• Ferguson's Cove, a small community of people who celebrated our neighbourhood today through a group picnic in our park with food and drink, games, conversation, and sidewalk chalk;
• a stretch of clear dry weather to get the wood in to the shed;
• the quiet of our house tonight, the lights of the city across the harbour;
• time to write this.

Learning and growing

One of our real treats (among many!) since we returned from Istanbul last July has been to spend a lot of time with our granddaughters, including E., who is now two and a bit. When she was a tiny baby a special privilege was being able to hold her and feed her with a bottle, and it is still a treat to have her climb up into your lap with a book to read. However, the biggest treat of all has been watching E. grow and develop over the fourteen months we have been back in Nova Scotia.

Something I have always done with small children, probably going back even to when my youngest brothers were still in diapers, is to play certain nursery rhyme games. These include “This little piggy”, carefully pulling a little on each toe as you say the rhyme, until you get to the tiny weeny baby piggy that goes “wee wee wee all the way home”. E. always kicks off her crocs when she comes into our house, and at some point in every visit she will put her foot in front of me and say “piggies”. I always do it, and she always waits for the little piggy of that foot to run home before she puts her other foot there and says “that one”. So then I do that one.

Usually after piggies have been done, she will put her hand out, palm up, and say “round round”, so I then do “Round and round the garden”, always ending with the underarm tickle. E. maintains a serious composure throughout, and then puts out her other hand and says “that one”, so it gets done too.

These are routine small child activities, like the “horsie ride”, which I have my own version of, ending always with the brave cowgirl from Calgary galloping and galloping until she tips backwards on “all fall down”. There is nothing remarkable really about doing these things with kids, except, of course, for the fun of it. What is truly remarkable, however, and also fun for me is to see how these activities change as E. changes.

“Piggies” has stayed pretty much the same, only tonight I had to do piggies on the little doll that E. has adopted as her own every time she comes to our house. So she watched very seriously while I picked each tiny plastic toe and enunciated the rhyme all the way through. And, of course, she said “that one” and got me to do the second foot. With “Round and round the garden”, the variation now is to have E. do it herself with her little forefinger in my large palm, including the walk up my arm to the “tickle you under there”, as well as having me do “baby round round” in the doll’s tiny plastic hand (and then, of course, the other one).

When E. has wanted a “horsie ride”, she will come up to me and say “Aaaa worsey ride”, and when I say OK (which I always do), she will sit very seriously on my knees for the whole routine. However, tonight, now that she is two and very grown up, she asked me to give baby a “worsey ride” instead, which I did. Then it was her stuffed friend Lambie’s turn, then her older sister A. brought Woofer for a ride, then Biffy Bean, and finally E. asked me to give the baby’s tiny plastic bottle a ride, but I drew the line there. Later, at the supper table, E. had the doll baby on her knees holding its little hands for a “horsie ride”, and sure enough she was going through the motions and saying “nim nim nim”, "jiggy jog, jiggy jog”, and “galpa galpa galpa all fall down”.

Learning and growing is what they do, E. included, and watching them do it, starting to take over control of their own lives and activities, is our particular joy every time we see them. Certainly worth coming back for!

Vanishing Point

Lorraine talked tonight of a friend from art school who had, when he was very young, looked for long periods of time at the edges of objects. He was trying to understand something about presence and non-presence, where the thing was and where it wasn’t. Like the china cabinet in the dining room or the television set, where each of them started and stopped. He didn’t keep doing it, but for a period of his life it was a compelling activity for him, and Lorraine was reminded of it by the presence and absence of the figure in her Body/Field: Temporal Inscriptions photographic series. We are here, our feet connect us with this ground, we move there, and are grounded again through our feet. Or we are here for a time and then we are not here, and we cannot imagine the absence of our presence in a place or time.

There are roses from the opening of her exhibition, Vanishing Point, of which Body/Field: Temporal Inscriptions makes up about one third; one bunch, all pink, is on the media centre and another, two deep red and one orange, on the dining room table. Their petals open out into the air, curled back slightly, whorled, unfurled. Each petal has an edge, a delicately veined edge that defines the flower’s place and presence in the room. It is that edge, or the thought of it, that takes me back to William Carlos Williams and his wonderful poem VII from Spring and All titled “The Rose”. Here are a couple of parts:

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

and

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

You can read the whole poem here if you care to. (Do it, you won’t regret it.)

There is something I want to write about Lorraine’s work, but I can’t quite do it yet. The Williams poem is a start. If you want to know more, you can get some idea of some of her work here, but to really begin to appreciate and understand it, you need to go to Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery to see her new exhibition. The title is Vanishing Point, and there is in each image just that, a vanishing point, but what consistently engages and holds me, even takes my breath away, is not the “vanishing” but the engaged and engaging presence of every image. See it for yourself, now that the opening is over and the crowds have gone. You won’t regret it.

Painted House

Yesterday the painting of the outside of our house was completed, or pretty much completed. All that is left is picking up the ladders and paint buckets, cleaning a few spots off the deck and the windows, painting the posts and support beams under the deck, and tidying up the places where the grey and the green meet. Those same shades of grey and green can still be found on the backs of my fingers, my forearms, and the old shirt that I just threw in the garbage, thankful that the job is over, but the house is done.

I had considerable help in getting it done from Josh, a young university student from Australia, and his friend Claire, also a student and someone we have known for almost twenty years. It was a pleasant enough task, because of an unusually fine stretch of painting weather (interrupted only on a couple of weekends by tropical storms Bill and Danny) and because of our shared satisfaction in how well the house was shaping up.

Lorraine and I painted our house twelve years ago during the summer of 1997, just as we had painted other people’s houses in our first summers in Nova Scotia almost forty years ago. Actually “painted” is not quite the right word since we used an opaque stain called Sadolin Pinotex, a Scandinavian finish that has lasted very well, even though the southeast side of the house gets more than its share of severe weather. This year we have stained the house again, using new colours of Pinotex, and we hope that it will last at least as long as the previous coat. It certainly has a good chance of doing so because of the care with which we prepared the surface – Josh spent many hours on the ladder with a sander in his hands – and our careful determination to apply at least two sturdy coats of stain everywhere.

There is a satisfaction that comes from house painting, things like getting the staging and ladders into the most advantageous and stable position, getting the right amount of stain on the brush to make an even coat or line, working your way across or down a stretch of wall or trim, moving your operation as the sun moves around the house so that you aren’t painting too warm a surface, watching the constant activity in the harbour reflected in the window, and, of course, closing in on the final bits to have the job complete.

Now it is done and the house looks great. The staging can go back to Steeplejacks, the ladders hung up, and the brushes and buckets put away until touchup time. Now it’s time to move on with the work around our house, like wood to put in the shed, a walkway to be finished, mowing the lawn at least once more, and stopping on occasion to admire our house with its new coat of grey and green.

September

Today is September 1 and it both feels and looks like it. Actually the first day of September, in terms of both look and feel, happened towards the end of last week, a day or so before Tropical Storm Danny came roaring through. It was, as it always is, a reminder of a change of season, often a fairly sharp reminder. The goldenrod and tansy were in full bloom, reminding teachers and students alike that vacation is coming to an end, the hydrangea petals were showing hints of pink at the edges, and the burning bush down in front had already started to redden.

The sharpness of the September reminder, which usually happens around the last week of August, is partly visual. The sky will be a deeper and sharper blue, and the colours of the foliage will be sharper, the edges more finely delineated, but it is also tactile, you can feel it first thing in the morning in the cool draft from the open window. The wind will be out of the northwest and the air will be drier, as if it too has an edge. It will be a beautiful day, and the sun will be warm enough, but there is something in the day to let us all know, if we care to, that the lazy ease of summer is going to soon shift into autumn, with all the wonders that season can bring, on the way to the winter which will surely come.

So today is the first day of September. At Saint Mary’s this afternoon there were large and small trucks, vans, utility trailers, and hatchbacks, all unloading student possessions and furnishings at the entrance to the residence tower. Later on the patio at Henry House I wished I either had a jacket or was sitting in the sun while I enjoyed my beer. The cruise ships were lined up at Pier 20, starting their fall tours of the Maritimes, and one of the Harbour Hoppers was parked in the lot on Maynard Street with a large cover over it. Tonight’s forecast said that the low would be 10, but 4 in low lying areas, with a risk of frost, no less! These were all signs, signs of September, signs of the ending of summer, signs of a shift of tempo, signs of the season.

There is lots ahead of us to look forward to, and summer can’t last forever, but I still want to walk back to Purcell’s Pond for another swim, get out to Martinique Beach to ride some waves, and keep on wearing shorts and sandals. Probably we will do these things, but we will be doing them in the clear knowledge that September is here, any summer days now are a treat to be savoured, and each time may well be the last time we do it this season. After all, it is September!

After Bill

Bill the Hurricane has passed our coast and passed from Hurricane into Tropical Storm status; that is, he has passed on and is gone from here. What we have now is strong northwesterlies that are rushing in to fill the gap that Bill’s centre of low pressure left behind. He was, as the man from Beyond the Fringe said, “not quite the conflagration we expected”, and we were glad for that. There was plenty of rain and plenty of wind and plenty of shaking of trees, but there was no shaking of our house and no debris flying around the property; in fact, the staging sections and ladders, the deck furniture, the plywood and scrap lumber were all lying exactly where I stowed them yesterday in anticipation of Bill.

So what was it like? This morning the waves hitting the shore at Sailor’s Point were unremarkable, nothing more than the usual good southeast gale, but down on Ferguson’s Cove Road the water was way up around Andrew’s wharf, even though it was still more than an hour until high tide, and John and Lesley’s lane was almost under water well ahead of the forecast storm surge. Bill did kick up some fuss, and our clumps of maples certainly thrashed their branches around, but nothing broke off and the torrential rain didn’t last long. The storm surge seemed not to amount to much and the gusts became less intense. While the large swells were crashing across Mauger’s Beach behind the lighthouse, the wind came around to the north and then northeast, and the whitecaps came straight across the harbour towards us, a sure sign that Bill’s centre had moved past.

Soon the wind shifted to northwest and the sky cleared a little. When we went back out to Sailor’s Point there were cars parked all up and down the road, and it was easy to see why. Bill had moved on but he had left behind huge swells that roared in from the open ocean and crashed on the rocks. There was something a little exotic about these giant rollers that came from way offshore where a huge depression called Bill had been stirring them up. Farther out on the shoal water just offshore they reared up and crested with the sharp wind blowing back plumes of spray so that they looked like white horses with flying white manes rushing in. People were standing everywhere, all looking seaward. Some held up their cameras and phones, but all were watching wave after wave. Out on the horizon spray flew upward in mysterious white blooms, and we all stood and watched.

Tonight Venus is bright in the eastern sky, the white blooms are still intact on our hydrangea, and there is a roar still coming in the window from the waves across the harbour. But Bill has gone, and we are OK. Tomorrow everyone goes back to their ordinary work, but they will all be talking. They’ll talk about Bill, what happened or didn’t happen and what he was or wasn’t, while Bill’s ragged remnants cross Newfoundland and end up in a couple of days lashing the coast of Ireland with whatever strength he has left.

Hurricane Bill -- the calm before

There’s a storm coming. Its name is Bill. I call it Kill Bill, but I’m hoping it won’t be a killer storm. It is a hurricane right now, a Category Three, but forecasters suggest it could move back up the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to a Four tomorrow. I hope it doesn’t. You can check out this site to see what the hurricane categories mean and what kind of damage can be expected (for example, if you live in a mobile home built before 1994, you are in trouble in any one of the categories).

We moved to Istanbul in August, 2003. In September of that year Hurricane Juan made landfall in Halifax and caused very extensive damage. We missed it but our house survived the storm without damage. From here you can see areas of dead trees over on McNab’s Island even now six years later, and Point Pleasant Park still shows signs of serious devastation; in fact, the wildfire that threatened our house at the end of April fed on the debris of dead trees from Juan. The thing that is particularly worrisome as Bill approaches is that Juan caused all the damage it did six years ago as a Category One hurricane, way down the scale from Bill's current status.

Today we took down the stage we have been using for painting the house and stacked it carefully on the ground. The sheets of plywood that have been protecting the deck are now safely stowed in the sheltered area next to the shed. Tomorrow, the day before Bill is expected to arrive, we will move the barbecue and all the deck furniture somewhere safe, away from windows and railings and anything else they could fly into and damage. We are in the process of battening down.

Today there was a light wind out of the south. The fogbank hung just beyond McNab’s all morning and began to drift in the harbour in the afternoon. Waves started breaking on the beach by the lighthouse, the first white water I’ve noticed over there in more than a week. Surf reports predict waves up to 3 metres on Saturday and 6 metres on Sunday, a sure sign of something coming even with hardly a breath of wind -- yet. And there seemed to be a lot of boats coming in the harbour, presumably looking for shelter from the storm.

I don’t know if we would have known a storm was coming if we hadn’t been checking the forecast and news reports over the last couple of days; that is, were there signs and portents that we would have noticed, or did we notice these things only because we knew Bill was tracking towards us? Whatever the answer, we feel that we can feel the storm coming, and we feel the need to get ready. Tomorrow we will fill the water containers and check that we have fuel and the Coleman works. We will locate the battery radio, candles, and matches. We will pick up anything around the house capable of becoming a projectile. And we will keep watching how Bill is tracking (here is a good source of information) and wait to see what happens.

My hope is that the colder water off our shore damps down this hurricane’s energy enough to lower its status a couple of categories or that it tracks far enough from here to limit us to a good gale from its edges. We will find out what Bill is up to (or down to) in a day or so, but we do know we will get a storm on Sunday and its name is Bill. We will try to be ready and we will be waiting.

Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Last week Leonard Cohen performed two concerts in Istanbul, the first time that he has played there. Earlier in the summer Loreena McKennitt also played Istanbul, one more great Canadian performer (with, of course, Hugh Marsh in her ensemble), so we have been well represented musically there this year – just need Neil and Joni, I guess, to complete that picture. You can read some interesting accounts of Leonard’s performances in the reviews and reactions listed by Dr. Guy in his blog here. They seem to have been good concerts, much appreciated by the Istanbul audiences, one of which included my good friend Ann and her daughter Çağla, who went for the best seats. There’s a nice view of “Hallelujah” here -- I hope that Ann and Çağla saw and heard as well as that.

I was quite familiar with Leonard’s work back in the 60’s, initially from the poems his teacher/mentor Irving Layton selected for the 1962 anthology of Canadian love poetry, Love Where the Nights are Long (still worth the price of admission!). I had my own copy of The Spice-Box of Earth, the one that had a cutout window in the paper cover showing Leonard’s picture inside, as did Lorraine when we first got together a few years later. Leonard’s poems were important to all of us young lovers and romantics as we tried to figure out who and how we were. Read “The Cuckold’s Song” to see why. Or this:

Song

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover

We all read Beautiful Losers and talked endlessly about Catherine and that great mantra “God is alive; magic is afoot”. Leonard was present in our lives, even though, as Warren T pointed out, he didn’t have the rhythmic or verbal complexity of Bob (he meant Mr. D but it could also have been our other hero Creeley); Warren was right, of course, but for us Leonard was still cool.

When we heard in 1967 that Leonard was coming to UBC to do a reading, we were all going. When we got into the lecture theatre, we waited. Leonard was not sitting down front to be introduced like at most readings – he wasn’t in the hall at all. We waited. When he came out from the wings, he was carrying a guitar -- no book, no sheaves of paper – just a guitar, and that small smile you will recognize if you ever saw him perform. He began with “Suzanne” and he owned us.

Later in the old caff we sat around tables while he told us that it was his birthday, his 33rd, and that he was happy to be in Vancouver, and he reminded us of the fact that Jesus was crucified in his 33rd year. He pointed out that such a thing was not part of his own plan, though he certainly toys with such ideas in “Dress Rehearsal Rag”, which we all knew from the copy of Judy Collins’ “In my Life” I was given for my birthday that year. The next year up in Sechelt Jon F. played and sang Cohen songs beatifically at our campfires on the beach at Sergeant’s Bay, etching songs like “Sisters of Mercy” and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” into my consciousness forever.

I have followed Leonard’s work over the years but haven’t been to a concert since that first one back at UBC. I’m glad he is doing them and glad that Ann and Çağla got to go to one last week. After all he is still, at close to 75, very cool and always worth a listen.

Four People

Yesterday afternoon at the airport we said our departure words to four of the best people we know as they headed back to their home in Istanbul after three weeks here with us and with our children and grandchildren. The words were not good-byes or farewells -- though our hope always is that they will “fare well” in their travels and in their daily doings, both of those terms carry too much feeling of finality for me to use them comfortably. I might prefer “Au revoir” or “Adieu”, but neither is a term that sits easily, and “See you” or “Görüşürüz” are just too casual for this occasion. It was a parting, a leave-taking, the beginning of a time away from each other until we see them again, either here or there, when we can greet them again and resume the happiness of the times we spend together. And our words were the words for people you truly care about and truly wish they did not have to leave

These four people are K&A, the parents, and their three-year old twins, A&Ö, and they were heading off on a 15-hour stint in the zone of air travel to get from Halifax to Istanbul, from our home to their home. Our place this morning is quiet. We were woken by the sun in our window rather than by the voice of a twin initiating his morning conversation. There is no more Thomas the Train layout in the living room and no “white window car”, the big Buick SUV they rented, sitting in the driveway. There is in our house the absence of their presence.

There are many gifts and benefits from our five years in Istanbul, which was a wonderfully life-changing period for us, but the best and most significant was our meeting and coming to know these four people there. K., who is Turkish, is about the closest colleague I have ever had and a truly excellent friend, one of those rare people you are fortunate to encounter and to come to know. His wife, A., who is American, is a truly gifted teacher and parent and a privilege to have as both a colleague and friend. And their boys, A and Ö, whom we have known practically since their conception, are now fluently bilingual and wonderful young beings, our good friends, able and inquisitive and truly loving. These four people are worth knowing and they are missed.

They have visited, and they have returned as they should to their own lives in Istanbul. They are there now and they should be sleeping. “Fare thee well”, I say to them -- we are thinking of them as we explore the now empty spaces of our house, resume some of the patterns of our ordinary life, and speculate on when we will next see them and hang out together again. They are four people who matter.