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.

This is the this

It is, as some of you know, my birthday today, and I am now 66.  It is important to me not just because I am beginning my 67^th year today, but also because of this.  What this, you might well ask.  Well, this is the this, this page I am just now composing and will some time through the day today post on my blog so that you, whoever you are and wherever you might be, can read it if you choose.

Two years ago today I decide to write and post my first ever blog entry (you can check it out here if you want to).  It was titled “They say it’s your birthday”, and it was built around the fact that Lou Reed (67 today), a boy named Levi (4 today), and I (66 today) share this day, the understanding that Lou was (and likely still is) in a relationship with Laurie Anderson, memories of the albums I had just taken to a used record store, and the connections to a couple of old Beatles songs that were in my head that day (and still are today, though I am no longer 64).

This is Post #130 of that blog, which I called Field Days: A Miscellany.  I have just learned how to pronounce “miscellany” through one of the wonders of the internet where someone at a pronunciation site just said it for me, and miscellaneous really characterizes the contents of Field Days.  It is subtitled “A Day Book of Sorts”, and one of the things I have truly loved is the ability to write here about things that happen in a day (miscellaneous things) and take my attention sufficiently to get me writing or photographing or googling them and posting the results here.

I think that my blog posts are a bit like essays, in the original sense of the word, that is; they are essais, or attempts, to get at something through language.  One of the blessings in this endeavour is the ability to write of these things that have engaged me in the informal voice I am most comfortable with, a kind of conversation with the known or unknown you.  A further blessing of a blog is the ability to broaden the range of what can be written through the use of links, so that my side trips in exploring that thing or things that may end up ranging over the vast number of possible trails through the ether of the net can be shared.  And, finally, because I am such a happily visual being, I have the opportunity to include images, what the roving eye may see and try to hold onto with a small camera.

I know some of the people who read what I write here, either because they post comments in response or because I recognize their IP addresses or locations, but the majority who show up on my sitemeter are unknown to me.  I like that, the fact that my writing voice, my listening ear, and my scanning eye can be read, heard, and seen by others out in our wide networked world whenever they care to explore what is available here, and sometimes wonder why that person in Agawam, Massachusetts or Arlon, Luxembourg, or Broadmeadows, Australia dropped in for a visit and what s/he might have thought or felt.

So the subject of my 130^th post is not so much my birthday today, shared with Lou and Levi and family and friends, but the variousness of the world we live in and the things that take our (or, in this case, my) attention in it sufficiently to note them as they pass.  Composing a post for this blog has always been a great pleasure for me, and I always hope it may bring pleasure to you too. 

Happy (birth) day to you too, hope you have a great one!

February 28, 2011

It is eight in the morning on the last day of February.

The sky is clear and the harbour is calm.

It is minus twelve outside but there’s wood in the stove.

The sun is getting higher and warming the house.

The girls have got over their flu and Kelly’s tulips are opening.

There’s still snow for skiing.

But the flower garden kilim gives a nice hint of seasons that could be just around the corner.  Tomorrow a new month marches in.

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.

The Brilliance of Winter

Yesterday, the 7^th of February, was a beautiful winter day here in Ferguson’s Cove and in Halifax.  The sun shone, the official temperature rose to at least +2, and (and this is the important part for us here on the eastern coast) there was no wind, none at all.  It was the brilliance of winter.

Various of our friends are heading south to places where the sun may not be brighter, but the air and the ocean will be warmer and they can wear shorts and sandals and sunscreen and forget about winter weather, like today’s snowstorm, which has been slow and wet, but persistent.  I don’t blame them for wanting a break, but there is something wonderful about the winter brilliance of a day like yesterday, and it is something you run the risk of missing if you decide you need to escape winter.

Part of what makes a brilliant winter day so special is the clear and even blue of the winter sky without a wisp of cloud or even a vapour trail, and the matching deeper blue of the harbour below it, set off by the bright whiteness of the snow.

Then there’s the way the sun delineates the branches of the bare trees and creates traces of bluish shadows in the snow.

And the sun has started to climb noticeably higher in the sky where it can melt snow and ice off some of the surfaces like our walkway.

It even provokes early thoughts of possible spring, getting this young busker out balancing and juggling in front of his sidewalk drawing next to the library.

And the same sun has enticed this person, who is sensible enough (or, like me, old enough) to keep her coat on, to at least take off her gloves and read on a park bench in the snow.

On a day like yesterday there was no need for SAD light therapy; all you needed was to walk outside and look around.  The official temperature may have been only 1.7 degrees Celsius, but the fact that the sun rose at 07:26 and didn’t set until 17:32, and that there was no wind all day, gave it the kind of warmth and brilliance that made you realize that winter, no matter how beautiful, would not stay forever and that something special, like they say, could not be far behind.

Spring will spring up soon enough, but right now I just want to get out into more of that bright white winter.