A Man, a Dog, and a Green Hill

One of the many joys of being part of Lorraine’s photographic practice has always been travelling with her to scout for locations. 

When we were looking for sites in various regions of Canada to make her Illuminated Petragraphs images (check them out here), we had a pretty rigorous regime.  In the evenings we had to be on location at least an hour before sunset to get the landscape image and didn’t usually leave until three or four hours later after darkness had fallen and the jewel-like projected image was double-exposed on top of it.  And mornings had us finding our way to the location at about four to photograph the projection in total darkness, well before sunrise lit up the surrounding landscape for the second shot.

We spent a lot of time waiting for the right light and watched a lot of sunrises and sets, which was a wonderful contemplative way to spend our time, but in between the morning and evening shoots we were always searching for our next locations.  What we needed was the right rock in the right orientation in the right landscape setting, and this took us down little roads to the shoreline, across fields, up rock faces, or through forest trails.  We were on a quest, the adventure was always in the looking, and finding the right rock for the next morning or evening was a shared moment of pleasure.

Other series took us to other places, like the ancient roadway in Jordan leading up to Herod’s palace or the rocky outcrops on the south side of Crete or the walled walkway in Jerusalem’s Old City, and every place, every location we returned to when the light was right, was the result of an adventure in looking. 

The forecast for last Sunday evening suggested that the fog wouldn’t let us get the shots we wanted at Crystal Crescent Beach, so Lorraine decided that we needed to go inland and we headed off to check out Laurie Park and Oakfield Park.  We went in roads and walked over fields, checking slopes and view planes and trying to determine without a compass or a clear location of the sun behind the clouds where it would set that night. 

We had a couple of reasons for being out there looking: the first was that the sky was supposed to clear that afternoon, so an evening shot was possible, as long as it was far enough inland to escape the fog; the second was that the man with the dog was available only on Sunday evenings and was getting married next weekend.   A further reason, of course, was that once the idea had taken shape it was important to get out and do the thing.

The park areas didn’t work, but finally we checked out the large dairy farms you can see from the highway  out near Milford where we found a couple of fields that were possible.  The first one we walked over had a transmission tower and power lines running across it.  A young eagle flew over and perched in the tower, which reminded me of the time in Oman we walked past power lines into the desert to check out a possible location and saw on our walk back more than a dozen vultures in one tower.  Just in case we didn’t make it all the way to the car, I’d guess.

The hay had been cut on the second one, which was clear of obstructions, and Lorraine decided it was likely the right one, so we found the owner, asked him where the sun would be setting, and got permission to come back to photograph.  So we came back that evening with the man and his dog in the back of our car and learned a lot about training dogs and their humans along the way.  

Another great joy for me is being there on the shoot, which it was, and recording some of the action with my little Lumix, but that may just have to be another story.

Our Turkish breakfast

It is June here and we are not in Istanbul; in fact, this is the first spring since 2004 that we have not been in Istanbul.  We miss it, especially in spring.

So when E., our daughter, arrived from Ontario on Friday night, I suggested that we have a Turkish breakfast (kahvaltı) in the morning.  She had spent two years (and thus two springs) in Istanbul, and we had happy shared memories of Saturday or Sunday morning kahvaltı somewhere along the Bosphorus.

I knew we had good tomatoes to slice up and some fine small cucumbers, maybe not the choice curvy Çengelköy variety, but compact and tasty.  There was also no crumbly beyaz peynir, but we did have good Nova Scotian feta cheese.  Although the olives, both green and black, were Greek rather than Turkish, at least we were geographically close on that front. 

Often at the studio in Ortaköy where we usually spent our weekends, we put together our own breakfasts.  It was only a short walk to a bakery where we could buy fresh bread (ekmek), still warm and smelling faintly of woodsmoke, poğaça, great little buns that were plain (sade) or cheese-filled (peynirli), or fresh simit, like slender sesame covered bagels, also faintly smoky.  And if we needed something more, like a variety of breakfast cheeses or a small bag of fresh eggs or some thick kaymaklı yoghurt with a crust of yellow cream on top, there was always the kahvaltı shop just around the corner.

Or you could eat out.  We could walk to the Cheesecake Café down on the waterfront and enjoy their good 11 lira breakfast that included fine crisp sigara borek pastries and plenty of Turkish tea (çay) always çok açık (not too strong).  If we were more ambitious and/or wanted a real treat, we would hop on a bus or get the car and go to Emirgan, which was on the sahil yolu (Seaside Road) in Emirgan and was one of the finest kahvaltı spots we knew, famous for its bal kaymak, a small cylinder of white clotted cream with golden honey poured over it, perfect to spread on fresh ekmek.  Or we could go a little farther for some great menemen at the tiny place right on the water in Istinye where you could lean your elbow on the seawall while you ate if you were early enough to get that table.

I have wandered a little from my plan for a Turkish breakfast here on Saturday morning, but I realize in writing this how strong and fond are my memories of those weekend breakfasts along the Bosphorus.  So I suppose it does make sense that when I put out fruit, olives, vegetables, and cheese, sliced the bread, made ihlamur (linden) tea in the little teapot from the Ortaköy eskici, and cooled the boiled eggs under the tap, I would want to take a picture of the spread and write something about what it all meant.

It was Halifax Harbour outside the window and not the Bosphorus, but our Ferguson’s Cove kahvaltı was a pretty good treat on Saturday morning for us three expats homesick for Istanbul.

Happy birthday, Bob

Today is Bob’s birthday and he is 70.  That is something to celebrate.  Here are a few things I did today in his honour:

I thought a lot about the summer of 1964 when I would hitchhike to Toronto with my friend Cal on Friday afternoon and crash at an SCM summer project in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Trinity Square.  As a young undergraduate from Halifax, it was my first opportunity to meet Trots, Leninists, and Marxists (the project was called a Peace Camp) and hang out with them on our weekends in the big city.  It was also the first time I heard Dylan sing, down in the rectory basement with the SCM radicals.  Cal was disdainful of Bob’s voice and did some pretty funny imitations, and I have to admit that I didn’t really get what everyone was blown away by.

And I thought about when I joined the Columbia Record Club in the fall of ’66 after moving to Vancouver and had my own apartment and a record player from a second hand store on Fourth.  My first order included Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it all Back Home, and Blonde on Blonde along with nine other albums, all for one cent, and it was then that I began to understand what people who talked about Bob were talking about.

I remembered how Desire was for us the landmark musical event of the 1970’s and how our five year old daughter loved to sit in the front seat of our van and sing the first verse of Highway 61 Revisited at the top of her lungs as we drove across Canada in the summer of 1984.

Lol and I both listened to Rick Terfry this afternoon on Drive as he played old Dylan and Dylan covers and clips of people talking about working with Bob.

This evening we also both went to a reading by Andy Wainwright of a fiction piece he had recently completed called “The Old Master”.  It was about a 16^th century Dutch painter, but the story of this painter’s artistic life and creative processes was clearly and subtly connected to the story of Bob’s life and work and artistic development and processes.  It was interesting to listen to the ways that Andy alluded to Bob through the painter’s imagery and actions and to follow the interplay between the two “old masters”, the painter and Bob, that Andy was exploring.

I made two notes during the reading, “discography” and “hagiography”.  Discography is pretty obvious, since so much of Andy’s story and of what we presume to know or understand of Bob is measured out by what we hear in his albums, the works he has made throughout the various stages of his life.  And hagiography is also obvious, since the age of threescore and ten suggests that a time has been reached for reflection and assessment and summing up.  Bob’s no saint and has steadfastly resisted sainthood; however, all of the hagiographers still struggle to come to terms with what he is,  though Bob himself will never easily be summed up; say what you will about him, you’ll usually find out that “he’s not there”, so to speak.

I particularly liked Lorraine’s comment/question after the reading as she asked Andy to reread the ending of the story where there were images of two women and then wondered aloud about the fact that though Bob grew up through the 60’s and the changes brought about in the status of women there seemed to be so little written about him by women.  Andy responded that he thought Bob was not a misogynist and mentioned the book that Suzy Retolo wrote recently about her relationship with Bob, but neither comment really touched on the fact that when it comes to writing about Bob and his work, he really is, as Lorraine put it, “a guy’s guy”.

Here is a fact Andy mentioned that is worth noting:  Bob has been quoted in more court decisions than any other artist.  I might have guessed Shakespeare for that achievement, which just goes to show how profoundly Bob’s words have shaped our age.

Here and here are a couple of commentaries, both by guys, about today that are worth noting.

And here’s a wish: Happy birthday, Bob, and may you be forever young.

Three bird stories

Two years ago, when we were having windows replaced and our deck rebuilt, I noticed a robin’s nest perched on top of the main carrying beam for the deck joists and under the deck itself.  I told P. the contractor about it.  He, it turned out, is someone who also pays attention to birds, telling me about the pileated woodpecker he has seen out behind his workshop and others he has noted in his travels, so he organized his work in order not to disturb the nest until the fledglings had moved out.  I appreciated that.

When we returned from Ontario earlier this month, I noticed that there were signs of three nests on top of the same carrying beam under our new deck.  It turned out that only one, the middle one, was occupied, and I would watch carefully from inside the studio to make sure I didn’t frighten this robin away.  She (or he) has been sitting on the nest for almost three weeks now, and I am sometimes scolded by one or the other parent if I wander too close, but so far as I can tell the nest and its occupant(s) have not been abandoned.

Last week I had found half a robin’s egg in the garden.  I figured that its neatly broken edge was a good sign, probably carefully chiseled open by the hatchling inside.  Then, a couple of days ago, I saw one of our neighbourhood red squirrels being chased by two ferocious robins up and down the shad bush next to the deck, more evidence that these parents still had something to protect.

When I checked just now there was no adult at the nest, so I waited a bit, watching one robin poking its bill into the wood chip pile and seeming to stay close to the nest.  Suddenly, from a different direction, I saw another robin fly up to the nest with a worm, feed at least one wide open beak, and nestle down over the young occupant(s) of the nest.  This made me happy. 

Something else that has made me happy lately is the return of our yellow-shafted flicker (you can see the yellow shafts of its feathers here).  It calls from the top of the power pole behind our shed, and sometimes flies up from the edge of our lane when we drive in, its bright white rump patch always a delight to see.  Last week Lorraine and I noticed it outside the dining room window, working next to the magnolia bush.  It was probably poking at the anthill, and we had plenty of time to admire its striped brown back, greyish head, and the bright red patch on its nape.

Many years ago when we lived in Maitland we found a flicker lying on the road out near the Mill Pond.  Its neck was broken, but almost every feather was in place, and its beautiful body was still warm in my hands.  We figured the car in front of us had hit it on one of the deep undulations of its flight and took it to our taxidermist friend F. where we had the opportunity to see it every time we went to his house, perfectly mounted and perfectly perfect. 

Last week we were planning to barbecue some steak.  There were three, and I cut them in half because they seemed big, seasoned them, and took them outside on a plate while I lighted the barbecue, which was on our back deck.  While the barbecue was heating I went back in the house to top up my wine and munch on some snacks.  A movement outside the front window caught my eye, and I saw a black crow racing off with a grey and white herring gull chasing it.  Interesting, I thought, and went outside to put the steaks on the grill, but where there had been six, there were now only five.

I admire the crows, their amazing flying ability, sharp beauty, and obvious intelligence.  They perch on I’s roof next door and in our trees and tell each other what is going on.  I didn’t see any crows around when I took the steaks out, but clearly one of them saw me, and the steak was gone, carried off by a crow.  The gull was bigger, but the crow was fast and deserved its prize.  We enjoyed our steaks and even had some left over, and I seriously hope the crow got to enjoy the one it stole.

Two things today

There were two things that brought tears to my eyes and thickened my throat today.

The first was telling Lorraine and JE about the e-mail I received yesterday from XE, the high school student who had moved to Halifax from Beijing three years ago and who had just heard of the substantial scholarships she had been awarded by Dalhousie.  It doesn’t really make sense that it would affect me this way; after all, she had worked so hard, completing pre-IB in her first year here, doing IB A1 English in her second year, and taking every suggestion I gave her and applying it assiduously to her next assignments.  XE was an utter treat to work with that whole year, and I always looked forward to our after school sessions, the serious brightness of her attention and presence, the slippers they gave me to wear, and the huge mug of green tea that her dad kept refilling for me as we worked.

Helping  XE with her scholarship application letters, I came to know a little more about her and what the family had left behind when they brought her here to complete high school and apply to university.  It was that knowledge combined with the experience of helping her navigate a course that was difficult for native English speakers that flooded up in me when we parked the car in front of JE’s house and I started to tell them about the scholarship awards.  JE caught my eye in the rear view mirror and told me it was OK, and it was, but it still took me more than a minute to be able to actually say the words without choking up again.  When we crossed the street to the house, I felt a tear rolling down my left cheek and smiled at the thought of XE beaming with happiness.

The second happened a while later when Lorraine was reviewing the images she had got last night out on the Welland Canal spit.  It was a perfect evening for it with a sky that had cleared off through the afternoon and a wind that had dropped to nothing.  She and JE drove out the Seaway Haulage Road and then hiked out the spit to the small cove that was formed near the end.  She set up the camera while he gathered a collection of flat stones for skipping and slitting the devil’s throat. 

 

He stood where she told him to right at the edge of the flat water that had just enough residual wave action that it seemed to be breathing and skipped rocks out toward the gap between the lighthouse on one side and the Niagara River point on the other.  The night was perfect and the rock’s impact curled up the still surface and sent out a widening circle every time it touched down and then skipped ahead to touch another time and another.  The serious focus and beauty of JE’s stance and throw and the breathtaking poetry of each skip captured so lovingly by Lorraine brought the same welling up in my eyes and constriction in my throat.

That’s really all, a couple of occasions that made me so happy that I couldn’t speak.  Don’t need any more than that to make it a good day.

Easter Sunday, 2011

It is Easter Sunday and we are in Ontario.  As Nova Scotians we don’t necessarily love Ontario, but people we love live here and so we come to see them.  And to see parts of Ontario we've never seen.

This morning we woke up in Long Point in a rented cottage right next to the Long Point Provincial Campground and just across the road from high sand dunes and a pathway to a huge sand beach on Lake Erie.  It’s a beautiful spot, the beach mostly empty now because it’s mainly a summer resort area, and we were able to walk kilometres without seeing more than one or two others all along the shore.

Lorraine did some photographing there.

The dunes were lovely with variegated shades of sand and trees growing right through them.

E. and I. were walking up ahead as the lake fog rolled in.

There were wet marshes behind the beaches that the birds loved, soldier blackbirds everywhere.

Back in St. Catharine’s small flowers were blooming in the garden.

And on the front walk.

A squirrel watched M. and me from a tree branch.

She worked on another picture out on the sidewalk.  And then the Ontario sun started to set and she had a bath and went to bed.

April 1, it is raining (again)

March went out quietly, like a lamb, as they say, but April came in today with no fooling, just the serious flourish of a late winter or early spring storm.  The sky early this morning was red in warning, as they say, and now it is an even grey, with winds gusting out of the east, shaking the trees, lashing the rain against our windows, and howling past the corners of the house.

It is the first day of Poetry Month, so we need a poem that fits the day, not the little rhyme of April showers bringing May flowers, but something more, like the beginning of this scene from Act III of King Lear:

SCENE II. Another part of the heath. Storm still.

Enter KING LEAR and Fool

KING LEAR

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow.
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks.
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world;
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man.

Fool

O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this

rain-water out o' door.  Good nuncle, in; ask thy daughters'

blessing.  Here's a night pities neither wise man nor fools.

KING LEAR

Rumble thy bellyful. Spit, fire; spout, rain.
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription.  Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure.  Here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! 'tis foul!

We don’t have any thunderbolts or pernicious children, but we do have a pretty good pretty wild storm today and we have Bill’s words to inaugurate the month of poetry here.  Long may it reign!

March 11, it is raining

Today is March 11, and it is raining.  It is another anniversary, a happy one, twelve years now since we took our second son, Jon Eben, to Emergency, and ended up going with him to 6 Lane (Long Stay) where he was confined for about three months.  “March 11, it is raining,” is what he wrote that day.

Today Lorraine and I had lunch at the Summer Savoury Restaurant on the second floor of the Halifax Infirmary.  We were there with my mother, who is a patient on 8.4 of the Infirmary and had already had her hospital lunch because we couldn’t get there earlier.  However, she had a couple of sections of a cinnamon bun and a small cup of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.  She said it was a real treat just to get out of her room and eat something different from what they served her in the hospital.

For Lorraine and me it was a time to remember our visits to the Summer Savoury a little under twelve years ago.  Once Jon Eben had been on the locked ward long enough to be allowed out with us, one of our excursions was to walk from there over to the Summer Savoury.  It was often a difficult journey, since he often had to be persuaded to go and that he could actually make it.  It was a long trip, after coming down in the elevator, to make our way through the long tunnels that connected the various hospital buildings.  Often we had to stop and rest or reassure him that it was going to be OK.  We always saw ourselves as trying to provide a safe space, a small sphere of normalcy, within which he could more easily walk through the corridors.  It was always good if the restaurant wasn’t crowded, and we’d try to find a table far enough away from others, because in the early days it was easy for him to believe that everyone there was talking about him.

It did change over time.  Lorraine insisted that the physical activity of the walk, as well as the possibility of moving through places that were not the ward, made a significant difference to Jon Eben’s state of being, and she was right.  The walks to the Summer Savoury and the time spent there eventually developed into walks outside the hospital and finally to day trips out to our house, until the time came early in the summer that he was able to leave the hospital for good.

The years since he was discharged have not been without incident or difficulty, but Jon Eben has prevailed over them all.  His present life as successful writer and editor, loving husband and father, and beloved brother and son is due in part to the professional care he has received and continues to receive from some caring and capable psychiatrists, counsellors, nurses, and other therapists, but it is also a tribute to his determination and courage and self-discipline and capacity for love. 

Today is March 11, and it is raining, but this evening Jon Eben will not be in the hospital like he was twelve years ago.  Instead he and S. will be going to a poetry reading featuring bill bissett, Steve McCaffery, and others, and tomorrow he’ll attend a Roundtable Discussion on Contemporary Poetics at a local art centre. 

His voice on the phone earlier was, as it always is, gentle and kind, and we are all grateful that he is starting his thirteenth year after that sudden onset of illness on March 11 1999 on such solid ground and in such good shape.  We are, as I have said before, all blessed by Jon Eben’s continued health and by his presence in our lives. He is our miracle.

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.

Season's Easing

Today is Saturday.  It is the weekend, though that fact means less, now that I am no longer engaged in fulltime work, than it used to; however, there is still a lightness to a Saturday that is different from other days of the week, perhaps a contact high I pick up when I am among regular working people enjoying their Saturdays, but a high nevertheless.  I used to feel it driving home from my school on a Friday afternoon; now I can’t always predict when it will come, but it is usually something I can count on, especially on a Saturday like this one.

For one thing it is March.  The sun is shining and the wind is out of the south.  It is the season of change where you first notice a palpable easing of the grip of winter.  It is not spring by any means, but there are days now when you can think of going outdoors in shoes instead of boots, where gloves become optional, where the car just seems to run with less effort, where the limitations of what is possible in winter begin to loosen, and you can begin to feel certain intimations of the possibility of what will come.

I miss the feel of Istanbul at this time of year; it’s still too early for the ihlamur and erguvan to be blooming there, but the dark melancholy of an Istanbul winter should be starting to lift right about now.  I can still feel it in the Japanese teapot on the table, which came from an eskici (seller of old things) in Ortakoy and puts me there in those back streets near the Bosphorus, the place mats and table cloth from our Armenian friend in Kapali Carsi (The Grand Bazaar), and the painting of a Bosphorus sea ferry on the wall, a birthday gift from a few years ago that still reminds me of the guy who sold them near the waterfront. 

You can feel the easing of the season outside as winter’s grip on water begins to loosen, allowing snow to sublimate and ice to shrink.  Lawns are starting to show that familiar dun colour of March with the faint hint of green that I always love seeing, and there is a slight rosy blur on the tips of bushes and the tops of birch trees.  If December indicated the descent of (or into) winter, then March may suggest an emergence from it.

The green tea I am drinking was a Christmas gift from X., a delightful IB student, and her gentle father who always served me a generous mug when I went to tutor her, and the tulips on the table that Kelly brought last weekend are in a vase that my great great great grandfather brought with him when he emigrated from England to Canada in the 1840’s.  It’s not clear what is so important to me about these small things, but there is something about the lightness and the easing of this first Saturday in March that allows me to notice and to cherish them.

We’re not going to visit Istanbul this spring, though we’ll certainly be thinking of that place, and we will pay attention here to that gradual loosening my old friend Williams has always reminded me of with his Spring and All:

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

                                                              [1923]

It is March, and the seasonal change marches on, just as the freedom fighters also march on toward Tripoli today.  Spring, we can hope, will mean better things for them and for our world.