Sparse Moments

Why Can't I Hear the Angels Sing? Part 1

2011-10-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

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Let me tell you a story.

I was 14. I had rejected God. I danced, 7 classes a week. I played piano and flute and was beginning to feel the tug of the guitar. I had recently fallen in love with Dylan, Donovan and folk rock. I was starting to write. I had a tenuous relationship with my parents.

My dad loved the war time music still. Not so much the jazz that lives today, but Tommy Dorsey and other white pretenders. He told me if I learned to play Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie, he’d buy me an organ.

I was motivated. I bought the sheet music and I practiced for months. It wasn’t easy for me, all those walking octaves – I had small hands with short fingers, the bane of any instrumentalist. I didn’t understand swing. I had a teacher who understood it well but couldn’t explain, just played for me, endlessly, as if osmosis would be good enough for a 14-year-old whose taste ran in a rather different direction. But I was motivated, and I learned the thing.

Dad brought home a rent-to-buy Hammond L100 with a built in Leslie. Man, that thing was sweet! I played hours every day. I reworked all my piano pieces to suit the organ. I learned favourite songs by ear. I made up stuff. I improvised. I got my friends on the phone, and played for them.

Then we had the fire. I was home alone and on the phone, playing organ for a friend. I smelled smoke, hung up, and ran around the house looking for the source. Smoke by then was pouring from the crack beneath the basement door. I made sure all the doors and windows were closed, just like I’d been trained, and ran next door to call the fire department and then my parents, some half-hour away at friends’.

The fire turned out to be mostly smouldering beams from a faulty new light fixture, but the smoke damage was extensive. We got to live in a hotel for a month on the insurance company’s dime, a snazzy downtown hotel, where I would go down to the dining room and order up anything flambé.

When we returned home, the organ was gone. The Bay had forgotten to bill Dad the rental, and I guess he didn’t want to pay the back charges, especially for a smoke-smelly organ. I don’t really know; he never explained.

Funny how a thing like that can hurt like hell, forty years later.

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Apropos of nothing in particular

2011-01-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

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Rick Steves is in Vancouver. We could catch the elevator with him, but he’s going down, and the auditorium is up. He’s eating a sandwich that smells of onions, and his face is clearly saying, “Please don’t get on the elevator with me.” So we don’t.

He’s taller than he looks on TV. A veritable giant. And his belly is bigger than the camera shows, he being in the full flush of middle age.

He sits cross-legged at the side of the stage while the KCTS9 Public Television director (or president or whatever high position she holds) offers a lengthy introduction. He rolls his neck, his prep (I presume) for his presentation. He’s in jeans and sports jacket, pretty much in line with the khakis and sports shirt of his TV shows. His hair is Ken-doll perfect, even though he has just self-tousled; it never changes: it doesn’t grow, and he doesn’t visit the barber. He is one of my heroes, alongside David Suzuki and Joni Mitchell and a couple of poets whose names don’t come to mind at the moment.

His talk is on the topic of his latest book, “Travel as a Political Act”. I am up for any heightening of the reasons for travel, so I’m all ears. He aims his comments at an American audience, and he apologises for that, well aware of the cultural differences between our two countries despite superficial similarities. He talks about the importance of broadening perspectives by travel, then bringing those new perspectives home. He compares European values with American values, European economy with American economy, Iranian fundamentalism with American fundamentalism, European drug laws with American drug laws. He is a master of not explicitly committing to opinion on what is better (though his opinion is clear), but stating over and over: ours is not the only way, and ours is not the better way—we need to consider alternatives. He complains about ethnocentrism and the policy of fear-mongering and the corporate motive that drives the American Way. He plugs public television at several junctures in his talk (public TV, of course, is paying his way here), calling it the thinking man’s alternative to the hysterical news coverage of commercial stations.

It was hard to go out on a Thursday night; we were tired beyond tired. But it’s a wonderful evening, gathered with a bunch of other aging PBS supporters cheering for liberal thinking. The talk is free, incidentally, but open only to donors.

This is apropos of nothing.

So.

Tonight I’m eating Purdy’s chocolates. Or, rather, tasting them. Most of them I don’t like. I’m of the “don’t eat calories you don’t absolutely adore” school, and I’m fussy about my chocolate. So I take a bite of something promising and if it’s full of some kind of fruity, too-sweet, creamy substance, I spit it out. I do not feel guilty about it. I have a pile, now, of a good half-dozen rejects. I’ve actually eaten two. I’m fed up with chocolate, and I return to my Minervois, an ever-smoother red wine from the southwest of France. Mmm Friday.

And this, too, is apropos of nothing.

Today was a Pro-D day. Professional Development. A requirement, as it should be. After twenty years of teaching, much of Pro-D seems a waste of time. Call me stuck in my ways or arrogantly presumptuous of my own creativity, I don’t care. Today, however, was stellar, as far as Pro-D days go. There were two one-to-two-hour workshops, a free lunch, and some meeting time.

The first workshop was given by an occupational therapist who works (on contract to the school board, I think) with a number of students in the school. She taught us about two types of exercise breaks for kids, one which engages the vestibular system and stimulates or energizes kids (and other humans) and another which engages the so-called proprioceptive system, and which help to calm and organize kids (and other humans), neurologically speaking. The vestibular system is located in the inner ear, those little hairs responsible for hearing and balance, and proprioception is about awareness of where parts of the body are in space, such as is tested by roadside cops when they ask you to touch your nose. We were led through a few exercises by the O.T., who was a thoroughly likeable presenter with good credentials. At the end we were asked to talk with our table-mates about how we might implement the exercises in our classrooms, while said O.T. circulated.

I asked her about the research that backed the information she conveyed. She admitted there wasn’t any, that there was a dearth of studies, that the evidence was pretty much anecdotal. I was not surprised, but I did appreciate her candor and that she was not offended by my question. Meanwhile, I have some googling to do—there must be SOMETHING, for god’s sake. Meanwhile, I am feeling smug about being a good skeptic.

Our team meeting was interesting, peppered with controversy. I love controversy, as long as it’s not personal, but others emerged from the meeting with adrenalin come-down, upset and wasted. Mine is the challenge to sort out a way to satisfy everyone. Not that that is possible.

The afternoon workshop was about a new and potentially extremely useful technological initiative in the district. Exciting.

I went shopping and bitching with Susan this evening. Can’t get enough of her. Now I’m blogging, apparently, while watching Discovery Channel, An Idiot Abroad.

And all this is apropos of nothing.

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The Skeptics' Guide to a Bit of Stuff

2010-11-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

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November 28, 2010

Outside my north-facing window, a steel cloud hovers like one of those mega-sized alien spacecraft that show up at the end of sci-fi movies. It’s as big as the neighbourhood, but there’s a little light sneaking underneath, and the day is brighter than most in November. Clumps of rotten snow huddle on the lawn from last week’s unseasonable flurries. The beech trees are budding out, already preparing for spring.

Last weekend, in the snow, I went to a taping of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, just up the way at UBC. I’ve been listening to these guys for at least two years now, my Sunday-morning-with-baguette breakfast treat. I don’t remember how I discovered the podcast, or why I turned to it, other than the intriguing name, but thus began the beginning of a change in my world view. I was always a skeptic, more or less, with the occasional wishful dipping into unscientific ideas, but now I require good solid double-blind-study, reproducible evidence, if I’m going to believe anything.

Steven Novella is the main host of the SGU. He’s an academic neurologist (Yale) who writes or contributes to numerous medical and skeptical blogs, including NeuroLogica, edits a couple of scientific journals, presides over the New England Skeptical Society, and posts the hour-long SGU podcast weekly. He has two young daughters, as best I can figure, whose science education he has undertaken since he finds the school system lacking in that regard. I don’t think he sleeps.

Steve’s little brothers, Bob and Jay, are on the SGU panel. Bob is pretty quiet, but brings a special interest in physics and astronomy to the table. Jay, the youngest, hippest brother, is a satirist who quips throughout the show. Also on the panel are Evan Bernstein, who seems to be the techie in the group, and Rebecca Watson, who also heads the Skepchick magazine and podcast, but who wasn’t present in Vancouver. Participating in the Vancouver show was George Hrab, who hosts another podcast, Geologica, and writes and performs skeptical songs. I find him abrasive, and his singing voice grating, but skeptics love him.

The format of the podcast begins with the news of the week, gathered from various scientific and media sources, often continues with a guest interview and listener questions, then includes a “Who’s that Noisy?”, in which the audience is asked to guess the content of a short audio clip, and a “Science or Fiction” segment where (usually) Steven sets up three scenarios and the panel members discuss and decide which of the three is the fiction. Somewhere in the show is a “This Day in History” bit, and a quote-of-the-week. The taping at UBC pretty much followed the regular format, with the Science or Fiction segment presenting research that all came out of UBC, which was fun. (Plus, I got it right, along with my seat neighbour and a very few other audience members, voting by applause, while all the panel members got it wrong!)

There is not a lot of point in recapping the entire show, as it will be put out on iTunes or the SGU website as soon as the gang is back home, I presume. But to give a taste of what these guys are about, if any of my four readers don’t know, one of the news items presented was about Oprah’s presentation of John of God. (There was a sizable snigger at the mention of Oprah, goddess of The Secret, the anti-vaccine movement, miracles, angels, and many other indefensible and often destructive flavour-of-the-day notions. Jay jumped up and cried, “Who loves Oprah?” Response: one guy cheered in irony.)

John of God is a Brazilian psychic surgeon. We’ve all heard of the Philippino psychic surgeons, I presume, and their debunking several years ago when “tumours” removed from clients proved to be chicken guts. John of God is different in that he appears to actually make an incision. Without sterile technique. Ack.

A skeptic doesn’t automatically deny the possibility that extraordinary claims are true, but rather asks questions and waits for answers produced by scientific (blinded, reproducible) study. As Steven Novella said in the program, John of God, with his extraordinary claims, will likely be exposed as a fraud, then Oprah will have him on the show and yell at him. We can’t say for certain yet that he is a fraud, as our only evidence is that every case of similar claims in the past has been proven to be so. The irony is that it is by Oprah’s publicity that researchers will be moved to investigate John of God.

Anyhow, Oprah says, “You be the judge,” then presents a documentary video. I’ll give you two videos and pose some questions, then you be the judge, how’s that?

Oprah:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9If9vSHQVQ

Skeptic James Randi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxMGxz6-oTs

Does John of God allow scientific analysis of the pieces of flesh he supposedly removes from his clients? What are the long-term health effects of his services, if clients substitute his treatment for conventional medical treatment? What is the evidence that people do not get infections in the incisions he makes; does the reporter do any followup with the clients? Why were we not shown Dr Jeffrey Rediger’s response to the question posed at 3:37 on the video? How do we know that the people in the Oprah video are not shills for John of God? The reporter says he went to John of God looking for proof of the existence of god, and that he found it; is this not confirmation bias?

As a skeptic, I do not accept anecdotes as evidence for anything. People are notoriously poor observers and memory is remarkably faulty. People who say that “alternatives” to conventional medicine are not studied–because “big pharma” would lose money, or some other such conspiracy theory–are not actually looking at the literature.

If you like this stuff, I recommend the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, the James Randi Educational Foundation, Brian Dunning, and Science-Based Medicine, just for starters. A search for skeptics and skepticism (“with a ‘k’”, as they say) will bring up many blogs, websites and podcasts. In the end, weigh it all up, and judge for yourself.

“When you are studying any matter never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficial social effects if it were believed. Look only and solely at what are the facts.”

. ~ Bertrand Russell

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Pilot’s Log

2010-11-11T21:31:00.000-08:00

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“Nothing but sea seen” - F/L E.J. Mullins, August 5, 1942

My dad was twenty-one when he made that jaunty entry in the first of many Air-Sea-Rescue missions flown with 280 Squadron out of Detling, near Maidstone, Kent, England. The entries grew more terse. “Nothing”, “Empty”, “Nil”.

I have no idea how he felt at the time, about all these “nil” rescues, because he never talked about them. When I read his entries in his meticulously recorded pilot’s log, I feel hopeless.

Every year, on the day before the Remembrance Day holiday, I take Dad’s log book, his photos, and his medals into school. My students cluster around. They think it’s all pretty cool.

A friend of mine posted on facebook the other day, a photo of his grandfather taken at Pearl Harbour just before the Japanese attack. Some of us are here by the skin of our teeth, or our fathers’ teeth.

My ideas of my father’s service time were fuzzy, when I was growing up. I knew he was stationed in Britain, then in Ceylon. I knew he had a silk aviator’s scarf that was a gift from an English girl whose family he had helped. He had a butterfly collection from Ceylon. Mom, in reference to the butterflies, talked about “his boy” who collected them, and there was disdain in her voice, but when I asked about the boy, neither Mom nor Dad would answer.

A few years ago I searched for my dad online, and I found him. I had forgotten about his pilot’s log, but I had had the good sense to keep it, at least, and I dug it out of one of very few boxes I have left that represent my parents. There were dates of missions online. They matched Dad’s log. The record keeping is impressive.

My favourite part of Dad’s log book is the transit flight in June 1943 from England to join 160 Squadron (R.A.F.) in Ceylon. He accomplished it in eight legs, a total of forty-nine hours and forty-five minutes. That’s hard to imagine, at today’s speeds. He flew a Liberator (Americans would call it the B24) from England to Gibralter, then to Libya, then Cairo, then to Habbaniya, Iraq, then Karachi, India, then Madras, then to Colombo, Ceylon.

Three days after he arrived in Colombo, Dad reports a fighter affiliation in which his aircraft lost a wing tip. The following week, he was flying reconnaisance over Nicobar, an island in the Bay of Bengal that had been occupied by the Japanese since March, 1942. These guys did not get much reprieve.

Robert Quirk maintains the website at http://rquirk.com/ where I found my dad’s name. I emailed Robert, and sent him some photos which he then posted there. He in turn sent me some photos of Liberator “J” FL 926. Dad flew that plane six days before it “failed to return”. By the skin of my teeth, am I here.

My dad’s photos: http://rquirk.com/160files/mullins/mulphoto.html

E.J. Mullins is 2nd from right, back row.
It's worth clicking and enlarging, to admire their knees, if nothing else.

The History Channel is great tonight, but it’s all about Normandy. There are no books about the troops in Ceylon, nor movies. Sometimes I feel like the only one in the world who even knows about that part of the war, save for Robert Quirk and the few survivors of 160 Squadron. The old boys meet once a year, still, and one small dream of mine is to be able to attend. I guess I’d better do it soon.

Anyhow. I’ve written about this before, but each year it comes to the forefront of my mind. “Lest we forget” becomes more imperative as we lose the people that fought the “great” war. I remember thinking, when I was a teenager, that it was about time for another major war; there had been twenty years between the world wars, and now it was twenty years on. (There was the Viet Nam war, which figured hugely in our culture, but Canadians were not involved.) We are the first generation in several to know life without war. Our children—they have no clue how lucky we are.

I have a love-hate relationship with Remembrance Day. It makes me remember, and it makes me remember.

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Upgrading some old posts

2010-10-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

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I'm couch-ridden at the moment, with a back in spasm. A good time to add some photos and links to the summer posts. Check out our first day in Paris, with photos previously unpublished.

Link: Perfect First Day in Paris

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Travel, the Nitty-Gritty: Part II: Health

2010-10-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

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Here it is, the long-promised (if not awaited— no, I would not assume anyone was on tender-hooks about this) piece on travel and health.

Travel Medical Insurance

If you are old or old-ish, which I am, you would probably be wise to have overseas health-care coverage. Check your extended health policy carefully. A few years ago, we paid for an add-on travel insurance policy with Blue Cross, only to discover later that we’d been covered all along, on our regular policy. You can’t count on BC Med (you BC residents—and I would imagine it’s the same in other provinces) to cover out-of-province expenses. Even with travel medical insurance, expect a hassle if you should need to use it; you may need to pay up front and collect from your insurer later. This said, I am no expert on these things; I just feel more comfortable travelling with insurance.

If you are young (and I refrain from quips about the definition of young—and dependence—here), you will probably travel without insurance and just call on Mommy and Daddy to bail you out if anything happens. (Oops, I think I just quipped.)

‘Nuff. Insurance is boring.

Digestion

Now we’re getting interesting….

Expect some, ur, digestive disturbances when you travel. Is it the sitting on a plane for the better part of a day that clogs you up, or the dehydrating atmosphere, or the pre-fab food they serve you? Who knows, but clogged you will likely be, for a day or two. Not a big deal, really. Not nearly so big a deal as when things go in the other direction.

Diarrhea! It hits suddenly, and it has no respect for your circumstances. And your circumstances are that you may not have easy access to toilets. Or the toilets you have access to, say, on a train, may be shared with other diarrhetic travellers. Need I say more?

Thank science for Immodium. It works. Quickly. One dose, for me, usually does the trick. I’m not talking about diarrhea caused by an infection such as giardia, which might not respond to a drug like Immodium, but for the every-day brand of traveller’s diarrhea brought on by—who knows?—a change in diet, different water, the dirty carrots at the juice vendor, Immodium is fantastic. Don’t leave home without it. It’s available at pharmacies in Europe, when your supply runs out. I carry a six-pouch with me ALWAYS, in my purse or day pack.

Feet, the Shoes

Walking is the name of the game when you’re travelling. You walk everywhere, if you want to see anything. There are buses, cabs, and subways in cities, but you’ll miss half the city if that’s how you get around. Outside of cities, the only way to explore is by walking. So plan to walk.

I discovered rocker soles a year ago, in Las Vegas, in the form of Skechers Shape-ups They were a new thing then, and I hadn’t seen them in Canada, but was interested in their claims that walking in them tones up the legs and posterior. I asked the salesperson what I could expect from them, and she told me I would get relief from lower back pain (which I’ve suffered from since my second pregnancy). I asked when, and she said right away. It was true! I tried a pair, and I had no pain. None! Instantly! I bought them, and have worn little else since. When I wear “regular” shoes, back pain; with these, none, no matter how long I’m on my feet. I don’t really buy the claim that they help you tone up, but I suppose since I can walk longer and faster on these things, the toning happens anyway.

For my travelling summer, I needed sandals with the same sole, and found them at a local specialist shoe store (Foot Solutions on Broadway near Macdonald, for anyone interested). Several companies are now making shoes with the rocker sole, so there is plenty of choice. The look is not great—clunky, with that fat sole—but that takes a distant second place to comfort, in my mind. One day in Paris, I decided to wear my daintier suede Tivas (still a “comfort shoe”), to look better with my dress, and I regretted the decision within half an hour. Not good, on a six-hour walking day.

Feet, the Skin

A side effect of hours of walking every day, for me, was the development of callouses on my feet. I’ve never really had a problem with callouses (though I know some people do), so I didn’t pay much attention. Several weeks into the trip, I noticed the ball of my right foot feeling a little tender, and found that a sizable callous had kind of folded over on itself. I sought out a pharmacy for something to shave down the callous. I could only find a pumice stone, which was better than nothing, and I began a regime of soaking and pumicing the callous. Once in Paris, however, a small fissure opened. Ouch! I soaked and softened it, and put on antibiotic cream and a bandaid and got serious about finding a callous-shaver, which I finally did. Because I caught it early, the fissure healed quickly. Two months later, however, I still have a crevice in the spot, and am probably vulnerable to a recurrence; essentially, I managed to ruin that part of my foot. I have added the shaver, which is a specialised razor-thingy with an actual razor blade in it, to my list of must-takes. And I will not ignore my feet any more.

Feet. The key to happy travelling. Huh.

Blogging and soaking in Paris

Weight Control and Fitness

Most women I know, myself included, gain weight when we travel. Our usual combination of tricks for weight control—keeping junk food out of the house, eating at home rather than out, sticking to simple, healthy food, eating to satisfy actual hunger—is not an option, and the food, oh the food, begs to be tried. Screams to be tried! You have to have Paris’s best ice cream! Several times! Baguettes, cheese, foie gras! Rosé wine for lunch! To travel is to eat.

Part of my problem, if I can call it that, is that because eating interrupts the activities of the day as much as being part of them, when John needs to eat, I eat too. If I didn’t, we’d have to stop again in an hour. This means I’m eating before I’m actually hungry, and eating more often than I need to.

Exercise is the other side of weight control, of course, and in that travelling is stellar. There is not a whole lot of sitting around on a trip. We could feel our fitness levels increasing on this trip; in the beginning, climbing the stairs to Ezra and Katharina’s apartment was strenuous, while several weeks later, we could trot up the escarpments to Cathar strongholds.

So. Stepping on the scales when I got home might have been traumatic, but . . . I’d gained about a pound (.6 kilo, Ezra). Wahooo! A pound is nothing; my weight has a 3-pound day-to-day variation anyhow. I lost that extra pound in a week. Whew.

I credit the walking, mainly. I also credit picnicking for at least one meal of the day, rather than eating in a restaurant. Also, I got quite tired of French food (!), and was tending to eat fewer “viandes” and more salads by the end. And remember the salad meals in Berlin! It all added up to a healthy trip without an appreciable weight gain.

But traveller beware: it’s easy to “let go”, and paying later is always painful, long after that fine Isle St Louis glace is forgotten.

When I was young, sometime back in the neolithic era, I didn’t think at all about health concerns, and certainly didn’t prepare for eventualities. I once spent a few days squatting over a hand-dug hole on a Mexican beach, after enjoying carrot juice in a local market. I never got sore feet. I couldn’t gain weight to save my life, I was so active in my regular life. Now that I’m old-ish (or old, depending on your perspective), I carry drugs and appliances to keep me going. I can live with that, and I can travel!

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Travel, the Nitty-Gritty: Part I: Packing

2010-09-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

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note: all photos were taken as I unpacked

I think I pretty much have it down. I went to Europe for 5½ weeks with a carry-on wheeled suitcase, a small day pack, and a tiny purse. I would not have had to check my baggage, but opted to do it since there were stop-overs in three airports, both ways, and I didn’t want to be lugging it around when the airlines could be taking care of it.

A note to the skeptical: you can travel light, and in fact you must. You need to be able to walk with all your baggage between hotels, train stations, car rentals, airports. You need to be able to carry your own luggage upstairs for as many as six storeys. If you can’t, you might find yourself unpacking on the ground floor and carrying your stuff upstairs in sections, six storeys per trip. Elevators are scarce, unless, of course, you pay a few limbs for your hotel rooms. You also need to be able to get your bags on and off trains, in one go, in a narrow space with several high steps, a crowd at your back, and three minutes till the train leaves. You need to be able to negotiate the ups and downs of city subways. Next time, I’d like to go lighter still, if I can figure out a way.

The bags, fully loaded (the cup is placed for scale):

Main Bag

Less than half of my main bag is taken up by clothes. I’ve come ro realize that the variety I feel I need at home is unnecessary while travelling, since no one sees me more than once, generally. My credo is “one to wear, one to wash”—therefore, two pants, two teeshirts, etc. A week’s worth of underwear so as not to be hand-washing too often. Beyong the basics, it’s hard to plan. We arrived in Berlin in a heatwave (36° C.), and all I wanted to wear was little cotton dresses, so I bought a couple of little cotton dresses. I bought a couple more in the south of France. I couldn’t have predicted that, and it easily could have been sweaters that I needed. As it was, I used everything I packed (at least several times) except a pair of yoga pants I took for cool evenings at “home”.

Winter clothes take up more room, of course, but an option would be to wear the bulkier items, rather than pack them.

What takes up the rest of the space in my baggage confounds even me: books, cosmetics, electronics. It all seems ridiculous, and much of it didn’t even exist when I was first travelling.

The main trick to packing well: compartments. I have packing cubes, three of which are designed to fit snugly in my carry-on if I were to use them all for clothes, which I don’t. I roll my clothes into two rolls and fit them into the largest packing cube (and wrinkles are minimal!). One of the two smaller cubes I use for underwear, sleepwear, scarves, and the other I use for miscellaneous necessities like a laundry line, blow dryer, mini umbrella, etc. Outside the packing cubes I have a well-designed, multi-pocketed toiletries bag (mine is from Rick Steves), books (travel guides and pleasure-reading), and two pairs of sandals. (Yes, two. One pair has “rocker” soles, in which I can walk for hours without lower back pain, and another in which I cannot, but which look better with a dress.)

The main bag, opened:

The clothes cube, plus sandals:

The clothes, unrolled:

Small cube, unloaded (the other small cube is just underwear, sleep wear, and a mesh laundry bag):

Secondary bag (which acts as a day pack once away):

My little day pack holds more books, the laptop, a really tiny down-filled travel pillow (which I use for between my knees at night, the only way I can sleep comfortably), a hoodie, and an emergency cosmetic kit in case my luggage gets held up—which happened a few years ago, resulting in my having to buy hair products I didn’t really want, a toothbrush I didn’t really want, etc., to tide me over. The little pack also holds cameras and other electronics I either can’t fit in the big bag or don’t want to entrust to baggage handlers. Security has a field day with my small bag—at one airport I forgot to empty out all the electronics. Oh boy.

The secondary bag, exploded (the laptop isn't shown, but it fits):

Again, compartments. I have a nylon bag for all my electronics cords, and within that, ziplocks labelled for each type: camera cords, battery-charging cords, computer cords, GPS and cord, and of course a couple of adapter plugs. I didn’t, for once, end up with a tangled mess to sort several times a day. (Note: you probably won’t need a voltage converter, as most (all?) electronics are made to work with a range of voltage. Check your devices’ labels.)

Cords!:

Purse

This is the first time I've actually carried a little shoulder bag, and it worked out well, more convenient (and slightly more elegant?) than always having a backpack. I still carry my essential documents and larger sums of money in a money belt.

The contents of purse and money belt, as carried in Paris:

Cosmetics

My skin turns into an angry adolescent if I don’t take particular care of it, so I do take a few products—no soap-and-water for this face. I once bought an “airline kit” of small jars and bottles, and I use those exclusively for my lotions and potions. To figure out how much to take of, say, hair conditioner, I literally squirted a day-sized blob into a bottle, 38 times for 38 days. The system worked; I neither ran out nor had more than a few days’ worth left over of anything. I’ll no longer need to count, as I now know the bottle size to take for a trip of a month or so, and the bottles are so small, it wouldn’t be worth going smaller still for shorter trips.

The toiletries bag, exploded:

I use solid shampoo, available at Lush, which is wonderful—high lather and glorious scent—a single disk of which lasts at least a month for two of us. For the rest, I divided my little bottles into 3 small ziplocks (have I said anything about compartments?), one for day, one for night, one for make-up (which I hardly used). The ziplocks held only a few items each, and just made it easier to manage the little bottles.

I have always found it a nuisance, when moving from place to place, to set out shower supplies and put them away on a daily basis, so I developed a system that works like a charm. I have a small wire-mesh basket (I’ve tried plastic, but water sits in the bottom. This one I got at London drugs—I think it’s meant for organizing kitchen drawers.) containing the following: solid shampoo (on a tiny soap-saver, because the shampoo dissolves quickly if it stands in water), conditioner, comb, soap, razor, face-wash (two kinds, for my fussy skin). I wrap the whole works in a quick-dry towel (made for wrapping wet hair, I think) and pack it as-is. Upon arrival, I unwrap it, stick the whole basket in the shower, and I’m ready to go. Packing up is just as easy. The towel is good for emergencies, too, in places where towels are not exactly abundant.

A close-up of the contents of the cosmetic bag and the mesh basket:

Going lighter still

I think the iPad (or similar device) might be the new answer to packing light. Theoretically, it will replace books, guidebooks, maps, laptop, and phone. (I don’t take a phone travelling, but some people do.) Unfortunately, it became available just a couple of weeks before I left on this trip, and when I checked it out, some books I wanted (Lonely Planet, Rick Steves) were not available for the device. Next time, I hope.

I’m sure I have bored many a reader (all three of you!) with this entry, but it’s here for my own reference, really. Packing isn’t hard, but the planning of what and how to pack is. This will serve to remind me, and, with luck, may be helpful to others.

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Not Quite the Last Word

2010-09-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

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... should have posted this a month ago...

Saturday, August 14, 2010.

I’m tired of writing the travelogue thing. Here’s a list of our activities over the last days:

Tues. John not feeling well; hung out at home, cooked dinner (chicken), Eiffel Tower by night

Wed. Anne not feeling well. Museums day 1: Rodin, Pompidou - dinner in Rue Rosiers (Marais)

Thurs. Museums Day 2: Louvre, Orangerie - to Montmartre for dinner and evening

Fri. Museums Day 3: Orsay, Cluny (just Anne, to the latter)

Sat. Walk to Isle de la Cité, line to Notre Dame tower too long, ice cream, Saint Chapelle, walk to Arene de Lutece, Mosquée de Paris, Rue Mouffetard, home

The “not feeling well” was a bit of stomach upset. More on that later, along with foot care (guaranteed to be an exciting post).

We bought a four-day museum pass, which must be used on consecutive days, so we had to start Wednesday so as to keep our last day, Sunday, open. I’m quite sure there used to be a three-day pass, which would be about perfect. Now there are two-day, four-day and six-day passes. A driven sight-seer could get by on a two-day pass for €36, but to make it worth the price, you’d have to visit four to six museums, and I don’t see how you could do any of them justice at that pace. The four-day pass is €48, pricey to say the least, but it paid for itself. One advantage is that passholders skip the long line-ups at most museums.

So, we’ve had four days of Museum City. The list is above (day four being Saint Chapelle)

I’ve been to most of these museums before. I remember the artworks. I remember the emotional resonance. And I remember the frenzy around certain pieces (notably, the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, both in the Louvre). What I had forgotten was the trance state inspired by artwork (and their homes, once away from the frenzy).

We grew up in churches and temples where we were told to hush. We grew up with librarians who shushed us. We know about the hush of certain places. All the world knows, it seems, because there are still certain places where people just shut up, no matter who they are. Art museums are among those places.

The Pompidou Center is a multi-purpose building whose fourth and fifth storeys hold a modern art museum. You ride the escalator, on the outside of the building, up and up, and enter the hush. The ceilings are high, the hallways wide. Everything not art is white, which seems to disappear. The first piece, facing you from the wall as you enter, is a 3-D rendering of a fairytale-cum-electronic-age woman’s dress. Huge, like nearly everything here. La Jaconda (the Mona Lisa), a mere 77cm high, would be lost in these galleries. And she wouldn’t have a lot to say.

Art has moved (a long time ago, now) from the realm of beauty to the realm of statement. Maybe art always made a statement, but from my perspective the message of very old art is unclear, while the beauty is paramount.

The art of the Pompidou is about statement, apparently to shed a light upon our existence. There is a room of films projected on the wall, one of which is of a woman who beheads a chicken then holds its body by the feet for several minutes while it flaps and spews blood all over her naked body. Several people watch from a bench in the room, transfixed. Other films in the room are similarly disquieting.

I went looking for the huge tryptic by Francis Bacon, in front of which I had sat and taken photos, with myself in reflection, back in 2004. The Bacons have been moved, so the same reflection shots with the better camera were not an option, though I got what I could.

The other piece I remember from that last visit was a multi-sensory installation of a mass of cinnamon balls hanging in long nylon tubes. It was a little past its prime, even back then, so it was no surprise that it was now gone. In its place—its place in memory, at least—is a room of “sound” pieces, the best of which is a pair of stringed boards on the wall, electronically charged so that a hanging ball struck them at erratic intervals. People passing through were impatient, and swumg the ball into the strings, bringing the guard running. I imagine that particular guard spent much of his daily shift running. Ne touchez pas!

By the time we left the Pompidou, I was completely spaced out, transported. The cavernous rooms, the reverberating sound, the surreal art—who knows what creates that sensation. I only hope the people working in that environment don’t hop in a car to drive home at the end of six or eight hours—it wouldn’t be safe.

*****

I wrote most of the above on August 14, two days before leaving Paris. Then I ran out of steam. Now, today, September 19, I just want to get it posted. I will, hopefully, write about the other museums in detail at a later date.

August 15th, Sunday, Paris rained. We stayed in, other than to go for dinner at the Restaurant Polidor, a wet walk away. It didn’t seem quite right to hang out in an apartment in . . . Paris. That we did was a sure signal that we had had enough. We were ready to go home.

August 16th, the taxi arrived at 4:00 a.m. Sixty euros later, we were at the airport. Fifteen hours after that, home. Vancouver, pleasantly sunny, with the most comfortable air of anywhere I’ve been.

The trip over, there is still a lot to process. I’ve been lazy about writing, but I will get down to finishing what I’ve started, bit by bit. In the past month I haven’t written, but I’ve gone through the more than 3000 photos and several hours of video. John comes up from his music cave to find me grinning at the computer, and he knows I’m back in France, reliving some amazing moments.

Quintessential Paris

2010-08-13T15:07:00.001-07:00

Paris, Day 2

2010-08-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

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Monday, August 9, 2010

We got off to a slow start, which was fine. When the trip is so long (almost six weeks), there has to be downtime; some you build in, some you just take because you feel like it.

We cooked breakfast (again) in the apartment. We’re finding it a huge advantage to not be in a hotel. We discovered the “Grande Epicerie” of the Bon Marché, just two blocks from here, which is about as large a gourmet food store anyone could hope for. There is an artisanal chocolates section, an artisanal bread section, a deli section with jewel-like containers of prepared sides and salads, a fromagerie, a boucherie, beautiful stands of fresh fruit and vegeatables, and aisles and aisles of wines and waters, crackers and condiments. It is as much fun shopping there as it is to eat out. Eating at home, a couple of meals a day, will be quite welcome.

Months ago I had discovered a bar/café in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris that hosts slam poetry, in English, Monday nights, so we had planned to go, excited to find an English literary scene here. We planned this day around that. It seemed logical to do some Right Bank exploring, shopping and dining, since that would be on the way to the slam.

We walked, again, happy to keep up our routine of hours of walking each day. Along the way, we came across Saint Sulpice, and dropped in. The church is famous for a number of things: it has a magnificent organ and a reknowned organist (last time I was here, I happened to hear him practicing when I came in—what a treat!); it has two major paintings by Delacroix; and it figures in “The DaVinci Code” in an imaginitive connection with the rose line in the church (a brass inlay across the trancept that indicates the Greenwich Meridian). It is a great grey block of a Romanesque church, simple, even dingy, on the inside. The Delacroix pieces were enormous. The organ was silent, but I hope to return on Sunday to hear it.

We made our way to the right bank, right up to Les Halles, which was once the central covered market of the city (hence the name), but is now a monster of a shopping mall that feels not unlike the metro, dark, dirty, labyrinthine. John needed (needed!) to check out FNAC, the French answer to Virgin or HMV. I looked in clothing stores but they were mostly chains I could shop at in Vancouver.

We emerged (had to actually jump a fence to get out, as the door we’d found that said exit was locked) from that dungeon and walked up to Rue Montorgueil, one of Paris’s many pedestrian-only market streets. We stopped in a café for a drink and to rest before heading to a restaurant I had pre-selected for dinner. Along the way, we happened upon the Pompidou Center, the site of a major modern art gallery, the building itself a modern work of art. It’s workings are all on the outside, so that it is a scaffolding of pipes and escalators to look at. The square at the building’s side is sloped cobbles, and there were hundreds of people sitting there as if it were a beach, just chatting and looking at the building. We joined them, waiting for the magic hour of 7:00, when most restaurants open.

The restaurant was closed. For the month of August. Many, many shops in Paris are closed in August. I didn’t notice it the last time I was here in August, probably because we pretty much stuck to the tourist zones, where it pays to stay open. In the neighbourhood of our apartment, though, what should be a bustling Rue Cherche-Midi feels abandonned. Some shops are open, but not most. Poilane, with it’s famous bread, is open, but the notable local chocolatier is not. The boucheries are closed, and even some restaurants sport hand-printed signs welcoming customers back on August 28th.

They are all in the Dordogne, I swear.

Anyhow, we went to plan B, which was to eat at Le Loup Blanc in Rue Tiquetonne. Susan and her family had stayed in an apartment above it a couple of years ago, and they had enjoyed it. It has an unusual menu in which you choose a main course and up to four accompaniments. I had chicken (desperate not to eat any more lamb just now, or duck, or veal, or any other rich thing I seldom eat at home), a carrot purée and a little salad with a scoop of mustard ice cream on the top. Mustard ice cream! It worked really well with the cabbage of the salad. It ranked up there with the tomato and chili sorbet I’d had in Domme. Also on the menu was a small notice saying the restaurant was a member of the Gay Business Association. When John visited the bathroom, he was intrigued to find innumerable post-it notes covering the mirror, inviting men for encounters. There were posters of naked men and pamphlets advertising gay-related events. If John ever switches teams, he’ll know where to go. We ended up glad for August and annual holidays, glad plan A had fallen through.

We’d made it three days without riding the metro, but now it was time to give our legs a break. We rode out to Belleville and set about finding the bar for our poetry. I had anticipated it might be confusing coming up from the metro (it’s hard to tell what direction you’re facing when you exit, and the maps don’t help as there are often several exits on various corners of a major intersection, but only one marked on the map), so I had brought along the GPS. I switched her to pedestrian mode, but she balked. We headed off on Boulevard de Belleville, not realizing we actually needed RUE de Belleville. I knew within a couple of blocks that something wasn’t right. It was getting dark. We were sweaty and nervous. We asked at a newsstand, but the clerk pointed us in what seemed to be the wrong direction. We walked back to the Metro and re-tried, this time heading up the hill (I was sure it would be down), on Rue de Belleville, GPS encouraging us. Finally we found the place. Lots of people out on the concrete, no one inside. We asked the waiter about the poesie, and he told us . . . not for the month of August. Never mind that I had looked up the program TODAY, and there appeared to be a scheduled slam for TODAY. Discouraged, disappointed, we slunk back down the hill, by lively cafés and crowds that had had better luck with their evenings.

Getting on the metro, a family—grandparents, mother, two kids—arrived just in front of us. We were stunned to see the adults encouraging the kids to slip through and then jumping the gates themselves, avoiding paying. There were officials in the ticket booth in plain sight, ignoring the scene. The family got on the same car as us and started up some loud arguing with each other and with other riders, while the little girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, came around and begged money with puppy-dog eyes and prayer hands. No one gave her anything. My mantra in these situations: watch your stuff. I have seen pickpockets in action in Paris, and this was the perfect ploy, so much distraction.

The metro stops half a block from our apartment, a relief at the end of a long day. We hauled ourselves up the hundred stairs and collapsed.

Some days are just what you envision. Others turn out differently. They are all good.

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A Perfect First Day in Paris

2010-08-11T04:17:00.000-07:00

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Sunday, August 8, 2010

We wanted to walk.

Down the exactly 100 steps to the street, Rue de Regard, and off to Jardins de Luxembourg. A sunny day, with a few clouds, warm. The pond yachts were just getting launched by kids with their long poles. Weathered hardwood hulls and faded sails have plied these waters for decades. Still the kids’ faces light up as their boats speed across the pool to the duck house, as the wind fills the little sails and turns the boats back to the concrete and another push with the pole. They are keeled and balanced just right, these boats, to turn and return. Today, no grandmothers wading out for the rescue.

We continued through the garden towards the Pantheon, then turned to walk by the the University of Paris at Sorbonne, one of the original universities, thriving since the mid-eleventh century. From there we continued to the Latin Quarter.

We had been walking in quiet lanes, few people about, and we could hear the rumble of crowds as we approached Rue de la Harpe, the spine of the Latin Quarter, lined with brasseries and trinket stores. We merged with the hordes, became them, bought trinkets! And donairs! I wanted to check the schedule at Caveau des Oubliettes and Caveau de la Huchette. Both programs were disappointing, so if we go, it will be for the atmosphere, not for the music.

Food as art in the Latin Quarter

We emerged onto the quay just at Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore, famous one-time haven for expat writers and artists. I had to have another shot of myself there, world-travelling writer, yep. I asked about readings, but they have pretty much stopped for the month of August, which in France is considered by many a holiday month.

Across Quai de la Tournelle are the bouquinistes, the little metal stalls where booksellers have been plying their wares for centuries. Most of them are more trinket-vendors now, but some hold steadfast to their historical purpose, carrying antique books and old newspapers. Notre Dame Cathedral serves as their backdrop. We’re in Paris!!

As we were about to cross, all traffic was brought to a halt by police. It was the beginning of the weekly rollerblade parade. It seemed to take ten minutes to pass; they were coming for as far as we could see. There were all types of people skating, all sizes and ages, interspersed by police also on rollerblades. Finally the end came, trailed by several ambulances-in-waiting.

Several artists were painting by the Pont de l’Archevoche. We stopped to look at the ink-and-water-colour work of one old man, small pieces that seemed to typify Parisian street drawings. I bought two, surprised at the low, €15 price. Woo hooo! Trinkets AND art!

We crossed the bridge, stopping to take yet more photos of the most-photographed view of Notre Dame, buttresses flying, the Seine in the foreground. We turned onto the Pont St Louis, wormed our way through a crowd watching a street-clown, past an accordion player and onto Ile St Louis for a couple of boules of the famous Berthillon ice cream. The pistachio! With pieces of nut in it! NOT bright green! To die for!

Street Performer on Pont Saint-Louis

The ubiquitous accordion player

Businessman with Berthillon

We sat on a wall by the Seine to savour, then continued back over the pont to Notre Dame. We walked around the cathedral to the front, amazed at its size, which just can’t be conveyed in photos. We had no intention to go in today, which was good, because the line up curled up to the end of the Place and back on itself.

We headed back to the Rive Gauche via Pont St Michel and stopped for a café on Boulevard St Germain, shady under leafy trees, noisy with many lanes of traffic.

There was a little market set up nearby, selling imported crafts; Russian nesting dolls, amber, Indonesian batik. One stall had a rainbow of sandals, handmade with knotted cotton cord. John convinced me to buy a pair, since they were so unique. Trinkets and art and shoes, oh my!

Hand made–in Thailand!

I stopped into a pharmacie to get a callous-shaving tool (more on foot care in a later blog, can ya hardly wait?). A man with a thick New York accent was asking where he could find a Starbucks. In Paris!

“In New York, I won’t go near a Starbucks, I won’t even use their bathrooms.”

“Then why here in Paris?” I asked.

“We have much better coffee than Starbucks,” said another customer, a Parisienne.

“Well, when I want a good iced drink, they know how to make it,” he said, though how he would know that if he never goes in, I have no idea.

There was a Starbucks just down the street, but it was closed, it being Sunday. “All of Paris is closed on Sunday!” NY proclaimed. “You show me where I can get a good coffee.”

“The best cafés in the world are just on the corner.” said Parisienne.

“Yeah,” I chimed in, “the most famous cafés in Paris.” We were just across the boulevard from Café Le Flore and Les Deux Magots, the one-time haunts of Hemmingway, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and others.

Parisienne took him outside and pointed to the cafés. NY headed off, wife in tow. The man at the cash asked me if I was with them. “NO!” I said, “Absolument non!” Everyone in the store was shaking their heads.

The whole exchange was a priceless accidental encounter.

We made our way up Rue du Cherche Midi to home for a well-needed rest.

The "other" tower: Tour Monparnasse, as seen from Saint-Germaine

Rue de Cherche Midi, with Velo station (rental bikes) in foreground

*****

I wanted to go over to Rue Mouffetard for dinner, specifically to Rue Pot de Fer, a tiny lane lined with restaurants where we had eaten a couple of times when we visited in 2004. I handed navigation over to John. The routes are rarely straight, the rues change names every block or two, and the smaller roads are not named at all on the maps produced for tourists. We took some unplanned turns, but arrived, quite by accident, at the top of Rue Pot de Fer; couldn’t have planned it better.

The meal at La Fontaine was straight-forward, a relief after the rich, complex meals of the Dordogne. A salad (without meat!), some chicken and veg, creme brulée. After dinner (it was 11:00 by this time), we wandered up the party that is Rue Mouffetard by night, and crossed the city to home. There were walkers everywhere; such a safe place to be, despite the hour.

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Good-bye Gîtes, Hello Paris

2010-08-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

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Catching up: two days here, two days to come....

(And apologies for typos in the past posts; it's only once in a while that I remember to spell-check. Everything's fixed in my own copy, but it's unlikely I'll go back to fix errors in the blog.)

Friday, August 6

By Friday, the last full day in our gîtes, we had slowed completely. We lazed around most of the morning (well, I wrote some eight pages of blog, so maybe that is not exactly lazing), then went just down the road to the Grotte de Cougnac, a relatively small cave with paleolithic paintings. The cave has two accessible sections, the first with stunning stalactite/stalagmite formations (never knew the rock could have so many colours!) and the second with the ancient paintings. We were in a group of about twenty, which seems standard, and there were a number of children along, which is also normal (lucky kids!).

The paintings were breathtaking, once again. It is not possible for a photograph to do them justice, as it is the way the painter has used the formations of the cave wall that is most impressive. The animals on the postcards are flat, but those in the caves are three-dimensional, and they move as the light source moves. It is the most eerie thing to see.

The tour was in French, the young guide speaking at Tour de France pace, and the kids (and their parents) were chattering throughout. By this time, the third cave, however, we pretty much knew what information was to be had. What I learned from this particular tour was how to sort out the various animals portrayed from the jumble of lines of overlapping images. I loved it.

We had to return John’s rented guitar to Sarlat, so we decided to have our last Dordogne dinner there; for me, it’s the kind of town I can’t get enough of. It’s big enough that you can escape the tourists, big enough to get lost in (like Venice, in a way), big enough to have plenty to keep you occupied. We chose a place recommended in the Michelin Green Guide (it’s hit-or-miss with restaurants, and I’ve learned it’s better to go on recommendations). We were early (it was only seven o’clock, the very beginning of dinner time), so we were alone in the little enclosed terrasse, at first. We splurged for the €26 menu, which included oh god something like five courses.

(If I have explained all the following previously, please forgive me; I am losing track.)

I think I might actually be figuring out this whole menu business. French menus (what we would call menus, what they call the Carte, I think) have several sections. One section is for entrées (starters), one for plats or viandes (the main course), and then cheeses and desserts. There is a section for drinks (sometimes two, for aperitifs and for wines/beers/coffee). And there is a section for the “menus”. There are two or three menus offered, typically. Each consists of two to (you name the number) courses. There are choices for each course. The cheaper menus not only have less interesting choices, they also have less food. I didn’t know that till I ordered the €28 menu in Sarlat.

Okay. We got a tapenade and bread as a “bouchon” before the first course. (Uh oh.) First course, I ordered some version of foie gras, knowing this was my last meal in foie gras country. Second course, I had some kind of salad, which happened to have foie gras on the side, as well as some dried smoked duck as a garnish (or something—why there is an obligation to put meat in a salad is beyond me, but I have found few salads in France without it). Main course, I had duck. A magret, I think they call it. Magret of duck is indistinguishable from a big slice of roast beef. I swear it! First time I had it, in Arles a few years back, I thought they had made a mistake. It’s dark, cooked rare, and most unlike poultry. Anyhow, I had the duck. Which happened to be served with a slab of fried foie gras on the top. After that, cheese. After that, profiteroles, which are like cream puffs. These were filled with artisanal vanilla ice cream and slathered in chocolate.

I was a bit sensible about it all, and didn’t finish any course entirely. I had already had the too-full experience and was not willing to repeat it. After dinner we strolled through the town, which had come alive with street performers. A panpipe player (who brought his own floodlight with him), a juggler, some street-statue people. The place was buzzing, a different Sarlat than we’d seen before.

Back home, we packed up for leaving the next day, and went to bed. I was feeling sick by that time, nauseated. I lay sleepless till 3 a.m., fighting it off, and finally got up and threw up pretty much the entire dinner. Last time I felt that sick was with the flu two winters ago. Moral of the story: get the cheaper menu, or at least avoid too much foie gras.

Here’s the coup de grace, though, or the coup de gras, if you please. When we went to Sarlat, we thought, “This will be the dinner from Kathryn,” as she generously asked us to have a dinner on her while we were in Europe. Obviously, it just won’t do to have thrown up Kathryn’s dinner, so we will just have to try again. Thank you Kathryn! We look forward to a Paris dinner!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Felt just fine in the morning. Cleaned up, settled the bill, and drove off to Bordeaux to return the rental car and catch the train to Paris.

We hadn’t planned to take the autoroute toll-road, but the first part of the trip was so slow, we realized we wouldn’t make it on time otherwise. (We had a TGV reservation for 2:50, and it would be a big hassle if we missed it.) So we fairly flew to Bordeaux. For €16.50 total, the route was worth it. Fantastic highway.

Getting to the station was another story. We had the GPS, and I’ve already told about her lack of reliability in that regard. I was so distracted by the GPS, that I missed the turn-off for the station (and the car return). Then we were utterly dependent on her. The maps are off by just enough to make us overshoot the turnoff almost every time. And when we do, she says, “recalculating, recalculating”, and I just might throw her out the window if I hear it again. After innumerable recalculations, we did reach the station. But there were no signs of rental car depots. In Toulouse they had been obvious. We cruised by the station to a traffic circle, then cruised back. Pulled a risky u-turn and cruised back again. I thought maybe the rental places were in the underground parking, so down we went. A parking official helped us out, gave us directions. We were beginning to panic, as we had about a half hour till train time. Finally, over a bridge from the station (we had been told, casually, “it’s just by the station”), and through some single-lane alleys unmarked by any indication that there might be car rentals nearby, we arrived at the right lot, parked the car badly, dropped the keys and ran.

We were in plenty of time, as it turned out. We found our platform, and when the train arrived, we found our seats like we’d been riding the rails all our lives. We breathed. We sank into the cushy seats. John ate a sandwich made from the supplies we had brought, but all I could manage was a nectarine. All was well. For three hours.

We arrived in Paris, at the Gare de Montparnasse, which is walking distance from our apartment. We walked down Rue de Rennes and all I could think was, “I’m in Paris! I’m in Paris!” I had visited the apartment by Google street view, so I got us right to it. That’s when things got interesting. I had full instructions for finding the actual apartment, but they were in email form, which, of course, I couldn’t access.

I am not as smart as I look. (ahem)

I have noticed, throughout France, a kind of good-samaritan mentality. People stop to help. They go out of their way to help. It seems to be the expected thing.

So, at the big blue door on the street, when my key didn’t work, a young woman came along to get into the building and showed us that there is a code. (I knew that, I’d just forgotten.)

Once inside, there was a tangle of apartment blocks, any of which could be ours. I had a vague memory that “Gabriel Brun” (the apartment owner’s son, who had the apartment when he was going to university in the city) would be in the first building, and there was his name, on the call-board. Okay, so we’re in the building, but had no idea which apartment was his/ours. (Again, I had instructions, but hadn’t printed them and didn’t remember; I think I had presumed that I would review the instructions before actually arriving in Paris, not realizing that travel-wear would have gotten to me by that point and I wouldn’t be thinking that clearly) I walked up to the top of the building, seven storeys, hoping to see “Gabriel Brun” on a door. Nope.

Another woman came along. Everyone seemed to know that there was a rental apartment in the block. She walked us up and found the right suite; how she knew, I have no idea. Why she would climb 100 steps for strangers is another mystery, but we are very grateful.

The apartment is beautiful but strange to the North American sensibility. The living area is spacious, but the bathroom has barely enough room to turn around. The “kitchen” is a wall with built-in cupboards. The sinks are distinctively French: deep, square, white basins. The stove is a two-burner convection thing that operates partly on touch and partly on ESP. But the bed is king-sized and the pillows are good, and we are more comfortable than we have been since Berlin.

Whew.

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And now for something completely different . . .

2010-08-09T00:55:00.000-07:00

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(This is from an email John just sent to sister Kathryn, capturing the moment. I'll bring things up to date in a future post.)

Yes sis. I think I look slimmer these days. But it might have to do
with Anne's regime of climbing to the top of medieval castles that
are, of course, on the tops of mountains, unlike the parking lots
which are at the bottoms of mountains. Or maybe it's the flights of
stairs every day. I can't figure why Zepplin wrote Stairway To Heaven,
it's Hell, baby.
Maybe Elevator to Heaven, No. Surely I look slimmer because of my
decision to not take metro here, but walk several km.
No, wait, it's because, until now, I haven't had a computer to park my
ass at for hours at a time. It's certainly not because of the rich
French cuisine of the region our gîtes was in. EVERYTHING there is
foie gras. Foie gras for the entree, foie gras with the salad, foie
gras with the main. foie gras with the cheese plate (dessert), they
even have foie gras ice cream.
No. Just kidding. They don\t really have foie gras with the salad. If
the French in that region could figure out how to get foie gras
flavoured water, they would. You can order several types of water,
each coming in various strengths of carbonation, mild, medium, or
strong.
Seriously. Every few km we drove there was a goose farm, and all the
signage boasts their foie gras. Then there's all the duck meat. I was
apalled the first time the entree was fresh honeydew melon...draped
in duck meat. Yes, the salads had slices of duck meat. The food is so
rich it made my poor baby sick! Arret with the fatty meat already!
I'm amazed that when it's hot, I don't perspire grease.
Sweat is good.
Now I have to go. I need my cup of coffee. Anne's all happy because I
got up before even she had a shower. She's gleeful that I can't sleep
in and waste a ray of sun in Paris.
Why? Because the construction is going across from our building and
she does not have to wake me up. The man with the drill can wake me
up. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Wake up.
Brrrrrrr the sun has been up for a whole hour John.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Welcome to Paris.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I'll be your host, doing root canal
surgery on this 6 storey wall for the rest of your stay.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Brrr Brrrrrrrrrrr
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Brr Just in case you thought there would be a
rhythmic pattern to lull you back to sleep Brr
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Brrr
Look I'm working on this square centimetre of the wall and there are 6
storeys of wall….
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr enjoy
your stay Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Anne is smiling smugly.
Her brain is no longer playing the tape, "I'm in Paris, I"m in Paris!"
She's playing her new hit, "I don't have to wait for John to get up!"
She's so excited she can barely hold on to the whattodinParis book
because she can plan MORE things to go to now that she's gained
several hours of non-John-sleeping-in time, and she's thinking "this
is the best construction zone ever!
And, oh dear, she's sad now, because instead of the 4-daymuseum pass
we got yesterday, she could have gotten the 6-day pass, because it was
Sunday, and she didn't know the construction would be this loud and
this early. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...coffee
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Brrr
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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Writing to Catch Up

2010-08-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

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Friday, August 6, 2010

We have slowed down. That was the plan, to spend a laid-back week at the gites, taking six days to see what could be seen in three. It has worked, and we have been glad to sleep in, take naps, enjoy the sun now that it has come back, and read.

I’ve kept a synopsis of the days, just to jog my memory:

Sunday: Gourdon festival, music, snack lunch of felafel, samosas and little fried chickpea-flour patties, yum, Sarlat - dinner at home, lentils cooked in duck fat

Monday: Gourdon festival - lunch in town (bird/salad/spuds, followed by bird/salad/spuds), sandwiches at home for dinner, with lots of wine and lots of blogging

Tuesday: kayaking - walks in La Roq Gageac and Beynac

Wednesday: traffic jam (held up by slow-moving truck), Sarlat market, altercation in kebab place, Castelnaud chateau and crowds, more traffic jams, Prinquieres barbecue

Thursday: laid-back day; out to pick up supplies locally, found an unexpected market, lunch at La Gabarre in St-Julien, aftenoon nap for me, to Rocamadour for sunset dinner.

The details:

Sunday, August 1

We didn’t know in advance about the annual Medieval Festival that occurs in Gourdon the first weekend of every August. We saw the signs and banners as we entered town on our way in from St-Cirq. We stopped in at the tourist info to get the details.

Gourdon is large by town standards, maybe even a city. The old part is built on a hilltop, like most medieval towns, and for the festival, the entire old town was blocked off, with people collecting a few euros for entry. Several town squares staged events: one was a marketplace for artisans to sell their wares (what you’d expect—jewellry, leatherwork, clothing, pottery); another was set up as a village, with felters, carvers, an instrument-maker, a forge, all working out of white canvas tents, and the scent of the burning charcoal permeating the air; the church square (St-Pierre) staged entertainment, several acts, musical and chivalrous, which repeated through the day. The streets between the squares were also lined with artisan stalls and food stalls. The smells! The majority of people were visitors and gawkers, like ourselves, but many, many people were dressed in medieval garb, and, given the setting, they seemed to be the ones who belonged.

As I lined up for felafel and samosas (the medieval period was influenced by contact with the east during the crusades, right? right?), a flock of geese came by the narrow channel, squeezing through the crowd. They were led by a young man dressed in purple, his long curls blowing in the wind, a staff in his hand, In the rear, a black dog. The man and the dog never lost eye contact. Occasionally the man would give a soft command, “Doucement, doucement!, when the geese took to moving too quickly. The geese (there were maybe 30 or 40 of them) had that vacant, apparently-unaware, straight-ahead stare, but I realized that they were completely focused on the dog behind them. It was a beautiful ballet.

As I waited (medieval people take their time cooking!) a sudden wind picked up, and thunder. The flaps of the tent stalls threatened to lose their moorings, and shop-keepers dashed to hold on to them. I finally got the food, stacked in little reed trays, and got back to John, sitting on hay bales in the square. The rain held off.

The group performing was fantastic, playing bagpipes, shawms (ancient double-reed instruments that sound like rough oboes), recorders, drums, and singing. The group leader was an animated, dramatic speaker, almost more entertaining than the musicians. I caught much of the performance on video, and I hope I can figure out how to YouTube it when I get home. We bought the group’s CD, but the spirit, the sound, is not the same.

The rain hit just as the group finished playing. The crowd poured into the church for shelter, but we left and drove up the highway to Sarlat. Sarlat is the biggest city in the immediate area, and is the touristic center. It is known as a very fine example of a medieval city and is large enough to support a major market twice a week, and to host millions of visitors. You have to do the “rise-above-the-crowd” thing, as I call it, when visiting such a place, to try to imagine it in a more reasonable, natural time. This day, however, the crowds were minimal, probably due to the threatening weather. We parked easily (!) and walked down (a rare example of a medieval city built in a hollow rather than a hilltop) into the old city. We walked the short Rick Steves walking tour, picked up some cash at one of the many bank machines, and headed home.

We had picked up a big jar of lentils cooked in duck fat (the people here do love their duck fat, and why they are not obese or cholesterol-ridden is a mystery to me) in a “cave” in St-Cirq, so we heated it for dinner at our gites. It was salty but otherwise bland, a disappointment. Accompanied by fresh baguette and some of our very expensive cheese, it was a decent meal.

Monday, August 2

Gourdon festival, day 2. We wanted to see more, so we returned to the festival. We saw another amazing group perform, a kind of circus with clowning jugglers, acrobats, and performing dogs, all accompanied by wonderful music similar to what we heard yesterday.

Again, we are struck with how Celtic this music sounds, with touches of Arabic and African influence. It makes me realize that these cultures were not isolated, that there was a lot of travel and commerce between societies, and that these people probably shared common roots with the Celts. I’m sure there have been academic studies of the roots of various folk traditions; something I’ll have to look up.

We had planned to visit several paleolithic caves in this region, including Lascaux II and Font de Gaume. We’ve decided not to go to either. The famous Lascaux has been closed to visitors for many years due to degradation of the paintings, and Lascaux II is a replica created for the public to view. The highlight of our experience in caves thus far has been to stand in the spot our ancient ancestors stood, to imagine them in that very space. We have already experienced the magic of seeing the paintings, their scale, the command of the rock these early painters had, so we feel no need to vist a replica. I’ve heard it’s fantastic, regardless, for anyone who has not had the opportunity to visit such caves before. As for Font de Gaume, I would love to go, but it is solidly reserved for the entire month. I tried repeatedly to book from home, but with the nine-hour time difference (and us working during the day), we could not get through when they were open. There is a way to go: arrive there at 8 a.m. and get one of the fifty tickets they set aside for non-reserved people. It’s a long ways to go, a good hour, at least, and doesn’t seem worth it at this time. There is a cave very close to here, Grotte de Cougnac, not nearly so large or popular, so we’ll try to get to that one. Like Lascaux, no reservations are taken; we can show up and be given a tour time.

Monday evening, we ate bread and cheese and salad at home, I drank a substantial quantity of Cahor rosé, and wrote.

Tuesday, August 3

I finally got John in a kayak. A sorry, plastic excuse for a kayak, but a kayak nevertheless. It’s been a long time coming. He’s “terrified” of the water, and he’s concerned for the health of his back. Neither were a problem here. The river is rarely more than waist deep, and kayaks, as he discovered, are very comfortable.

There are proably dozens of companies renting out canoes and kayacs along the Dordogne River. We chose one that picks up in Beynac, a 3-star village, so that we could explore it before riding the bus back to our car. We put in at Vitrac and drifted, barely paddling, through a woodsy turn of the river, past campsites and fishermen. We were not alone, not by a longshot; yellow and red and green canoes floated down with us, like a windfall of autumn leaves strewn across the river. There were quiet paddlers and boisterous ones, families with dogs, and teenagers dumping each other. Somehow, it was peaceful, regardless. There is nothing like floating at the water’s surface, drifting with the current.

We had a picnic on a rocky beach. No cameras today; the paddles provided had no splash-rings, so we expected to get soaked, and did. No matter, the sun was out, and the water was cooling.

Around a bend in the river, we saw Domme high above us. Another bend, under a stone bridge, Ceynac on our right. Around another bend, La Roque-Gageac clung to the cliffside, and the tourist boats motored up and down. We stopped for a break in La Roque, leaving our kayaks and gear on the shore along with many others. The traffic was horrendous on the one riverside street through town. This is when I realized that we had chosen the best possible way to visit the river villages; by car it would be a nightmare. We climbed to the top of the village and found a little plaque commemorating a disaster in 1957, when a piece of the cliff gave way and crushed three houses built into the stone below. The scars of the houses are still visible against the rock face: three lines of peaked roofs, some carved out holes for beams, two or three clinging shingles, still. We looked up and saw the potential for more such disasters: the cliff really overhangs the town.

We took to our kayaks and joined the masses, again, on the river. Around another bend, the Chateau de Castelnaud, once held by the English in their war with the French for this territory. We could see the trebuchets (built recently by enthusiasts of medieval warfare) on the donjon, from the river. Another bend, another bridge, and there was our destination, Beynac. It is yet another cliffside town topped by a fortress/chateau, this one held by the French in the Hundred Years War. We pulled in and climbed to the top of the town for spectacular views. Again, the riverside main street (the only route through town) was practically a parking lot, and we were grateful not to be driving. We stopped in a few shops, then caught our canoe-company bus back to our car.

We ate in Gourdon, at a café recommended by our gites hosts. The salads were huge, but sandy. You get a beach in the sink when you wash lettuce here; this restaurant seemed to have forgotten.

Wednesday, August 4
(Simon’s birthday, and I was unable to get online, waahhh)

Wednesday is market day in Sarlat. I have been wanting to get another Provencal tablecloth, in a different size from the one I got last time, and have waited, not realizing just how local the shops tend to be. In the Provence, all the tourist shops sell the cloths, in Rousillon, less so. I had thought I’d wait till we got here, a bigger city and more time, to shop for my tablecloth, but the shops here are full of foie gras, and foie gras. And wine, some conserves, and foie gras. I thought my best chance to find something might be in the market, as people come in with imports from other regions and even other countries.

It was a risk, as the world descends on Sarlat’s market, and parking can be nearly impossible. It turned out parking was not the problem. Some ten kilometers from town, traffic suddenly came to a near standstill; there was a truck at the front of the line (a sweeper? I couldn’t tell), moving extremely slowly and not allowing anyone to pass. It took an hour to get into town. We watched some people park and walk, and they got there sooner. This was the kind of traffic nightmare we’d avoided yesterday by taking the river from town to town, but there is no river in Sarlat. When we finally reached town center, we took a wrong turn, to the right instead of to the left. Ack. We realized it right away, and turned left onto a little lane that led right through the market! It was a driveable street, but you wouldn’t know it; we crawled along, so as not to knock over baby buggies and crepe stands. We made it, however, back to the right route, arriving just as someone was leaving a parking spot. Lucky. We had been thinking we would arrive just as the market was packing up (a pattern we seem to have), but things were still in full swing. It was a huge contrast in spirit from the Sarlat we’d visited just a couple of days earlier; this place was bustling! We wandered the stalls, breathed deeply at the cheese stands (well, I did, while John held his nose), stopped to look at Langouille knives, Provencal spice graters, olives and tapenades. No tableclothes, though. I found a permanent shop with a small selection, but nothing I wanted. I did find some more of my napkins to go with the yellow cloth I have, so I bought those. Maybe I will find a cloth in Paris.

There was a kebab café that beckoned to John. We sat down just as the owner began shouting at some customers, “Allez, allez!”, as he sent them from the terrasse. We couldn’t figure out what had happened. The owner’s son went out to the terrasse to say something, and the owner slapped him. It was all too much for me; I left John to order his kebab and went for a stroll down the main commercial street of town, a street with banks and hardware stores and clothing chainstores. Sometimes it’s therapy to be in the 21st Century.

After we rejoined, we sat for coffee and crepes on the “goose square”, watching the market merchants fold up their stalls and maneuver their trucks through the crowd to haul their wagons off. It was time for us to leave, too. We pulled out of Sarlat, snarled in more traffic which only cleared once we were several kilometers out.

I wanted to visit Castelnaud, the chateau we’d seen from the river, which is now a Medieval War Museum. After the obligatory meander on country roads, we crossed the river to the town, then wound up and up and up to the chateau parking lot. It was huge, and it was very full. All of France was at the chateau with us. We found a spot way back in an upper corner, and had quite a time backing into it.

We walked from parking lot to upper village, past a woodturner working magic on his lathe, to a line-up for the chateau. Then John realized he’d left his wallet, in the fluster of parking, in the car. So it was back through the upper village, past the woodturner, through the parking lot again.

At least one of us was not in the best of states by this time.

The chateau might have been special at another time. Have I mentioned the screaming babies? All morning in Sarlat, and now at the chateau, we were hearing the protests of unhappy babies and three-year-olds in tantrums. Who can blame them? I think they are just vocalizing what the rest of us are too polite to express: the crowds are nuts, and (for kids) cheese and stone are just not that interesting. I loved the chateau, but there were too many people there. We climbed to a platform where several working full-sized trebuchets were displayed. I took a bunch of photos, when people stopped sitting on them. I like the one with the abandonned water bottle, I think.

We started to go through the rooms of the donjon, where there was a variety of weaponry displayed, but we were peopled out and decided to leave. The way home took us back very close to Sarlat, where, again, traffic was practically at a standstill. There was a “Casino”, a huge supermarket, mid-traffic-jam, so we stopped in for supplies, and things were moving a little better when we came out.

What a day of crowds and traffic! We realize, as we near the end of our stay in southern France, that we have had enough of medieval towns, enough of tourists and traffic. We decide to lay low the last two stays of our gites stay, to relax before we hit Paris.

Eack Wednesday night, Derek and Sue host a barbecue for guests of the gites. There are four rental suites in all, and three couples showed up for the meal. (The fourth staying this week is a French couple with a little girl; the ads for the place clearly state that the gites is rented “exclusively for couples”, but I think this couple may not have understood that; they have kept their daughter low-key. If I’m outside and they come out, they go right back in again; it’s a bit uncomfortable.) We all brought our own meat/fish, which Derek cooked for us, and salads and copious amounts of wine were provided. Turns out the other guests are all from Yorkshire (but the couples hadn’t previously met); Monty Python jokes aside, we had a wonderful, laughter-filled evening. There were stories only fellow Englishmen would really know about, which they delighted in sharing with us, such as the story of the Hartleypool football (soccer) team with the hung monkey as their symbol. Apparently, when the people of Hartleypool were at war with the French, no one had ever seen a French person. A townsman happened to see a monkey, and thinking it was a Frenchman, hung it. Trust the English to be able to laugh at themselves enough to adopt the story as a team emblem!

I think the funniest part of the evening for me was that I could barely understand most of what was being said. This was English! I felt I could have done as well if they’d been speaking in French!

The local wine is very good, and must be very pure. I drank more than I would normally be able to get away with, yet woke up without the slightest trace of hangover. It’s dangerous, really.

Thursday, August 5

Was able to get online in the morning and send a birthday email to Simon. How he would love this country and its medievalness; I can’t get him out of my head. (Not that I want to!)

After the madness of yesterday’s crowds, a day of rest.

Around noon, we went to a local village for toilet paper and a baguette. I noticed, as I often have, that the woman in the little shop did not want to take my €3.70 for my €3.65 purchase. She saw that I had change, and she wanted the exact amount. She smiled the whole time, probably wondering what on earth we were doing in her shop, in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, buying such a combination of goods.

We drove a little more into the countryside. The region is dotted with small stone villages, often no more than two or three kilometers apart, separated by forest or farmland, fields of corn, tobacco or freshly-baled hay. Farmhouses are sprinkled along the way, usually large and modern; the region seems prosperous. We drove to St-Julien de Lampon, a larger village (almost a town?) some six or eight kilometers from here, to have lunch at the Restaurant La Gabarre, recommended by Derek and Sue. On the way we came upon a village market in and stopped in to check it out; it was packing up as we arrived, of course, but there was still a crowd at the wine stall, where a good deal of sampling was going on. One stall in the market was selling imported percussion instruments, mostly tourist-model items from Indonesia. John bought a bamboo jaw-harp after we tried out a number of djembes, shakers, mbiras and balafons, none of which were tuned (hence useless, for looks only).

We found the recemmended restaurant, and what a find! It hangs above the Dordogne, a sleepy wooded area far from the crowds down river. A few families ate with us on the deck under the trees. It was silent, beautiful. It’s what a visitor hopes to find, authentic, and away from the crowds.

I ordered the lunch menu, and John did the same. We started with a salad with the chewy dried duck so popular in the region. The main course was veal kidney. John didn’t know that he didn’t like kidney, and the look on his face when he tried it was priceless—such shock and disgust! He said it was all he could do not to gag. For me, kidney takes me back to Dad’s Sunday brunches, kidneys and fried eggs and breaded green tomatoes. Mmmm. I had no choice but to eat John’s portion, beautifully arranged around a disk of rice and dried tomatoes. As he said, I “took one for the team”, because it would have been a little embarassing not to have touched the meat. Dessert, we’d been told, was a little white cake. It didn’t sound appealing, but when it came, we realized each tiny cake had been baked as the order came, so it was fresh from the oven, tender like angelfood, with a crispy crust. Fresh wild strawberries were arranged around it, with a tart raspberry coulis. Amazing.

With two lunches in my belly, I took a nap when we got home, sleeping until almost five. John sat out by the pool in the welcome sun (weather here has been pleasant but not particularly sunny).

We drove to Rocamadour for dinner. It’s ways to go from here, about twenty kilometers on a very curly road, but our neighbours said it was a must-see, and it is, or has been, one of the top pilgrimage sites in Europe. In the 13th Century, 20,000 to 30,000 people a day would arrive. The village itself is home to less than 1,000 people to day, but had a population of about 8,000 at its peak. It’s hard to imagine the impact of so many visitors, but suffice to say, the town flourished. The chief draw, for pilgrims, is a small carved black madonna, said to have delivered miracles to those who pray at her feet. Henry III was the first, I think, followed by a number of famous others, including Louis IX, Richard the Lionhearted and Eleanor of Aquitane. The town has been pillaged a number of times, too, especially in the Religious Wars of the Reformation, and little remains of the original medieval structures. I wanted to see the site, though, just to understand the lay of the land and have an image in which to place the history.

The town is built, once again, on a cliffside above the Lot River. The “cité” is on the lowest level, with various religious structures on the two levels above that. There are stairs or an elevator (!) for getting between levels. This day, we were not up for any of that. We had a small dinner (prawns/scallops, and salad) at a hotel restaurant overlooking the whole site, where we watched the sun go down and the village floodlights come up. It was gorgeous, and it was enough.

We drove home in the dark, but I find that the driving is almost easier at night than during the day. The notorious French tailgater is home with his family, and we can poke along at a pleasant, safe speed.

Friday, August 6

So here I am, at last, caught up! I have been sitting and writing the last eight pages on the front patio of our gites, just out of reach of the sun. Can’t write in the sun, because the laptop screen is too hard to see.

I haven’t meant to be so detailed, but things come to me as I write, and I can’t help myself. This is a chronicle for myself, really, to keep the memories clear for the future. Hard to know whether it is of interest to anyone but us.

A green anole skitters across the stony patio. A butterfly flutters by. A few puffy clouds hover, not moving. I hear the neighbours at lunch, the clink of their cutlery. Their food smells delicious.

Today, we will try to get into the Grotte de Cougnac, a painted cave just near here, and we will return the rented guitar. We will clean the gites and pack our bags for an early departure tomorrow.

There may be more. As we head out in the car, I’ll look at the map. The day is open, and wonderful.

. How can I write with an empty glass??

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Near Fajoles, which is near Gourdon, Lot, France

2010-08-02T09:31:00.001-07:00

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This is the third of three I’m posting this evening. As usual, scroll down and read from the bottom up to get them in order. Posting has proven time-consuming, due to the unreliable nature of the various wi-fi connections I’ve depended on; it’s not like being at home. In particular, posting photos here is crazy-slow, so I’m putting pics mainly on picasa, which seems to upload much faster.

I’m enjoying the writing part of this, it’s just the posting that’s a big pain.

*****

August 1, 2010

Les Prinquieres

It feels like much more than four days since I last wrote. We’ve covered a lot of ground, in more ways than one.

The air is close, tepid, like a bath gone cool after a long soak. My bit of laundry, hung this morning, still drips. The dishes in the rack since breakfast have yet to dry. A still, grey sky, lush tobacco fields, silence. These walls could sweat.

It feels strange to be indoors, after much of the last three weeks spent outside. I could sit out at the table on the gravel terasse, but the chairs are wet after today’s showers. Maybe later I’ll take a towel to them, and watch the stars come up.

We arrived here yesterday afternoon after a leisurely drive from Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. The gites is a farmstead, or once was, consisting of a handful of buildings: the owners’ house, the converted barn divided into three small apartments, a small (also converted) cabin, a slant-roofed shed and a “hangar”—an open garage for the owners’ cars and tractor. There are traces of old stone walls that start and stop, a rusty plow once horse-drawn, hedges, fruit trees and acres of mown grass. There is a fenced swimming pool, a boules court, a place to play badminton. We have yet to venture much onto the grounds; we eat inside, then go to the car to explore the region. I did hang some clothes (a useless exercise) out on the line by the hangar.

The apartment itself is better-outfitted than I expected. Sue and Derek, the owners, have thought of everything, including inventorying it all in a booklet just for this apartment, right down to the coasters and wooden spoons. (I wish I could scan the list!)

A pigeon hoots a syncopated song. Who would have known?

So. I’m behind. I’ll be bouncing around a bit in time. For now, back to the day we left Collioure….

*****

Collioure to Carcasonne

We left Collioure on that brilliant Wednesday morning, after I’d spent the second morning in a row on the deck of our room, writing and watching the town wake up. We drove south a bit, toward the Spanish border, on the “high road”, which affords some of the most spectacular views of the Vermillion Coast. I think we only did about half of it, realizing later we could have gone further, but it was enough to get the gist: rolling hills of patchwork vineyards, the so-blue Mediterranean sparkling beyond.

We headed, then, into Cathar country. There were two medieval fortresses I wanted to visit: Queribus and Peyrepertuse.

Well. I may have mentioned this: months ago, I bought the Michelin map book for France (Michelin maps are the only way to go, in France and maybe in all of Europe), which has a scale of 1:200,000, or 1 cm = 2 km, or 1 inch = 3.16 miles (for my American friends). The book is heavy, so I tore out the pages we wouldn’t need. This tome is our best friend in the front seat.

We EAT the map, when we drive. If there is a curve in the road, it shows on the Michelin map. If there is a village of two houses that actually has a name, it’s there on the Michelin map. You get the picture.

It ought to have been enough. But last year, when we took a road trip through the American southwest, we got lost once or twice, and lost hours of travel time. We bought a GPS in a Costco somewhere in Utah, and have learned to love it. So we bought the GPS map for France, thinking it would save us in a pinch.

It has. Really. It’s absolutely the best thing for getting us out of cities. Getting us TO places has been a slightly different story. Out of Collioure, I set the GPS to get us to Queribus. She (it has a woman’s voice, so I tend to call it “her”, and since she is quite curt, I haven’t bonded to her, and have been known to call her nasty names at times) instructed us to leave the highway some distance south of Perpignan. That was fine, since negotiating Perpignan looked like a potential headache. We ended up on a tiny road. The tiniest of roads. We zigzagged and switched back through olive groves and vineyards, and had we met another car face on, I don’t know which one of us would have been obliged to back up for several kilometers to make way. We were passed, at widenings in the road, by three cars in the course of an hour. We assumed they had GPS’s too. We had no choice but to continue following instructions. We saw things we never would have otherwise seen. We filmed some of it, and managed to capture cicadas on the sound track.
When we finally emerged onto the main thoroughfare, I shut the GPS down. I remembered reading an online travel blog about a couple who had followed their GPS instructions down miles and miles of unpaved roads in France, only to have to turn around. I would say, now, that American-generated GPS maps work exceptionally well in North America, but not so well elsewhere. It could be due to the proliferation of roads here. Every track that was ever carved by wagon is now paved and numbered; to get from one village to the neighbouring village, one has to choose between three routes. Our GPS seems not to distinguish between wagon tracks and major highways.

Anyhow. Back to the journey.

We found Queribus, using the Michelin map, because French routes are very well marked. Queribus. She stood like a monolith against the sky. The first thought is, “How did they possibly get their materials up there to build in the first place?” (It had to have been the aliens!!) The second, “How are WE going to get up there now?”

Remarkably, the road leads right to the base of the cliff upon which the fortress is built. There is a kiosk at the parking lot, selling books (some excellent histories, in English!), souvenirs and ice cream (what more do you need?). We got the audio guide in English and headed up the path. The audio guide was a delightfully useless bit of fluff, a heavily-accented man proclaiming how lucky he was to see this marvel of ancient architecture. We climbed. A gravel path, then stone stairs. Up and up and into the fortress itself. The outer walls are considerably decayed, but the keep (“le donjon”) has been restored, and a narrow spiral staircase takes you to the top. If you have the nerve, which I don’t. I used to be fearless, but now I get vertigo in high places. Queribus was difficult, not for the climb but for the height. I had to keep my eyes on my feet. The little spiral staircases were too much for me; I tried but gave up. It seemed to me that the few extra meters of height would make little difference to the view, so it was okay not to reach the top.

The best part, for me, is imagining the people who went before me, back almost a thousand years. How did they bring water? What was THEIR experience, looking out at ridge beyond ridge in the haze, watching north for signals from Peyrepertuse and south from the next tower, visible on the horizon. I am still not sure why they built these massive fortresses, but I do know they became obsolete when the French-Spanish border was moved considerably south of here. Between the building and obsolescence, they changed hands a number of times, sometimes bequeathed by Lords, such as the Count de Foix, who had no right to them in the first place. They were considered military prizes, boasting points, I suppose.

From Queribus, we headed for Peyrepertuse, supposed to be the best of all the high strongholds. We stopped along the way at Cucugnan to pick up cheese and bread for lunch. It was a picturesque hilltop village, baking beneath the stone windmill at its summit. We found a bit of shade on what passed for a town square, and made sandwiches.

John tackled the narrow switchbacks (while I closed my eyes) up to the site of Peyrepertuse. Again, a dusty parking lot, and a kiosk with postcards for purchase. The path to the top was through shady woods, and led completely around the peak. We had no view of the fortress as we climbed, but the shade was welcome, and the incline relatively gentle. When we emerged, there we were at the walls of the ancient site, at the top of a ridge that hangs over the valleys below and extends for miles.

There was a sign, as we entered, that there would be a falconry exhibition at 4:00. It was ten to four—nice timing. We found the site for the exhibition, at the edge of a cliff, and sat on stones to watch. The falconrists (is that the right way to say it?) were a father and two sons. One of the sons looked like my son, Simon, who has an interest in all things medieval, including falconry; it turned out this young man’s name was also Simon. The father was the master of the exhibition, a great showman, and explained in detail the history and technique of falconry. It was a time when I wished my French was better, because, in truth, I’m pretty good in a restaurant, but when the language is flying by my ears, I understand only fragments of what I hear. (More on this in a later blog.) Between John and myself, however, we got the idea. It didn’t matter. The birds were what mattered. First there were the falcons, a female, then a male. Then a buzzard of some sort, blue-headed and spooky. Then a blue-beaked bird I can’t identify, then a bald eagle. It was amazing how these men communicated with their birds, how the birds would fly off for great distances, but return with a call or a signal. Why would a wild bird not choose freedom? There was certainly a choice.

I took several dozen photos of the event, and I was right up front, so I got some good shots. The pictures say it all, really.

The falconry event took about a half hour, after which we decided we were satisfied, even without having explored the site completely, so we headed down through the shady woods to the car, and drove, without the help of the back-roads GPS, to Carcasonne.

*****

Les Prinquieres

John rented a guitar today, a lucky find from a just-opened shop. He has been off in the woods, writing a song all in French, in the style of the new-medieval bands we’ve been seeing.

We just took a walk around the perimeter of this property. It’s cool out, and silent. We have neighbours, but they are ensconced in their amber-lit spaces; we got a wave from another couple also out on a walk.

*****

Carcasonne

We entered Carcasonne with the aid of GPS. She did well for us until the final few blocks, when she brought us to essentially nothing, then redirected us back to essentially nothing. I had a sense of where our hotel was, so I turned off the GPS, followed the Google map I’d printed, and brought us to the Hotel Montmorency, just outside the walls of La City, the medieval city of Carcasonne.

Pretty spiffy place. A short-term parking for people checking in. A patio, an open foyer. I presented myself as usual at the desk: “Nous avons un reservation….” The young woman at the desk could not find my reservation. She asked if we had a confirmation, so I returned to the car and retrieved it (lesson: print your confirmations!). She read it and said “C’est incroyable!” (“That’s incredible.”) She looked again through her records, and repeated, “C’est incroyable!” She brought out a huge black binder full of confirmations and leafed through it. Found mine. “C’est incroyable!” She finally claimed that she had given our room to someone else, but no problem, there was a room for us…. We didn’t really care, as long as we had a room. It did strike us as poor business that the “best” hotel we had booked was the only one to “lose” our reservation; John was livid, actually. At last, we received a key, a code for parking, and we were on our way. The foyer of the Montmorency (which is the second, lower-priced part of a two-hotel complex) is a bizarre 60s-style composite of black-and-white with purple hassocks. Wish I had taken a photo, but I know Susan has one from when she stayed two years ago. The hallways, too, were 60s pop. I expected to run into Twiggy. Our room, however, was another story. A beautiful yellow Provencal wallpaper with a red floral pattern, matched by red drapes with yellow flowers—matching. The bathroom was ultra-modern. and the deck was fin-de-siecle (nineteenth, that is). The contrasts worked.

We unloaded, and headed into La Cité. Disney took a page from La Cité. It’s about as inspiring in faux medieval as you’re going to get. It’s gorgeous, a bit fake, but a wonderful place in which to succumb to romantic fantasy. We, however, were hungry. We found a place just off the main tourist square (which was absolutely nuts), and ordered off the “menu”. The food was decent, the waiter was funny and the ambience was unbeatable from our table on the street. The only distracting thing was a traffic light, necessary to control the flow of traffic through a curving lane wide enough for a single car.

During dinner, the music started: Guantanamera, from the square we’d avoided. And another Latin pop classic, and another.

After dinner we went for a walk, a tour of La Cité. Rock music began to echo off the stone. We walked, and it grew louder. Finally, we found the park behind the cathedral, and a concert by Motorhead. I remembered Susan talking about hearing Diana Ross from behind the gates. I’m thinking Diana Ross would not be so bad! We wandered by the cathedral and down medieval lanes to the noise of Motorhead. When the concert let out, at 11:00, the fans streamed peacefully through the narrow streets, all dressed up in Motorhead t-shirts.

The disconnect was just too much for us, so we headed back to the contradictions of our hotel, and to sleep. We had no desire to return into La Cité in the morning, so we hit the road for Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. GPS got us reliably out of town before we turned her off.

Carcasonne:

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Collioure

2010-08-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

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Wednesday July 28, 2010, 6:56 am

Collioure

Couldn’t sleep, again, and I remembered how much I enjoyed yesterday morning, watching the sunrise and the town coming to life, so I’m up, writing on the tiny balcony of our ocean-view hotel room.

Getting this room was the best decision I could have made. It seemed expensive at the time I booked it, but for €80 a night we have a priceless location. All day yesterday, as the crowds languished in shady cafés or under quayside umbrellas, we kept returning to our room, to our terrace on the shady side of the bay. It’s the hotel Triton, and I recommend it.

A few people are out and about: a swimmer breast-strokes across the bay to the chateau, a jogger casts a long shadow on stone walls, some men bait their hooks and fish with bamboo poles, a man walks his dog on a short leash, a metal-detector wields his machine on the rocky beach. Trucks rattle by, the odd motorcycle buzzes. The waves swish lightly, a kayaker out to the open sea. Before the crowds wake up, it is peaceful here.

What a great place to spend a couple of days. The old town itself is pretty beyond pretty, with camera-perfect shots to be had every few meters. Matisse said the blue of the sky here was like no other, and we have seen that, in the evening, looking up between yellow-painted walls. It’s a visual delight, perfectly maintained (even in the private quarters) and spotlessly clean (I watched the street cleaners yesterday, a toy-sized sweeping truck—when its brushes couldn’t reach a scrap of paper, the driver jumped out with a broom to clean it up—followed by a toy-sized washing truck, spraying what smelled like disinfectant. You could eat off these streets.

The shops are tasteful, with nice quality clothing and art to buy. I haven’t seen a postcard shop; no stamped t-shirts or souvenir thimbles here. The ice cream shops make art with their glace, building colour-swirled mountains; the mango ice-cream had a small mango decorating it, the noisette a few hazelnuts, the chocolate a chocolate bar. Yesterday I tried “violette”, and it tasted like flowers.

Food here has been fantastic. We ate the first night at a Rick-Steves recommended restaurant, a tiny terrace in the old town. We had the Catalan menu. I started with Tapas consisting of Manchego cheese, “tomato bread”, thin-sliced ham, and continued with sea bass, a whole, somewhat bony fish, and finished with Creme Catalan, which is like a creme brulée with a citrus touch. Everything was delicious, but I ate too much and suffered for an hour afterwards. Yesterday I ate very little until dinner at 8:30. We went to “The Sails”, just along the quay from our hotel, which is the less-pricey partner to the Michelin-starred Neptune Restaurant. I had the famous Collioure sardines to start, arranged beautifully with a green salad and tomato toast, followed by a Catalan Salad (“de la mer et de la montagne”), a mass of greens topped with seafood and several types of dry, paper-thin-sliced ham. John started with an amazing gazpacho, followed by a chicken dish. We were wise enough not to order dessert.

It is crowded here, but we expected that, this being the tiny French version of St. Tropez. It’s a party atmosphere, so it’s fun. Parking, however, is a problem. When we arrived Monday, there was actually a guard at the lot beside our hotel (beach-front) stopping cars from entering. We found another lot and were extremely lucky to arrive just as a family was packing up to leave; the guard there directed us to wait. It wasn’t too far a walk to roll our luggage, but the lots are metered, with a three-hour limit, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., so we wanted to move the car closer for convenience. We watched all evening, and once the guard was gone, cars lined up in the lot waiting for a spot. Yesterday morning, I happened to wake up at 5:30, saw that there were spaces available, as there are now, and ran to get the car. I had planned to take a short drive yesterday, down the coast to the Spanish border, but once we had parking, we didn’t want to give it up. We’ll do the drive this morning, as we leave.

View from our balcony at sunrise:

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Villefranche-de-Conflent, and Le Petit Train Jaune

2010-08-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

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Internet has been intermittent; this is the first of three pieces I'm posting this evening.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Villefranche-de-Conflent, and Le Petit Train Jaune

Leaving the Grotte de Niaux, we headed east, through a section of the Pyrenees. The road was good but windy, many switchbacks and a lot of gear-changing. John wasn’t feeling well, so I did most of the driving. We stopped in Ax-en-Thermes for lunch, and I dangled my feet in a thermal pool that was built in the 13th century. We picked up a baguette and some emmental cheese, and carried on. John snoozed while the road took us parallel to the border with Spain, through village after picturesque village—one seemed to be vertical, clinging to the mountainside, the front door of one building on the level of the roof of the next one down. We wound our way down into the Tet valley, and into Villefranche-de-conflent. We easily found our B&B, a huge nineteenth-century house on the river, between the town and the train station. We were shown to a beautiful, airy room, and John went to sleep.

I walked into Villefranche, a well-preserved medieval walled town, through the bastides and into . . . touristville. Cheap souvenir stalls, mediocre ice-cream stands, crowds of people just shopping, and a big band playing mariachi music (!) in the town square. Such a disappointment. You just can’t know, ahead of time, which town will have found the right balance of maintaining authenticity while catering to visitors, and which will be a complete disaster. I chose to stay in Villefranche mainly because it is the terminus for the Petit Train Jaune (the Little Yellow Train), but also because it’s a well-preserved bastide town. Sometimes you win, sometimes not. We have had Mirepoix, and now we’ve had Villefranche. There will be more of each to come, no doubt.

We ended up just having our bread and cheese, and the rest of the rosé from Avignon, for dinner in our room, and going to bed early. We had to be up early to ride the…

Petit Train Jaune

This regional train serves the mountain villages; its route winds high into the Pyrenees, pretty much along the route we drove to get here. It has become a tourist attraction now, with each village stop part of a chain of ecological parks. You can get off where you want, take a hike or ride a horse, have a picnic, then catch the train back down. At our B&B host’s suggestion, we rode about half way up, to Mont Louis, which is another Vauban town like Villefranche. (Vauban was a planner/architect in [I think—have to look it up] the nineteenth century who took on the restoration and renovation of dozens of old bastide towns throughout France. Without him, most of these would be in crumbling ruins.)

The ride up to Mont Louis was a disappointment. Our train was a new one, with closed and air-conditioned cars. At a stop on the way up, an old version of the train came into the stations, with a couple of open carriages and other cars with people hanging out the windows. There was a collective groan from our train: THAT was the train we wanted to be on. We did share the car with a three-generation family who was having a blast on the trip. I love the French for their exuberance, their expressiveness. The trip would have been a bore without this family along.

Mont Louis was a nice stop. We walked fifteen minutes to the town itself. It was not very developed for tourists, for which I was grateful after the madhouse that was Villefranche. We had lunch at a Creperie (John had a galette—the savoury version of a crepe—with cheese and ham, and I had a salad, as has become usual), walked to the walls for the view, then went back to catch the train back down into the valley.

This time, our train was the old type. I had wanted to ride in the open carriage, but it was quite chilly in the mountains, so we rode inside, which was fine. I hung out the window most of the way, along with everyone else on the train, taking photos and movies. I was ecstatic.

We pulled into the station at 3:30, picked up our car at the B&B, and headed down the road to Collioure.

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Grotte de Niaux July 25, 2010

2010-07-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

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Internet access is intermittent. This post is #3 of 3; scroll down and read from the bottom up, to read them in order.

*****

Niaux is a small village a few kilometres from Tarascon-en-Ariege (to distinguish it from the other Tarascon or Tarascons—one finds many towns with the same name in France), one whose claim to fame is the Grotte, the kilometers-long cave which contains some of the most elaborate and beautiful cave art we know, painted by the Magdalenian people 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Twenty of us were on the English tour. Entrance to the caves is carefully controlled, as it has been found that light, dust and even the breathing of visitors cause these ancient masterpieces to degrade. (Lascaux has been closed because more degradation had occurred in the few years people had been visiting than had occurred over thousands of years previously; the Lascaux that people now tour is a replica. At Niaux, we were fortunate to see the real thing.) A man at the reception desk begged to be allowed on the tour, but was refused, and told the next available spot was at 1:30 that afternoon.

Our guide showed us on a map where we would be going, 800 meters into the mountain, to what has been named the Black Chamber. Here were discovered, about a hundred years ago, many depictions of animals (most other parts of the cave contain painted symbols, but not animals) painted only in black manganese. (Iron ore was used elsewhere, to paint in red.) We were given flashlights, told to turn them on and leave them on when instructed (this was a no-nonsense guy), and were led through two doors meant to keep the caves sealed. We walked slowly through narrow passages and large caverns. Our lights were dim, our footsteps echoed. There were some, but not a lot, of stalactite-stalagmite formations, but this cave, in general, is a dry one. At times, the guide would stop and explain some features, or warn us about slippery spots or low headroom.

We passed grafiti, dated from as early as the 1680’s. Then we reached a junction with another passageway where there were paleolithic designs drawn, lines and dots mostly, in black and red. The guide was clear that we have no idea what any of the signs might mean, just as we have no idea why the people painted, or why they painted what they painted. The meaning has all been lost; the images remain to make us wonder. We moved deeper into the cave.

Finally, our guide told us to put our flashlights on a rock and turn them off. We proceeded by the light of his torch alone. He led us to a railing, and gathered us together, turned his light off for a moment of total darkness, then turned on a permanent floodlight. There was a collective gasp as the cave wall was lit and the images emerged: bison, horses, ibexes, many of them. They filled the space, overlapping in places, some incomplete, some with painstaking detail. The guide used the shadow of his hand to outline animals we may not have noticed. He showed us how the artists used the contour of the rock to create gesture: a bison appears to be turning its head, a horse’s jawline juts. He told us about technique; these painters brought their pigments and brushes with them, they lit their way with grease lamps (pots of animal fat with wicks—the remains have been found). They came here just to paint, and they came to the same spot over and over again. The earliest paintings are a thousand years older than the most recent. Even those later painters must have marvelled at the antiquity of what was already there. No one knows why they painted what they did; we can only guess. Theories have been that it was about the hunt, but bison are the most painted animal, and it is known that these people did not hunt bison, and bison were only found far away, on the plains. These people hunted mainly small animals such as rabbit and birds, but there are no paintings of either.

We moved along to another wall of the same cavern. Again a moment of darkness, and again the gasp when the wall was revealed. Really, these things will move you to tears.

We then moved to the middle of the immense chamber. The guide explained that one theory is that this chamber, alone of many, was chosen for its acoustic properties, and he asked if there was a singer among us. He turned out the light and waited. A man with a magnificent voice began to sing, something that sounded like plainchant. The rest of us were struck dumb.

The moment was over. We picked up our flashlights and made our way out of the cave, and back to the day.

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Possibly the best day ever (July 24, 2010)

2010-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

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July 24, 2010

Internet access is intermittent. This post is #2 of 3; scroll down and read from the bottom up, to read them in order.

*****

It started out ordinary enough. Petit dejeuner in the Toulouse hotel, picking up the rental car. (Although, it continues to amaze me that hotels and rental agencies have our names on their list, and are ready for us—it’s all going so smoothly, there’s nothing ordinary about it.) We made our way out of Toulouse with help of our GPS (loaded with a map of France) and instructions from the rental guy. Neither worked well; we followed signs, and ended up exactly where I would have chosen—NOT on the big toll road.

Then came the sunflowers. We’ve all seem them, the fields, thanks to Van Gogh and ads for Provence. To experience them from the inside is entirely a different matter, so when an accessible field came available, we pulled over for photos.

*****

The smell of woodsmoke, a cooking fire. Timber-framed buildings overhang the public square. Children play at bows and arrows. A horse nickers. Canvas tents. Hand-made shoes, voluminous medieval shirts—these are here for purchase. It’s Saturday, the artisans market. You can buy hand-made hats, or honey, or soap made from the lavender of the field. You can eat crepes made on an open fire, or play games as old as your ancestors, compete with your brother or your father using sticks and wooden balls, or ropes and hand-carved pulleys.

This is Mirepoix. Simon de Montfort, the ubiquitous bastard, tried to destroy it in the 13th Century. Later fire tried. But it remains much as it was, a center for the people of the surrounding fields to gather in, a place to buy and sell. The beams not varnished, the paint not so fresh, this feels like the real thing. We buy a book, eat some lunch. The man next to us is from Brazil, but now living here. He is a horse man, inquires about Vancouver. This was Piece of Perfection #1.

*****

We plan to visit Grotte de Niaux tomorrow, a paleolithic painting site not unlike the more famous Lascaux. In Tarascon-sur-Ariege, there is a prehistoric park dedicated to educating the public about the times of the Magdalenian people (of 14,000 to 13.000 years ago) and replicating and explaining the art in the caves. I didn’t expect a lot from the park, but it turned out to be astoundingly good. The indoor exposition took us through a series of rooms, each with a different focus. We were given headsets with English commentary, but these were infrared-triggered, so that when we stepped into a certain area, the commentary would start automatically. The space was dimly lit, and the soundscape meditative. There were few other people there. We were urged to walk slowly, and we felt like we were carried into an otherworldly space. The lives and the environment of the Magdalenians were explained, the art was described and duplicated on a reconstruction of the wall as found at Niaux. There were film clips of scientists explaining how they analyse their findings, down to microscopic examination of brushstrokes and chisel lines. (You can tell the difference between carving done by a master and that done by an apprentice, based on how smoothly the stone is cut.) There were complete skeletons of a wooly mammoth and some kind of ancient lion.

The outdoor space of the park, which covered many hectares, included a large artificial lake (whose purpose is, I don’t know, but it looked good), and several activity centres which showed how the ancients lived. There were several types of animal-skin dwellings (there is no evidence that people ever lived in caves—that is a nineteenth-century myth), a spear-throwing range, a sound labyrinth, with bird and insect songs to lead you through. It was a magical time; perfection #2. By the time we left the park, we were saying, “Could there be a better day than this?”

*****

We drove back up the road from Tarascon to Foix, where we had the Hotel Lons booked for the night. The town is typically medieval in that there are no straight roads or two-way streets (except one, the “Champs-Elysées” many towns seems to emulate). We parked where we found a spot, walked until we found the hotel, and then moved the car closer with the aid of a map from the Tourist Info centre. Our way through, we noticed a lot of people gathered in a big covered space at the town centre, so after dinner (at the hotel), we wandered up to check it out.

It turned out there was a traditional music festival going on, and since it was Saturday night, the whole town seemed to be there, along with many from the surrounding region. People aged twelve to sixty were dancing traditional dances to music that sounded almost Celtic, played on an accordian, fiddle, clarinet, hurdy gurdy, The band leader sometimes called instructions, and it was clear from watching that there were those that knew the dances well, and those that followed along. We joined in, definitely followers. (John humoured me, knowing I can’t NOT join in when there’s dancing.)

This was the kind of event I’ve looked for, for years, but never quite found. In Ireland, we found the trad music, but not the dancing. In Mabou, Cape Breton, we found the music and the dancing in a community hall, and it was real, but the dances were so complicated and involved so much partner-changing, we couldn’t join in comfortably. This night in Foix, the dances were simple (big circle dances, with people moving around the circle with their partners) and no one cared if you messed up. The smiles, god, it was one big smiling party. We worked up a sweat that even Ami would approve of: real exercise!

When the band finished, a group of early-music enthusiasts (we knew from their t-shirts) played, in front of the stage. They played shawms and fifes and guitars and a strange clay-pot drum with a stick piercing the skin. People continued to dance. Then, at 11:30 p.m., came the featured act, a band called Bombe2Bal. Bal, as far as I can figure, refers to the type of music, or maybe to the dances; I’ll have to look it up later. The band included three women singing together (as well as playing instruments) and some back-up players, and their music sounded sometimes Brazilian, sometimes Celtic, sometimes African and always fantastic. They are available on iTunes, I found, and I’ll buy when I return home. We listened for a while, then wandered through the bare streets, music echoing, back to our hotel.

Perfection #3. NOW we say again, could there be a day to top this one?

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Food

2010-07-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

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Internet access is intermittent. This post is #1 of 3 posted on July 27th

Lisa asked for something about food, so this is for her. Thanks to everyone for reading, and especially for dropping comments.

Berlin

When we were in Berlin the temperatures were such that all I could manage to eat was salad, to go with the rosé, which seems to be the wine of choice in Europe in the summer. Among the changes Berlin has manifest is the meeting of cosmopolitan tastes. Not long ago, a salad might have consisted of cucumber, corn kernels, and some limp iceberg lettuce smothered in mayonnaise. Nowadays, it's a wonderful fresh salad of baby greens, often topped with unripened mozarella, or hard-boiled egg, or paper-thin slices of smoked meat, and with a fine olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing. We loved the salads at “the beach”, on the River Spree across from the Neues Museum. We had them with Hefeweizen (a pale beer with lots of floating yeast in it, making it cloudy) or rosé or some strange mix of beer and fruit juice that Katharina would order. (Her apparent favourite? Beer with banana juice. Truly.)

Fruhstuch–add a couple of umlauts and you have breakfast, in German. We ate nearly every breakfast in the Bilderbuche Cafe, as mentioned previously. The breakfast menu was long, but most of the choices were a variation on the theme of cheeses, ham or sausage (think thin-sliced prosciutto kind of ham and slices of wrist-thick salami-type sausage—the closest I can think of available in Canada or the U.S.), sliced bell peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, and slices of melon, peach, and other fruit. The platters were accompanied by a big basket of a variety of delicious breads. To accompany, milchcafé or other variations on coffee or excellent black tea. John would have been miserable with these breakfasts, except that the Bilderbuche also served scrambled eggs with a variety of fillings. Apparently restaurants include eggs for the sake of English or North American visitors; Germans don’t eat them for breakfast, other than hard-boiled as part of a cheese and sausage platter.

We generally had dinner in the Schoneberg neighbourhood where Ezra and Katharina live. We liked the Yogi Haus for Indian food, and a certain Vietnamese place (there are several), and we found a restaurant with an eclectic menu that included great salads. Out and about during the day, we’d pick up street food. I think I mentioned it: currywurst, donairs. Katharina took us to her favourite pizza place in Kreutzberg (a youth-trendy neighbourhood) called “Romantica”. That’s the place that serves horse meat on pizza, if you want it (I didn’t). Customers spill out of the ample terrace and onto a bridge across a canal. Sometimes people bring guitars. It's a festival!

What was astounding about Berlin was the prices. I have come to expect to pay dearly for meals in France, but in Berlin (and likely all of Germany) meals were plentiful and cheap. We generally fed the four of us a great meal, including drinks, for €30 - €40, which, at about $1.30 or so Canadian, is a steal. The breakfasts were €3 to €4. Phenomenal.

When we ventured south into Saechische-Schweiz, our food experiences were just this side of disastrous. We made the mistake of ordering seafood, which of course you shouldn’t do if you are nowhere near the sea; it smelled and tasted like it had known better days, and we couldn’t finish it. The second evening, we asked a person in a travel agency where a good restaurant would be and she recommended her favourite Italian. It turned out to be a pizza place with a few pasta options, The mushrooms on my pizza were canned. The pasta sauce seemed to be, too. This was a region under Soviet rule until twenty years ago, and it seems to me they are still learning how to cater to the needs of diners.

And so, onwards, to France, almost as renowned for food as Italy….

Colmar

Colmar is French trying to be German. Or the other way around. The local dishes there include sauerkraut with sausage (they call it charcouterie) and tarte flambe, which, as far as I can figure, is a pizza-esque dish. We tried neither, but John did order a traditional Alsace hotpot, which is a sort of soup with big hunks of a variety of meat. His was bland. The salads were decent, however, and that’s about all I ate.

France, generally

The French take food seriously. That means it’s pretty good, most of the time. There are several kinds of restaurants in France, and I haven’t, frankly, quite figured out the difference. There are bars, at which people hang out and drink (duh), but which also serve food. There are cafés (or, I’ve noticed this time, “Salons du tea”), at which people hang out and drink—often coffee, but alcohol as well—and which also serve food. There are brasseries, which serve food and drink. And there are restaurants, which differ from the others in that they only serve at specific hours, usually from noon to two, then from six or seven to nine or later. All four have chalkboard menus out front, and in tourist season, there is always a cluster of people taking a bespecktacled look at the fare. A restaurant (and a brasserie) will have one or more “menus” posted; a menu consists of two or more courses at a fixed price, the courses being limited to several choices. There might be a €14 menu, a €18 menu, and a €24 menu, and you get what you pay for. Notice, though, that you couldn’t feel four people for 30 - 40 Euros, as you could in Germany. There is also a “carte”, from which you can order individual dishes, if you choose, but the best deals are on the “menu”.

In a shop in Avignon, the proprietors asked where we were going next, and when we said the Dordogne, there was a chorus of “oh, you’ll eat well there!” Fois gras, duck, all that heavy-duty food that will make you fat if it doesn’t give you a heart attack first—that’s what the Dordogne is known for. We had a meal with Roselyne’s sister in Toulouse the other day, at a very nice restaurant called “7 Severin” (hint: if there is a number in the name, it’s a good restaurant; holds true in Vancouver, too). I had the foie gras as an entrée (entrée being the “entrance” to the meal in France, while the main course is “Viande” (meat) or “Poisson” (fish). Apparently it was good foie gras, but it has the taste and texture of lard to me, so I doubt I’ll be getting fat on it in Dordogne. As for duck, last time I had it in France, I thought the waiter had made a mistake and brought me roast beef. Won’t be getting fat on duck, either.

Cheese. That’s a different story. When you walk into a fromagérie (cheese shop) in France, you must take a deep whiff. “Foot of an angel” is how I’ve heard the scent described. It’s definitely a smelly-foot kind of aroma, but arguably not so disagreeable. I love the smell of the fromagérie. If you love the smell of mouldy basements (and the smell of your dog’s paws), you will too. Otherwise, avoid.

I am happy with almost any cheese. Some take a little getting accustomed to, but to me, worth the effort. John, however, has no tolerance for any but the mildest of goudas, so he goes elsewhere when I shop for cheese. I bought some Emmental for tomorrow’s picnic, and I just hope it suits him, because the French like to TASTE their cheese, just as they like to taste their coffee.

Speaking of which. There is no such thing as café-au-lait in the afternoon. At breakfast, it’s café-au-lait till you float away; it’s expected. Ask for the same at 4 pm, and they will deny ever having heard of such a thing. “Café-au-lait? Qu’est-ce que c’est? Je ne connais pas cette chose!” John thought I was making it up, but Jocelyne confirmed my story. Even she, living in France her whole life, finds it funny.

Cassoulet is a dish indigenous to south-western France. It is a stew consisting of a specific white bean grown in the region, and a variety of sausages and other meats. There is serious competition about Cassoulet, with any of several towns thinking theirs is the best. (Toronto and Montreal have a similar rivalry about bagels.) I tried a Cassoulet in the same good Toulouse restaurant when I was there several years ago and was under-impressed. We tried it again in Foix last night, and again found it less than thrilling. John, I think, nailed it: it is the kind of food that would take one back to one’s childhood—like Grand-mere’s. It is peasant food, hearty and cheap (or should be). It’s comfort food like mac and cheese, if you are a mac-and-cheese kind of person. The difference is that it’s a complicated dish to make, apparently, the process taking a couple of days. Can’t say I understand what the Cassoulet fuss is about.

We are just now into a Catalan-influenced region of France. I am looking forward to a couple of days of paella and Collioure anchovies. After that, whatever the Dordogne has to offer as an alternative to foie gras and duck confit.

So. My plan, at one point, was to create something from this trip that included poetry, photos, food (meaning recipes). I still think the idea is decent, but I’m not sure the recipe part will happen. I did take photos of some recipes today (how’s that for cheap?), but I can’t rightly claim those. There has been no poetry yet, but fodder for much; that will come. Photos, I have a gazillion already. Most of them crap. I’m still trying to find my theme, not satisfied by the shots that have been done better in postcards. I have a lot of cranes and building sites—maybe that will be it.

Thank you Lisa, for making me do this. Next up: the possibly greatest day of my life (yesterday), while it’s still fresh.

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Avignon during the Theater Festival

2010-07-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

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This is the last of 4 posts tonight. I wrote this one on the train today, and tonight our Toulouse hotel has wi-fi, at last. Scroll down if you want to read them in order.

July 22, 2010. Avignon, Provence, France

Disembarking from the TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse - Train of “Large Speed”), our noses crinkle with the smell of burning forest. The rain hits during the shuttle ride to town. Hits hard. People on the street are soaked, water sheets down the bus windows. I try to think where I’ve stashed my mini umbrella. The smell of smoke is washed away, the air cleansed.

We have arrived in Avignon at the height of the annual Theatre Festival. It’s a major month-long event that attracts thousands of people from all over France. Hotel prices jump 20% for the month, cafes are constantly crowded. Every wall, fence, lamppost is festooned with posters. They slump and wrinkle from the rain.

The downpour relaxes as we reach our stop. We step onto a steamy sidewalk and make our way down a broad, Hausmann-style boulevard to our little hotel, just off a church park.

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We had just one night in Avignon, arriving at 2:30 Thursday and departing at 1:30 Friday. It was just the right amount of time for seeing the most famous sites, exploring the backstreets, and absorbing the atmosphere. After checking into the Hotel du Parc, we set out into the twisted medieval city core. The streets were only wide enough for a single vehicle, and the sidewalks were barely more than balance beams, so pedestrians walked on the street, moved off when a car would come, then drifted back onto the road. So many people! Normally, I would not like the crowds, but this was such a festve atmosphere. Every few meters, someone would hand us a card advertising their show—a comedy, or “spectacle”, dance or music—and often that someone would be in costume, with full make-up—a member of the cast. There was an unbelievable number of these shows being produced, dozens, or maybe hundreds. Just walking along Rue de Lices, we saw at least four venues.

As we headed towards city center, the Place de l’Horlage (I think), and the Papal Palace, we heard music and headed towards it. There was a long-haired man playing a kind of tin drum, a tune that sounded like a Celtic harp. (Later we saw an African man playing the same instrument, but sounding like an mbira.) Further along, there was a family playing a kind of African-American folk, the mother and father on guitars, one young son playing a box-drum (what a natural he was!) and a yet younger son dancing. Further, there was a brass band, then a jazz combo. Beyond that, a strange marraca sound, which we figured out was coming from cicadas high in the plane trees of Place de l’Horlage. Underneath them, the sound was astoundingly loud. We found out later that the cicadas are in Avignon from mid-June to mid-August every year. They are a good luck symbol in Provence, and tourist shops are fully of cicada souvenirs in the form of oven mitts, shakers, fridge-magnets, and noisy ceramic motion detectors.

We walked into the massive square beside the massive Palace des Papes. The Pope moved here from Rome in the mid 14th Century to escape the plague. The Vatican virtually built (or rebuilt) the city to accommodate its many personages, and the population grew to some 25,000, about twice as many as live in the old-city core today.

A recorder player wearing a halo danced as he played Renaissance tunes. Painted statue-men posed. A juggler drew crowds. At the centre of the square is a sculpture of an elephant balancing on its trunk. I don’t know, yet, what it signifies, but it is, again, massive.

We walked up a hill behind the square and the cathedral into a peaceful, treed park with fantastic views of the Rhone and . . . the Pont d’Avignon. The song whirled through our heads.

We found our way down the ramparts to the river, took some photos, and made our way to the bridge. Of course, we had to dance there, and we got some shots of ourselves kicking up our heels ridiculously. We were glad to see others doing the same. Everyone gets it.

It is not free to dance—or walk—on the Pont (which is actually called Pont de Saint-Benezaire), but €4,50 gets you on, along with an informative audio guide. Information is great, but in this case, it seemed beside the point.

The sun came out in full while we were on the bridge (the better to photograph it!), but the breeze kept us comfortable, much more pleasant than it has been for much of the past twelve days. We made our way back to the center of town, then up a street called Rue de Teintereurs towards where we planned dinner. On one side of the rue runs a small canal with huge working waterwheels. On the other, an eclectic assortment of shops and restaurants. Temporary stalls sold things like frog-scrapers, the kind that croak when you run a stick across their back (I bought two small ones for €12, and John bought a cricket for €7), and glass light-catchers, and brass singing bowls. The crowd was thick and flambouyant, many people in costumes and masks, many handing out their advertising cards.

The restaurant we’d planned to eat at, a Rick Steves high-end-ish kind of place, was fully booked, so we chose a Moroccan place in the heart of the action. We ate at a tin table on the cobblestones, right beside a two-piece band—bass and soprano sax—who bebopped through our entire lamb couscous meal without a break. We sat for at least an hour, watching people.

The night was just beginning in festival Avignon, but we had had enough. We took our bottle of rosé (bought from its maker in a tiny shop, where we also had the pleasure of tasting a most delicious, and beautiful-to-look-at, lavender liqueur), and retreated to our hotel above the park.

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Colmar

2010-07-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

This is the 3rd of 4 posts tonight, finally, after several days without wi-fi. The most recent is at the top of the page; scroll down to take them in order.

Colmar, Alsace, France - July 21, 2010

The terrace of our restaurant all but fills a widening in an alleyway. We face a wall of mango-painted plaster broken by half-timbers stained and laquered to a rich chocolate brown. At the corner of the wall, a careful arrangements of stones are exposed. A sax player blows standards, accompanied by an accordian. I feel like I’m in Disneyland.

For those of you who’ve never been, Disneyland is divided up into districts meant to represent particular environments. You can visit Polynesia, for instance, or the French Quarter of New Orleans. Supposedly. Disney could transplant Colmar cobblestone by cobblestone, timber-framed house by timber-framed house, and it would still feel like . . . Disneyland.

Not that it’s not beautiful. It is. It is perfect. It is astoundingly well-preserved. (The bombers seemed to have had instructions to avoid it.) If it weren’t for the hoards of tourists, one could feel transported to the 16th century with barely a street seeming out of place. One imagines oneself among the tanners or the fishers, the shouts of merchants and the stink of their wares. This terrace has been occupied, possibly, for hundreds of years.

The good part about a town like this is that it’s very photogenic, and there’s not much to do. We take an afternoon nap; I get to catch up with my blogging.

There’s a fantastic little museum here, the Unterlinden (funny, the main drag in eastern Berlin is Unter den Linden), whose prize exhibit is the Issenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece of early 16th Century art painted by Grunewald (people may know his depiction of monsters tempting St. Anthony, a piece that looks Goya-esque and thoroughly modern) and with a centerpiece sculpted by Nicolas de Haguenau. The Altarpiece was designed to open up to show several different scenes at different times of the litergical year, but the museum has separated the panels so that we can view them all, and then created models which we can move, to see how the original worked. In the basement of the museum is the modern art gallery, which is currently exhibiting the work of Joe Downing, an American who lived in Paris, and we got excited with ideas to work with, with our students. We spent a couple of hours in the museum, which occupies a one-time convent, cloister and all.

It is so good to be in France, where we can at least partly understand what people are saying, where we can make requests and even a little conversation without having to think too hard. (Think too hard?? In Germany, thinking did us no good whatsoever; we needed Katharina or Ezra or our phrase book to say the slightest thing!) Colmar is an oddity in France, with its heavy Germanic influence, and it may be Disneyesque, but we are happy to be here.

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Berlin Impressions

2010-07-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

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The second of several posts tonight, posted in order; the most recent appear at the top of the page.

Shout out to Lisa and Ami for commenting; it's great to know you are reading.

so...

Ezra asked me how Berlin compared to my expectations. It takes a while to consolidate impressions, but I’ll try.

If I had gone to Berlin without knowing any of its history (and how would that be possible?), I think I would have seen a cosmopolitan city with lots of construction going on, a smattering of historic—gothic and neo-classical—buildings and monuments, lots of people on the streets, walking or biking (thousands of bikes), and a certain shabbiness (graffiti everywhere).

Since I do know some of Berlin’s history, I can’t help but impose my own ideas on the city. So, what I have to say may be purely my own fantasy and not at all based on what a Berliner might think.

Berlin is not a tourist city like, say, Paris. Paris would hardly exist without tourists, these days, I think, but people who come to Berlin—few in number compared to Paris—stay for a day or two, see the sites they’ve heard of, and leave for, oh I dunno, the Rhineland or Bavaria, or maybe other eastern European capitals. I heard American English only twice, once at the Pergamon, a highly-rated museum, and then again at Checkpoint Charlie, which was fairly crawling with Americans, since it is THEIR site, after all. I heard snippets of British English in the Schoneberg neighbourhood, where E & K live, but I think they were ex-pats now living in Berlin, since Schoneberg is residential, without sites to particularly attract tourists.

Berlin, to me, is like a butterfly emerging from its chysalis. The old is being peeled away, transformed in the process, to reveal an entirely new entity underneath. Between the thorough smashing it got at the hands of the Allies at the end of WWII and the pre-fab boxlike construction of the Soviet era, the city has a lot to recover from.

The story of Katharina’s parents helps to shed some light. Her father, Jochim, came to West Berlin as a student, studying medicine at the University in the 60’s, not long after the building of the Berlin Wall. K’s mom, Agnes, joined him shortly thereafter. Both considered it a temporary move, but they had work and they began a family, so they stayed. Katharina tells me that the government offered families 10,000 Deutsche Marks for each child they had, if they would commit to staying in Berlin for ten years; the Scholmanns did not take the offer. They, along with many others, expected the Soviets to overtake West Berlin at any time. They never did feel safe. Katharina, who was ten years old when the wall came down, tells me about taking family holidays as a little kid and being told to be serious and quiet when passing through the borders, that her mom seemed very nervous about it. They were, after all, surrounded by “enemy” territory.

Jochim’s own father, incidently, had gone off to war when Jochim was two years old, and had never returned—this is a family whose lives have been immersed in what the rest of us view as history, from a distance. Jochim and Agnes took us to several places where remnants of the wall still stand (the most famous is the East Gallery, given over to artists’ works, but it is not, in my experience, the most affecting part). Agnes told me about friends who were separated from their family when the wall went up, because they were married to someone from the other sector. It was clear they have not forgotten, nor will ever forget, the horror of those times. John asked Jochim about young people and their responses. Jochim said that it’s just history to them. As it is to us.

The full length of the wall is marked with a double line of bricks in the pavement now. Some of the parts that still stand, such as the pieces at Potsdamer Platz, are tourist traps, complete with young men dressed in Soviet uniforms, stamping passports for a fee. People line up to take each others’ pictures. It’s all a bit of a circus.

It’s hard to tell East Berlin from West Berlin these days. A careful look at apartment buildings might reveal the prefab panels of the Soviets. Although we stayed in the western part, we did most of our touring about in the eastern part, because that is where the most interesting monuments and museums are, along with a very cool riverfront and its “beach” cafes for hanging out. Where the East merges with the West, such as at Potsdamer Platz, tall glass buildings now gleam. The East seems young, vibrant, happening. The shops are shiny, and the people are spiffy.

I was expecting an edgier Berlin than the one I found. Edgy Berlin is there, I’m sure, but it doesn’t emerge much before 2 a.m., and we just weren’t up to that. Katharina says there are neighbourhoods that used to be very cool, occupied by poor artists, but “cool” attracts the rich, and those neighbourhoods, once shabby and down-to-earth, have become prettified, gentrified. That’s the case in every city, I suppose.

On a day John and I decided to walk from home to the “Topography of Terror”, we found plenty of shabby, and abandonned buildings, broken glass, overgrown parks. Not cool, not yet. There is still a lot of room for development in Berlin.

I had the notion, before I visited Berlin, that the German nation carried a shame about its past, in particular about the Nazi era. (I’ve read books that state that, so I wasn’t just making it up.) I think that whatever shame there might have been has passed now, no doubt in part because most of the people who participated as adults in that era will have died by now. The evidence is in the monuments that are continuing to spring up around Berlin. The memorials we visited—the Jewish Memorial, the Topography of Terror, the Jewish Museum, the memorials to others murdered by the Nazis—are all less than ten years old. The memorials are major monuments, predominately located: they can’t be missed, not by tourists, not by the commuter riding the bus to work. Berlin is fairly shouting: this is the atrocity that happened here, we will not forget. The Topography of Terror, in particular, is relentlessly honest, chronicling Nazi activity in excruciating detail, including newspaper articles and masses of photographs, all displayed in a brand new glass building on the site where the Gestapo headquarters once stood. It gives me chills still, just thinking about it.

Berlin is also currywurst (basically a good quality weiner roasted, then sliced up and drowned in curry powder and ketchup) on the street corners, famous donair stands, sidewalk cafe after sidewalk cafe, excellent salads for very cheap, tall glasses of yeasty beer, and wonderful ethnic restaurants where you can fill up with healthy food for less than ten bucks.

Berlin is a low-skyline city, with little exception. The buildings are six-storeys, generally, with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above. Behind nondescript doorways are courtyards, walled in by apartments. There are virtually no elevators. Even Katharina’s parents, successful professionals living in Berlin for more than forty years, live in a third-floor walk-up, a huge, beautiful apartment, but an apartment nevertheless. People don’t own housing in Berlin, they rent (other than, I suppose, the very wealthy).

Many people also do not own cars. No need. The transit system is a three-way marriage of buses, the U-Bahn (the underground urban trains) and the S-Bahn (the mostly above-ground urban trains). Connections between them are smooth—one ticket works on all systems—and which one to take is a matter of convenience or taste: how far is the station, how fast do you want to get there, and do you care if you see anything along the way? The other main mode of transportation is the bicycle. Berlin is flat. People ride to work, school, the grocery store. There are marked bike lanes on virtually every street, often on the sidewalk, where a pedestrian takes her life in her hands to walk on the red-brick bike path.

Maybe because they walk all the time to transit stops, or ride bikes to where they are going, but I found that Berliners are generally very attractive, slim and healthy-looking (ignore the fact that many, many of them smoke!). The women are gorgeous, though I suppose it helps that it has been little-cotton-dress weather.

I am sure I will have a lot more to say about Berlin when the dust settles. This is all I can muster for tonight.

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Dresden

2010-07-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

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note from July 23: I have several posts to make tonight, and to keep things chronological, I'm posting them in order, which will show up on the page as last one first

written July 21, but looking back

Dresden was always considered a jewel among cities in Germany. Dresden was famously destroyed by incendiary bombs dropped by the Allies in 1945. We have seen film footage taken from bombers the night of the raid, and we have heard stories about people swarming into the river, holding their babies above the water, to escape the firestorm. When our route between Saechische-Schweis and Berlin took us practically through Dresden, I wanted to stop for a couple of hours, to see how this jewel was faring.

The weather was back to sweltering, after a well-timed cloudy reprieve while we hiked the stone monoliths of Saechissche-Schweiss. Ezra got us to the centre of the old city, where we parked and had lunch to fortify ourselves, across from the Zwinger Palace. We dropped into the palace courtyard, but left promptly, as it was the architectural equivalent of strawberry mouse with double the sugar: too much for us. We wandered by orange plastic temporary fencing, rotating cranes, stacked concrete slabs, and megalithic holes in the ground; Dresden, like Berlin, is a city under construction. Beyond the containers and pneumatic drills, however, there was an old city full of character: long, yellow-painted row-houses with red-tiled roofs, narrow, twisting streets taking off higgledy-piggledy from an open market square as big as I’ve ever seen. The stunning centerpiece of the square is the Frauenkirche.

The Frauenkirche is a protestant church dedicated to the virgin Mary, an unusual circumstance in itself. It was built, originally, in the early 18th Century, and boasts the most significant stone dome north of the Alps. It’s a graceful building which seems taller than it is long, and with a footprint that seems to be practically circular, odd to an eye accustomed to the long and narrow shape of most stone churches.

The Frauenkirche was completely gutted by fire during the 1945 bombing raid, and her dome collapsed two days later. The ruins lay untouched in the city centre for 45 years. In the early 1990’s, a citizens' group sent out an appeal worldwide for the reconstruction of the church, and donations came in from more than 100,000 private donors. The Frauenkirche was rebuilt using the original plans and as much of the original material as could be salvaged. She was finally completed in 2005, a symbol of building bridges and reconciliation.

A man outside the church wanted to give me a pamphlet. I said, “No, danke”, not having mastered “nein” for spontaneous responses. He recognized that I spoke English and asked, in English, if I was Christian. I said no. He told me I had to accept Jesus into my life or I would be damned to hell. I told him I would take my chances. He said his life was nothing without Jesus and I told him I was happy he had found meaning for himself. He said he just knew I would burn in hell forever, and that he would pray for me to find Jesus before I died. I thanked him.

When I later told Katharina about the encounter, she was shocked; she had never heard of a German proselytizing like that.

When we entered the Frauenkirche, a choir was singing. This was an ad hoc concert by a visiting choir, who performed a single, gorgeous, polyphonic acappela song then left. We were so lucky to have caught them. John and Ezra sat in the pews, well into a deep discussion about religion and philosophy, while I wandered through the brightly painted interior, taking photos.

Inside the church is preserved the burnt ruin of the original cross that topped the dome, which had been buried in rubble for 45 years. Its replica tops the dome outside. People were lighting candles beside it.

I can’t help but be moved by these things.

I do not subscribe to any religion, and have a hard time imagining myself doing so, but nevertheless, I like churches. The old stone churches are enormous, with pillars that go up forever. The balance, the proportion, the colour from the stained glass that splashes on the floor below, and, man, the acoustics! It is all designed to inspire awe, and it works. It is designed to make us look up, and look up we do.

I like the idea of monuments built to some greater “other”. They seem to me to represent the relinquishing of self, and the belief that narcissism, with which we are plagued today, is not the way to a good and fulfilled life.

I know, I know, the Church has been an instrument of many evils, and the forced tithing of the poor to build cathedrals is among them. I can’t argue with that. However, I think we are arrogant if we believe we can see into the minds of medieval or Renaissance people and decide for them what might have been a better way to spend money. The buildings move me, and I suspect they have always moved anyone who enters.

A woman mounted the pulpit and began to speak; it was time for us to leave. We made our way back across the square and past the construction zone to the car, bound homeward, to Berlin.

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A Quick Catch-up

2010-07-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

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July 19, 2010

I’m getting behind. Each evening I load photos onto my laptop from my camera, sort through and edit them, choose some representative shots for public viewing, then upload them either into a slideshow or Picasa and notify family. It’s time-consuming, and by the time I’m done I don’t have the energy to write. I may need to alternate between the photo thing and writing, in order to accomplish both. I’ll get it sorted out.

We take the train tomorrow to Colmar, Alsace, France. The first part of the journey is about 6 or 7 hours to Basel, Switzerland, and if my battery holds out, I’ll put in print some of the deeper impressions Berlin and Germany has made on me. Meanwhile, as much for jogging my own memory as anything else, here is what we’ve been up to the past few days:

July 15 - visit to the Bastei Bridge, Saechische-Schweiz, then hiking near Rosenberg
July 16 - return to Berlin via Dresden, highlighted by a visit to the Frauenkirche
July 17 - Deutsche National Museum, Jewish Memorial and Information Centre
July 18 - 2:00 dinner with Agnes and Jochim (Katharina’s parents), walk in the Botanical Gardens, especially through a maze of fascinating greenhouses

I have been posting photos at Picasa. It's yet another Google app which is supposed to be easy to synch with Blogger, so I'll have to figure that out. Meanwhile, here's the link (hope it works):

http://picasaweb.google.com/anne.mullins

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Journey to Saxony

2010-07-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

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July 14, 2010. Pirna, Saxony, Germany

8:52 p.m.

You can hear it coming, a distant whine. You hear it for a long time—minutes—before it volumes up. Then it hits, the roar, as the train shudders by, not ten meters from your deck chair.

Once it has past, you don’t notice its sound as it continues up the track to Dresden. You hear, instead, the voices of the bargemen over the diesel rumble of their craft. This seems to be a station, a way-stop where the barges and their tugs rest a while, for what is unclear.

A sparrow chatters from the top branch of a blue spruce as if this were a peaceful place. The brochure suggested only sparrows, and a river to row.

9:07 p.m.

You barely hear this one before it is upon you; it came from behind your cabin roof, suddenly, bound for Prague. The sparrow never stops.

9:12 p.m.

The third train. You decide to move indoors, and close all the windows, as the mosquitos arrive. That sparrow should audition for the part of court nightingale. Such tenacity! Such spirit!

So.

Today has been the kind of day I travel for. You just can’t plan for the twists this day has taken; of days like this, memories are made.

We have been planning for months to visit this area with Ezra. He and Katharina had come here hiking in the Bastei in the winter, and the landscape in their photos was astounding, so we thought we might all take a sidetrip here together. (Unfortunately Katharina has to work all week—she’s an intern in pediatrics at a Brandenberg hospital, putting in the legendary hours expected of young doctors.)

(9:20 p.m. train)

Anyhow, by the time we made reservations, it was hard to find vacancies in this area (www.saechsische-schweiz.de ), since it is a favourite holiday spot for Germans, apparently. Ezra and Katharina found this sweet-looking guest cabin online, and the price was right, so we took it.

We left Berlin around noon, after a relaxing breakfast in the BilderBucke. We were armed with a GPS (who yelled at us in German until Ezzie figured out how to shut her up), a Michelin map book, and driving directions I had copied from Google maps. We had suspenders and a belt, all the way.

(9:26 train)

Most of the 2-hour drive was uneventful. The GPS and my Google directions lined up perfectly until, three kilometers from our destination, the road was closed due to construction. “Oh,” Ezra said, “This is what she meant, that we wouldn’t be able to get there this way.” We had vague instructions to go out through the next village and then circle around from the east. We tried that, but the side road in the right direction was little more than a wagon track. We asked directions and were told that, yes, that little road was the right way, so we took it, through a forest then down again to the river. We came to the end of the road in the yard of an old farmhouse. It looked like a rougher version of those farm couryards they like to put in movies, with huge Italian families dining al fresco. It was gorgeous. The old man working there didn’t even look surprised to see us and was about to go inside when we asked him where we might find #17 (his place was #5 on the road we were looking for). He gestured and explained (Ezra, thankfully, has been living in Berlin and studying German for a year, or God knows where we might have ended up) where we needed to go. There it was, #17. No sign that it might be any kind of rental accommodation, but we parked and walked up a long flight of stone steps. At the top, in a garden which, again, one only sees in movies, a woman was sunbathing. She did look rather surprised to see us, but listened as Ezra explained, and told us the most likely way to go to find our way to our little piece of heaven on the river. By this time, I was thinking we should just offer them the €60 a night to stay there.

Anyhow, we found the river road, and we found our cabin. We found out about trains and mosquitos and a remarkably circuitous route to the Elbe that few outsiders would ever discover.

Our hostess, at first, told us that the only way into Pirna from here was back the way we came, but her husband arrived and told us there was a way to skirt the construction zone, and he would lead us through. We followed behind his car through private gates, up bike paths, and through a works yard and into town. He left us at the market centre, and returned home to his family.

It was too early for dinner, but John and Ezra were hungry, so we stopped into a bakery (sometimes bakeries make sandwiches). This bakery had mostly pastries, but a customer offered to walk us to one that sold sandwiches. On the way through a cobbled pedestrian-only shopping area, we passed by more than one bakery/sandwich places, but our guide led us to the best, and then carried on his way.

We travel for the encounters with people, don’t we? Today was a day of encounters, of remarkable friendliness and generosity.

Tomorrow we’ll explore the landscape, but I bet it won’t go out of its way to make memories for us.

Photos from Pirna and the Saechische-Schweiz, complete with climbers.

Settling in Schoneberg

2010-07-13T13:56:00.001-07:00

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July 12

We have established a pattern already. There is a café around the corner, the BilderBuche Cafe, that offers great breakfasts at great prices. John orders the ham omelet, and I order the “vegetarian”, which consists of cheeses, olives, vegetables and fruit. He has a “milchcafe” and I have black tea. Both beverages are better than we get in Canada. The tea is more expensive than the coffee, which is more expensive than the beer, but who wants beer at 9am? Some of the people working there speak a little English, but it doesn’t matter. We point and smile. Works every time.

We have done our best to see the highlights of Berlin, but it is something like 35° C here, and the humidity is high, so it feels a bit like slogging through a bathtub to get from museum A to historical site B.

We have seen most of Unter den Linden (the “scenic” street of what used to be East Berlin), the Pergamon Museum, the Nuer Museum, both of which have a lot of plundered antiquities (oops, I mean, artifacts rescued by courageous archeologists), taken a boat cruise, and wandered one neighbourhood in particular—Shoneberg—which, I am assured by someone who ought to know, is not only a magnificent neighbourhood, but also the home of the most gay-friendly area in Berlin, which is just fine by me.

By this time, if all had gone according to plan, I would have bicycle-toured and walking-toured most of the Nazi and Communist sites of Berlin. But it’s too bloody hot, so we have been takiing it easy, breakfasting for an hour or two, bussing or U-bahning or S-bahning to places we think might be cooler than the great outdoors.

I have learned a thing or two.

1. When you eat at a restaurant/cafe, you have to ask for the bill if you actually want to get it. Then the waiter will...wait...for you to pay. A tip is assumed to be included in the price, but the idea is to tell him/her the total you want to pay, rounding up a Euro or so, and he/she will give you the change from that amount. We in North America are now at the 20% mark for tipping, but 10% in Berlin will have them practically kissing your feet.

2. You can’t count on getting away with not paying on the transit system. Yesterday, heading home on the U-bahn (the subway system), there were two transit “cops” showing a couple of tourists how to pay and time-stamp their tickets, which is unusual, according to Ezra, who lives here. Normally, they would simply charge €60 for the infraction.

The two officials got on the same train we did. They have a pattern: they get on the train, announce to people to produce their tickets, then move to each end of the car and sweep towards the center, kind of like a garbage compactor. There was a young guy sitting across from me...well...his look said “oh shit” or “scheisse” or whatever that look might be in German. He tried to fake it with a student card, but ended up escorted from the train. Damn. I actually wanted to hand him my ticket. Or pay him some of the fine. I told myself he had probably been riding for weeks or months for free, but still. . . .

3. Museums are not air-conditioned. Or, at least, you can’t count on it. We thought we could escape the heat at the Pergamon. Nope. The Neues Museum. Nope. What the heck? Don’t these artifacts need the same conditions we need, to last through the ages???

4. In Germany, “smokers are us”. They’ll pass a law soon, but meanwhile, enjoy your breakfast with second-hand cigarette.

5. Most people will not read your carefully crafted (if wine-induced) prose, but will jump to the pictures. So….

The Quirks of Flying East

2010-07-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

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I think I was a bit foggy this morning when I posted the previous bit. It's not so much that there would be a short version and a long version, but rather that there would be some posts that sum up the day(s) and others that would be more reflective on the details. So I say now, but I could still be foggy, and I'm not much for sticking with well-laid plans. Anyhow...

I’d forgotten about this.

When you fly from west to east on a long haul, you whip across time zones in the opposite direction from the sun. The effect is that if you leave in the early part of the day, you rush into night and then rush into day. Put that together with the northern (“polar”) route that is the most direct line from west coast North America to Europe, and you’ll encounter almost no darkness, even though you arrive in Europe in the morning and nine or so hours will have passed.

The navigation screen on the aircraft displays the “night zone” in a kind of bell-curve on the screen, like this:

This is a poor-quality photo I took of the navigation screen, complete with reflection, but you get the idea. It is clear that if you were to fly further south, you would pass through more darkness, and if you travelled just a smidgen further north, the sun would be visible the entire flight.

A moment after the shot of the screen, I turned my camera out the window to capture the sunrise above the clouds from 10,000 meters high.

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Not in Vancouver Any More

2010-07-11T03:12:00.000-07:00

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I’ve decided to post in two versions, a short one that I can whip off in a few minutes, and a longer version that I’ll write when I have more time to allot—I can tell already I’ll have too much to say to keep abreast of long versions on a day-to-day basis. So, for now...

The Short Version

We’re flying on points, and so travel business class; the difference in cost (in points) is neglegible, but the difference in travel experience is huge when flying overseas (not so much within the country).

So, Travel Tip #1: If you have enough points, travel business.

Travel Tip #2: If you are flying to Europe from the West Coast, be sure that you fly long-haul FROM the west, not transferring in, say Toronto or Montreal, because the planes are not the same.

Our trip was in three legs: Vancouver-Calgary, Calgary-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Berlin. What I was not prepared for was having to go through security in EACH airport. That would not have been a problem, except that our plane sat on the Calgary tarmac for an hour, and we would only have an hour and a half transfer time once we got to Frankfurt. When we landed in Frankfurt, late as expected, the gates were full and a shuttle bus had to meet us to take us to the terminal. We ran. In line for security—third time that day—a woman who appeared to be custodial staff came along and flipped the directional sign, so that suddenly we were in the wrong line-up for the concourse we needed, and had to leave the line and run, I swear, the full length of the airport, take stairs, elevators, stand in a different line for security, to end up at the gate listed on our boarding passes. We inquired at the neighbouring gate and were told that the gate had been changed and that the plane had departed. The attendant was going to book us on the next plane, but called and found out that the plane had not, in fact left, and that we would catch it if we ran. We ran.

Forty-five minutes later we landed in Berlin. I don’t know how our luggage made it, since we barely did, but there it was, probably due to the “priority” sticker (another perk of business class). Ezra and Katharina were there, such a welcome sight! We rode the U-bahn, the underground urban train, to their apartment. They live in a wonderful, very Berlin neighbourhood called Schoeneberg, lots of shops and cafes lining the street, the bottom floor of 6-storey apartment buildings.

To keep jetlag at bay, we went to the old Berlin center, to walk the Unter den Linden in the bright sunlight; we dragged ourselves around in temperatures of about 35°C. We discovered that U-Bahn stations are a good place to cool off, especially when a train blasts in, a cold wind preceding it.

We went to a neighbourhood Indian Restaurant for a dinner we could well have enjoyed in Vancouver—thank you to the fine Indian restauranteurs, worldwide!—then returned to the apartment to collapse in bed, to the sounds of young Germans hooting their approval every time Germany scored in the 3rd-place FIFA game.

I am happy!

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The Beauty of Mathematics

2010-06-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

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Okay, today I’m not thinking about the south of France

lalalalalalalalalalala. . . .

Here it is, the end of the school year. French is done. Social Studies is done. Science, well, I could do more, we’ll see. Language Arts never ends, nor do any of the fine arts.

Curriculum is a constant knocking at the door. “Hey, Human Body!” “Hey, Fractions and Decimals!” “Hey, Five Paragraph Essay!” “Hey, Parts of a Cell!” “Hey, Aspects of Puberty!” “Hey, Elements of Design!” “Hey, Human Rights and Responsibilities!”

Hey, sometimes you just wanna insert earplugs, ya know?

But the year is about done, and the pressure is off, and today I taught the way I would teach every day if there weren’t some 500 learning objectives I had to be sure to cover. It was organic, and it took close to three hours, but I learned a bunch, got excited, and dragged 26 students along with me.

Today, we did math, specifically, the Fibonacci sequence. For those not in the know, it goes like this:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 . . .

The pattern is to add the last two numbers to get the next. It started in 1202 in Italy
(which appeals to me, being just a few years before the beginning of the Roman Inquisition, in which I’m very interested). Old Fibonacci was charged with the task of figuring out how many rabbits would exist in one year if a single pair were set loose in a field to do the dirty deed, as rabbits are wont to do, apparently.

Here’s what he figured out: Fibonacci Numbers and Nature

. . . along with other good stuff.

So, when we got through rabbits, we got into the very elementary genetics of the problems of brothers and sisters mating (the thought of which was too shocking for even pubescent boys to respond!), and managed, somehow, to get into the theoretical probability of two brown-eyed parents producing a blue-eyed child. (“Can we take a survey?” they asked, and this teacher rejoiced!) Our class was way outside the expected norm, with a whole lot of blue-eyed children of brown-eyed parents – so that’s the next exploration, I guess.

Back to Fibonacci. We drew out a series of squares based on the Fibonacci series. Kids were hooked. Then we drew a spiral line within the Fibonacci squares. Kids were blown away. There was K., my perpetual I-can’t-do-it kid, staring at his own work in amazement. “Can you believe you did that?” I asked.

“No.” That is what he said.

So, here it is. I think I’ve been doing it backwards, and I’m not alone. Somewhere around Grade 3, we start getting kids to learn the multiplication table. At Grade 5 and 6, which I teach, we expect them to know it, automatically. Most of them don’t, of course, and so every operation they have to do hurts, in a visceral way. I know, because that was my own experience as a kid.

We never tell them why they should want to do this. It’s like providing a map without saying anything about the treasure; there is no “x marks the spot”. Why would anyone care to follow?

In a strange coincidence, my principal sent a link today to a slide show called, “Beauty of Mathematics”. I showed it to my class, and they were so excited. They just hadn’t thought of math this way, and, to be honest, neither had I.

The end part, the didactic preachy part about reaching 100 per cent is nonsense, of course.*

I am working on trying to find a link or an attachment that I can post here. Meanwhile, you may have to do your own search for "Beauty of Mathematics" and put up with the God stuff that was NOT a part of the slideshow I showed my students, though the non-God stuff is the same.

One nice thing about teaching is that you get to try again next year. I hope I will have the courage, next year, to start with the turn-on, the treasure – Fibonacci, nature, and the amazing things numbers do – and then get to the steps you need to take to get to the treasure. I bet I’ll be able to entice a few kids who would otherwise would stay behind.

*On a completely different tack: when I googled this slide show so that I could post it on facebook, what I found was somehow attached to “the Love of God”, which gets you to 101%. The slide show was the same, but included God as part of the “equation”. Nauseating. Best I can do is post this blog and link it through facebook. God might try, but it can’t win.

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Travel Planning III: To Plan or Not To Plan

2010-05-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

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Okay, okay. I’m a planner. Can’t help it. I’m not a minute-by-minute uberplanner, you have to give me that, but I like to know where I’m heading, and I don’t want to find out later that I missed something I would have loved not to miss.

I haven’t always been this way. My travel lust was born when I was 19 and spent almost a year in Europe and North Africa. I listened to others that had been, made a few notes about places to stay, somehow knew to buy a sleeping bag in London instead of at home, got a passport, an International Drivers License, which I didn’t use, and a Youth Hostel membership, which I did. I carried a copy of Frommer’s “Europe on $5 a Day” and budgeted for 3. I spent one thousand dollars in ten months.

When the weather was cold, we (my friend Anne and I) headed south. When we met some nice guys with a van, we rode with them, for three months. When we were denied a one-way ferry ticket to Tunis from Sicily, we hitch-hiked to the other side of the island and caught a ferry to Malta, not knowing what language the Maltese would speak, nor the money they’d use, nor anything else about Malta. When we met some nice guys with an apartment to rent, we stayed on Malta for a month. We hitchhiked across North Africa, Libya to Morocco. We weren’t mugged, raped or murdered. Apparently.

When I came home after that trip, I did have a plan: to travel again, soon and often. That plan fell through.

My friend Anne did travel, though. She and her now-husband Dave went to Asia for two years. When they left, there were no guidebooks. Around that time the first “Shoestring” (to become Lonely Planet) guide came out, but Anne and Dave’s trip preceded that publication, and they headed off for Samoa not having a clue what they’d find there. There was planning, but not a lot of help in doing it.

I did spend a couple of winters in Mexico. We (my boyfriend Dave and I) drove a 60’s Volkswagon van all over Mexico, spending the nights parked for free in quarries (recommended), and banana plantations (not recommended unless you are fond of mosquitoes). We met and travelled with others like us. Our guidebook was “The Peoples Guide to Mexico” by Carl Franz and Lorena Havens – aimed at vagabond hippie-types like ourselves. On the second trip, we stayed on the west coast, moving on when the Federales raided the campground of Mazatlan, ending up on a beach south of Puerta Vallarta for a month with a community of American expats who wintered there regularly. We built gardens of stones.

I got serious after that, headed off on a career path, had a family, joined the rat race. My next trip was to Ireland in 2004, a trip decades in coming.

I wanted to do Ireland the way I’d travelled before, staying when we found places we liked and finding accommodation as we went. The barrier to that was that we, having joined mainstream society, had the dual restraints of time and budget. I bought a couple of guidebooks, planned a Rick-Steves-but-slower kind of independent tour, and off we (my husband John and I) went. And I learned a lot about planning for travel.

Rick-Steves-but-slower was still way, way too fast. And not booking ahead for accommodation ensured that our places, while nice enough, were out of the way. I learned that I like to be in the center of things, close enough to stumble home from the pub to the B&B. I learned that travel is as exhausting as it is exhilarating, and that I was unable to stay up late enough to find the craic (and Irish trad) until I started taking afternoon naps. The main thing I learned, though, was that even two nights in a town gives me a sense of being more than a passer-through, however delusional that sense might be. I learned that the slower you go, the better the trip.

I don’t know how to balance the need to go slow – being open to discovering things the guidebooks miss, meeting people, and just hanging out when the view is good – with the advantages of booking ahead. I think the only way may be analogous, if opposite, to the principle of packing light: to pack light, pack everything you absolutely need, then remove half of it. To travel well, maybe you need to plan for as long as you think the place will interest you, then book double that amount of time. That means, of course, to go to few places rather than many, to limit driving distances, and to hunker down in places that you hope are as nice as they look online.

The only actual/typical on-the-road travelling we’ll be doing on the upcoming trip will be from the time we leave Berlin to the time we arrive at our gites in the Dordogne, a total of twelve days and eight different towns to sleep in. This is the part of the trip I’ve planned the most, and the part I’m most worried about – that we’ll be moving too fast. I guess this part of the trip will be a good test for my double-the-time theory. I sure hope the gites will be the peaceful haven it appears to be; we’ll probably need the rest, and it’s booked for three times as many days the guidebooks suggest. That should be slow enough.

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Travel Planning II: Reason to Travel

2010-05-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. -Miriam Beard

It’s not enough just to go places. After a while, each chateau resembles the last. “The one with the deep blue ceiling embedded with stars–which one was that?” you ask your spouse. The ruins of a fortress become just another rubble pile, a picnic spot with a view.

Throughout the area we’ll be travelling in the south of France are the remains of Cathar strongholds with names that echo down from history. When I began my search for places to explore, I had little idea who these Cathars were. One would expect a military presence, maybe a southwest version of the raging Mongols, from the prominence of castles; or maybe a branch of the Moors, from their proximity to Spain. But castles, of course, are built in defense, while raging hoards are the attackers, and these castles are distinctly not Moorish, but rather look like Sleeping Beauty’s resting place had the prince not come to kiss her.

A good guidebook offers a bit of history, as do web pages of the region, aimed at the traveller with a casual interest. For she who likes to immerse herself in her landscape, these tidbits only serve to pique the appetite. So I’m reading history books. Right now, I’m reading “The Inquisition”, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. More on these authors to follow.

The Cathars

The Cathars were a Christian sect that denounced the Catholic Church and its extravagant ways. They looked to the life of Jesus and attempted to follow his lead; they lived in poverty and humility, and believed that the life of the flesh was the incarnation of evil while divinity resided solely in the spiritual realm. The Catholic Church at the time, ostensibly a religious institution, was more a self-driven political machine aimed at keeping power and wealth in the hands of the pope and his bishops. The Church had imaginative ways of insuring the tithe, including the selling of indulgences, whereby a sinner could pay off the priest to be forgiven. The church held scripture tightly to its chest, not allowing translation into common languages; this enabled any number of twists to the “word of God” to work in the church’s favour. Martin Luther was the most famous of objectors to the ways of the Catholic Church, but he was not the first. The Cathars were not the first, either, having been preceded by the Gnostics and the Balkan Bogomils. Their ideas had emerged previously, with the Eastern Orthodox Church and 3rd-century Manichaeanism (from the Persian teacher, Mani).

I don’t know anything about these last entities–the reading of history always plants the seeds for more reading.

The Cathars first appeared on Catholic radar around the beginning of the 13th century, when the Crusades were already in full swing. In 1208, Pope Innocent III (love the irony of Papal names!) turned the crusade idea inward to people within Europe’s boundaries for the first time, to the heretics known as Cathar (“the purified”), also known as Albigensians after Albi, one of their centers. This first internal crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, was headed by a new institution formed by the pope: the Inquisition. We all know what followed.

The Dominicans

The monk Dominic encountered the Cathars in his travels and was the first, along with his travelling partner the Bishop of Osma, to bring the Cathar heresy to Pope Innocent’s attention in 1203 or 1204. “The Inquisition” labels him as a fanatic who “rode with the spearhead of the crusaders’ army”. It is interesting that he learned by observing the Cathars: they spread their word through educated wandering preachers; thus, he set up his organization of travelling friars, trained in the art of persuasion, to counteract the heretical preachers. He also adopted the ideal of poverty and himself wore a hair robe, whipped himself publicly, and generally lived the ascetic life. I suppose “fighting fire with fire” is an unfortunate analogy, but that seems to have been Dominic’s method.

When the Cathars could not be brought back into Catholicism “through sweetness and blessing”, he appeared to become enraged and took up “the stick” to combat the heresy. “We . . . will cause many people to die by the sword, will ruin your towers, overthrow and destroy your walls and reduce you all to servitude.” (Vicare, Saint Dominic and His Times, p. 146.)

The views of Baigent and Leigh are clear: Dominic was a raging fanatic. Dominic died in 1221 and was canonized in 1234 by Pope Gregory IX, who happened to be an old buddy of Dominic. His order, the Dominicans, were the original Inquisitors.

The Cathars were systematically exterminated. The last Cathar was burned in 1321. The last one.

If you go to the website of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), Saint Dominic is depicted as merciful and acting on behalf of the persecuted. Wikipedia suggests some controversy around his history, that his participation in the Inquisition is not established. In short, there appears to have been some whitewashing of his story.

Behind our hotel in Collioure is a Dominican winery. No doubt we will visit and enjoy the wares. I can’t help but wonder about the current Dominicans, what of their own history they believe, and how they might respond to allegations that their founder might have been less than saintly.

I don’t believe we can be held responsible for the “sins of the fathers”, but the idea of collective guilt about the past intrigues me. I picked up a book about the phenomenon, written by Bernhard Schlink, author of “The Reader”; I have not read it yet, but in the first few pages, he tells how his generation (which is my generation) still makes frequent reference to the Third Reich and the Holocaust, as though still trying to reconcile with the past. I don’t have any answers, but I will be asking questions, when I travel.

How I'd make a million if I could beat Dan Brown to it

Back to the authors of “The Inquisition”. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh also wrote “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” in 1982. I read it way back then, and have forgotten most of its details, but when I read “The Da Vinci Code” a couple of years ago, the ideas were strikingly familiar. Dan Brown took his thesis from the Baigent/Leigh book, and wrote a ripping tale out of it. If I had a modicum of Brown’s story-telling capability, I’d tackle “The Inquisition” and make a mint of my own.

It is interesting to note that “The Holy Blood. . . ” was panned by serious historians as pseudo-history. (I never thought it was actually meant to be history, in fact.) That could signal that the authors’ ideas about Dominic and his role in the Inquisition might not be entirely dependable. That’s a pity, because he makes a wonderful bad guy, along with the Catholic Church.

Incidentally, all histories of the Inquisition were included in the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, established in the mid-16th Century. Any Catholic reading them risked excommunication. The Index was not finally abolished until 1966.

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Summer 2010 - The Planning

2010-04-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

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It’s a remarkably blustery day here today. I’m alone in the house, cozy but a bit jumpy, because there’s a lot of noise out there. A perfect day to holiday-plan.

Here’s my idea–if not a plan, a notion. I want to blog this summer’s trip, every day. I may not get online every day, but I'll be taking my laptop, so I can write each day and post later. I’ll be able to upload photos, too. (Better learn how to take good night shots.)

I want to focus in particular on the villages and the city neighbourhoods that have never and likely will never make it into the guidebooks. I want to hit on the country roads lined with scrub, and the scuzzy lanes lined with sex shops. I want to include food: the markets, the picnics, the restaurants, their owners and their recipes. (Better learn how to take good food shots.)

I want to write poetry, fragments of the road. Bits of conversations, signs, names.

I want to lump the work together into some kind of book. Maybe I can.

The idea for this trip began with the realization that we have three sets of family/friends currently living in Europe: Ezra and Katharina in Berlin, Marc in Haarlem/Amsterdam, and Mike and Marin in London. It seemed like a confluence unlikely to be repeated. Well, okay, I was looking for an excuse. When I started looking at the logistics, I decided it would be crazy exhausting to do three major cities in one trip, so we dropped London. There was no question about Berlin, Ezra being John’s son, and we’d be unlikely to choose to go there if he wasn’t there–it’d be too far away from the high-on-the-list places to make a special trip for.

So, Germany. I did spend a few days there some decades back. My memories are of white wine, beer halls, and precisely-planted corn-row forests. A bit of research revealed white wine, beer halls, and Rhine-side castles and manors. I tried, but I couldn’t get excited, so I turned the task over to John. “You do some planning for a change,” I whined.

John’s a man of strong and specific passions. He loves music-making, and astronomy, and paleontology. He looked up the latter and found it–in the south of France.

Woo hoo! It’s a long way from Berlin, but when John said “France”, the gypsy blood rushed; this was the spark I’d been waiting to feel. Besides, that’s what high-speed trains are for: a day of relaxing, reading, writing, and getting across Europe.

So, after considerable research, here’s the plan. Click on the names to see images: 

Berlin, 10 days
Colmar, 2 days
Avignon, 1 day
Toulouse (just overnight to transition from train to car)
south to Foix and the Tarascon caves, 1 day
Villefranche-de-Conflent and the Canary Train, 1 day
Coullioure on the beach near the Spanish border, 2 days
Carcasonne, 1 day
St.-Cirq-Lapopie and Pech Merle, 2 days
a gites near Gourdon in the Dordogne, 1 week, visiting Lascaux and other caves, canoing on the river, marketing in medieval villages
Paris, 9 days in an apartment in St-Germain-des-Pres

Back in Vancouver, as the storm subsides, I crack a bottle of wine from Cahors, in the heart of the countryside we'll be exploring. The label is all about regional wine values:

Croix du Mayne is an estate located on a gravelly soil on a second terrace of the Lot Valley, exposed South, Southwest.

It's a good day for a sip of the south of France.

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Epiphany

2010-01-04T22:54:00.000-08:00

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I don’t know what has happened to me, regarding writing. I suppose there is a fine balance between work and reward, and, of late, to write has been more work than reward.

But I have a small story to share.

A boy in my class (I’ll call him Aaron) lost his dad a few weeks ago, suddenly. I don’t know if there can be a worse time for a boy to lose his dad—the kid’s 11—not that there’s any good time, but I grieve for this kid, and I am at a loss as to what to do for him. My gut feeling is that it might help him to concentrate on school work, to put his grief out of mind momentarily. So I’m pressing him, gently.

Just before the winter break, we were wrapping up a months-long study of Rodman Philbrick’s wonderful novel, Freak the Mighty. We were all in love with the book and it’s rough-cut protagonist, Max. As a final assignment, I asked students to imagine that the book was being remade into a feature film, and that they were under consideration to play one of the two main characters. I asked them to explain which character they would play best, and why—how did they see themselves as similar to that character, and how could they relate to the experience of being Max or Kevin.

Aaron was struggling, knowing which character was closest to him, but not having a clue what to say about that. I asked him if he could see any similarities between Max’s experience with his dad and Aaron’s own. (Big risk, I know, but I want Aaron to know it’s okay to talk about his dad’s death, that it doesn’t have to be private or hidden.) Aaron saw the connection and started to write about it.

Meanwhile, another boy in the class had discovered a flip-chart I have, aimed at students, filled with tips for improving writing; he had found the page that gives alternative words for dull, overused ones. You know—you remember those teachers saying, “Don’t say ‘said’, don’t say ‘went!’” —same old thing. This boy made lots of noise about his discovery, excited to look for interesting language, making sure everyone else heard about it too. (Sometimes these “disruptions” are the best thing that can happen to a classroom!)

Aaron picked up on it. He came up to me, wanting to find a better word for “sad”. There was nothing in the flip chart. I showed him how to use a thesaurus. We found “sad,” with a long list of wonderful substitutes: devastated, wretched, miserable. I left it with Aaron to make his choice.

Some time later Aaron came up to me again, his face bright with excitement. “I found the right word!” he said. I was thrilled.

“What’s the word?” I asked him.

He burst out, “Unhappy!”

“Wow, great,” was all I could say, “Good for you!”

And eventually, there was Aaron’s paper, a short paragraph with that one special word. “I’ll never see my dad again, and that’s very unhappy for me.”

Who knows what’s in the hearts, or the heads, of children? Who knows how a boy grieves for his father? Who are we to say they need flamboyant expression for their feelings?

For Aaron, “unhappy” was an epiphany. Now he has more than one word to describe how he’s feeling.

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Normandy: A Series of Poems and Photographs

2009-04-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

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In celebration of International Poetry Month, I'm writing a poem every day this month. Just past the half-way point, I'm surprised how well it's been going. What this tells me, it seems, is that I can write when I have to, when I'm committed to it. The supposed dry spells seem to be more a lack of motivation than a lack of inspiration.

I'm shy to post poems here, telling myself I would then be taking them off the market for publishing. As if I submit! But maybe I will, and so I keep the poems hidden away except from a few close associates.

Anyhow. So far all but one of my poems have been about Normany - sixteen of them to date. I've been immersed in memories of the place, stories I've been told by a friend from Normandy, and my imagined plot bits. I've gone through my photos of my October 06 trip to France, which included a stay in Avranches, Normandy.

Here are some of my shots, posted with lines from poems I've been writing this month.

You get used to ruins. We revere
broken statues

a cavernous kitchen, a walk-in fireplace

a courtyard enough to hang laundry, just

The street is wide enough
for Suzanne to swing, to fly
in the hands of Nat and Sylvain.

More to follow....

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Outdoor School

2009-03-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

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Once again, I took my Grade 6 class to the North Vancouver Outdoor School. We had about 80 kids there, with four teachers, from two schools. The idea is that each teacher develops and delivers a field study in some way related to the outdoor environment. Resident Outdoor School teachers also deliver field studies, so that there are six in all, and the kids rotate through all of them. That means teaching twelve to fifteen kids at a time in two-hour sessions, repeating the study six times. High-school aged counselors accompany us, assisting and eventually taking over the study.

The Outdoor School is a wonderful facility situated in Paradise Valley, beside the Cheakamus River. There are salmon spawning streams running through the property, a salmon hatchery, original cedar stands, and a small farm. Studies are usually related to natural history, and can include Birds of Prey, Salmon Studies, Farm Study, a guided Boardwalk explaining the natural history of the area. I always choose Poetry as my study; I consider it a different way to connect to the outdoors - to be quiet and aware out there, to observe closely, to describe the sensory experiences of being in such a place.

Oh, I get attitude. I get faces, usually from a boy or two. I get mumblings of “I hate poetry.” I ignore all that. I start by drawing the analogy between poetic (or artistic) observation and scientific observation, how everything we know about our world comes from observing it closely. I talk about the senses, and about not making sense. I tell the kids they never have to show their work to anyone, if they don’t want to. (Last year, this brought out the query, from a predictable source: “Can we use the f word?” I said, sure, if you need to.) The liberty of writing for only themselves seems to settle the dissidents.

I hand out clipboards and pencils and a little chapbook for each poet, and we walk. I take them on the Moss Trail, which leads through some wonderful Douglas Fir stands with plenty of open ground for sitting, to a rehabilitated creek beside some boulder-formed caves. We make several stops along the way for writing.

I introduce each poem for writing, one at a time, then send the kids to find a spot to sit (on a sitting pad). The counselor and I stand silently while they write.

I love those moments, kids crouched beneath trees hanging with old man’s beard - moss brilliant in the sun - kids bent in concentration, the glances up as they gather ideas like the Original People gathering roots. I love how everything becomes amplified in those moments: the roosters from the far-off farm, a chickadee’s mating call, a small plane overhead, the wavering patches of sunlight on the litter of the forest floor.

I guide the kids through six poems. The first asks where a poem might hide, if the poem were a creature; look around at all the places some small critter might hide. The second holds a dialogue with some other-than-human living thing, a tree, a bear, a centipede. The third is a shopping list that some wild animal might write. For the fourth, we blindfold the kids, and they sit and let the senses other than sight take over. The fifth - we are beside the creek by this time - is a 360° poem, in which the poet stands in one place and describes scene after scene as she turns around in a full circle. The last poem, the finale, is a stick poem, a short message written on a small stick, sent downstream for some future hiker to find.

I invite students to read their poems if they want to. Some of the poems show surprising insight and sensitivity. Many of them venture into metaphor and “big ideas”. I have no idea how conscious the writers are of what they’ve done, but I’m not concerned with that. My purpose is to open up these kids’ minds to some possibilities they may not have thought of before. Other than the poems kids choose to read, my indication that I’ve been successful is the quiet that blankets the group once we’ve started, the acceptance of the tasks, and the change in attitude apparent as we wrap up.

Does any of it matter to the kids? Who knows? For me, the study is a gift of two hours of quiet introspection, in a magnificent outdoors. I love it, and if one or two of them love it too, that’s a bonus.

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Following the Links

2009-01-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

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I read a poem by Anne Boyer that two people simply love.

why simply? why not complicatedly?
why not complexly? why not ornately? 
I love him ornately, curlycues in every crevice.
I love the poem ornately, every syllable, no,
every letter. I read every letter twice
before moving on.

The poem, I suppose, is experimental, which these days seems to entail using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns or in some cases adjectives as nouns, verbs and other parts of speech heretofore undefined.

I do not love it simply, or ornately. I cannot love what I cannot decipher.

That sounds like I can’t love mystery, yet mystery is what I love more than anything. So I was lying when I said I cannot love what I cannot decipher. It sure sounded good, though. Instead I should say

I can’t be bothered to ponder
this particular mystery. Maybe
tomorrow.

If Anne Boyer assumes unpopular political views, broadcasts them, and becomes controversial, she might win the Nobel prize. Kinda like Ezra Pound. Otherwise, I suspect her audience is, and will be, limited.

My suspicions are often proven wrong.

If she marries a poet megastar, or lands a teaching position at Harvard, she will likely be pronounced the next great thing to hit American Literature.

I’m a bit of a cynic regarding poetry and proclamations of greatness. A bit.

Regardless of my impressions of Anne Boyer’s poem, I’m impressed that two people simply love it, so I search for more of her and her work, trying to find what to love.

She writes a feminist blog. She publishes a journal. I find three other competent poems and an interview in which she names “Utopia” by Bernadette Mayer as her current favourite poem. (This was a couple of years ago.)

I immediately like Mayer more than Boyer just because she was born in 1945 not 1973.

I also notice that Boyer names poets Weiner and Porter as great and I wonder if she’s noticed she has a thing for poets whose names end in “er.” Like hers. I shall look for poets whose names end in “ins” like mine, and I shall extoll their virtues.

I can’t find Mayer’s “Utopia,” but there are many scholarly papers about it or about her. She’s a bigwig, apparently.

I wonder if she’s related to John. Mayer.

I am not a utopian, so I may not like her poem. I like some others I found, though, such as “I was one of the skunks.”

Mayer is an experimentalist, or has been, like Boyer. At least two of her experiments have been to chronicle the minutiae of her day-to-day, in narrated photographs or in journal form. Joycean, I suppose. I would have to read or see these installations before I could venture an opinion as to whether they are interesting or not. The photo exhibit was critically well-received and established her place in the experimental art world, according to one source. I only know that I personally can’t presume that my own minutiae would be of the least interest to anyone. They are barely interesting to me.

So why am I writing this? It started out in poem-form, with line breaks, because I thought I would write a very long stream-of-consciousness poem since I have the impression that very long poems are the ones most likely to be named as great or “favourite.” I am writing it because I’ve become interested again in what makes a poem great or favourite - a sign, perhaps, that my cynicism has lost its sheen, for the moment, that I’m willing to try again.

I de-poemized this bit of rant, though the beginning could possibly become a poem. I have written some six or eight first drafts of poems in the last couple of weeks. I feel revitalized by this, and I hope I can keep it up.

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Photo From a Friend

2009-01-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

My friend Heather Hansen caught this shot at her Pender Island home, when the sun finally cut through the fog that's blanketed us for more than a week. Used by permission.

Winter Hits

2008-12-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

We don't get much snow in Vancouver, particularly in December. It will be a rare white Christmas this year.

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"Winner!"

2008-11-30T13:41:00.001-08:00

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Well, I did it. Wrote 50 000+ words towards a novel. Here's a summary of my odyssey. Not the novel, just me, trying to write it.

For the first 6500 words, I plodded through a memoire of my early childhood experiences. I mean really plodded. I had no idea what my story was about, not having planned ahead. I was hoping that the muse would drop by while I was writing, as she sometimes does. Not that I believe in the muse, other than as a useful metaphor for whatever that psychological shift is that moves me from the mundane into something, well, inspired. (Ack!)

I switched back and forth between first and third person, sometimes I was speaking and sometimes my character “Katie.” Eventually I got fed up with the whole thing, which was boring and going nowhere. And did I say "plodding"?

So I introduced "Josie," who I think is an older incarnation of "Katie," but I don't know for sure. I just had to do something different. So I had Josie go grocery shopping. Cool, eh? She grocery-shopped for 1500 words.

I got side-tracked a little on American election day, November 4, and wrote a few words about momentous history.

On November 7, I finally told a tale, entirely imaginary, about my parents, circa 1940. Oh - this was what I was going to be writing about! The story wrote itself till about the 19,000 word mark, when suddenly Beat and Bert, Peggy's parents, appeared from Brighton, 1918. They stuck around for 3000 words, then left.

On November 16, I wrote a 3000 word story about a Ceylonese butterfly catcher. His story served a purpose in the larger story that was taking shape. Now I was getting somewhere! And I'd hit 25,000 words.

At this point, I dried up for a couple of days. I experienced the same thing I've experienced writing poetry: after a particularly creative burst, I'm spent. Anything I try fails. It's a pattern I wish didn't happen; a writer has to be able to write day after day, right?

I finally found my novel at the 35,000 word mark. Chris Baty, the originator of the novel-in-a-month idea, says that 35,000 words is a turning point, but I don't think he meant that the novelist wouldn't know what the novel was until that point. At 35,000 words, I began to really write about Ed, my father who has been dead almost thirty years.

I became obsessed with World War II history, particularly the history of the South East Asia Command and the bomber squadrons based in Ceylon. I combed through Ed's pilot's log, which he kept meticulously until 1955, and matched his missions with the official records and with anecdotes I found online. I made contact with a couple of people interested in the subject, including a man in England who had been on Ed's squadron.

My story - which might become a novel - tries to get inside the head of a twenty-five-year-old man (a kid, really, if the war hadn't made him grow up in a hurry) who must fly out deadly missions almost daily, who watches his comrades die, who drops bombs on an unseen enemy. It tries to answer the questions I've always had and which he and so many other veterans of that war have refused to answer.

It has ended up being a very emotional experience for me, and I find myself grieving the loss of my father, something I never did when he died.

I will post an excerpt here shortly, assuming I find something in the mess worth excerpting. Why not, eh? It might be the only light of day the thing ever sees.

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Dad's Old Photos

2008-11-21T22:57:00.000-08:00

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In the process of writing my "novel," (shhhhh) I was researching my dad's activities in WWII and remembered a website I'd found a couple of years ago that listed missions his squadron flew out of Ceylon in 1942-1943. I found his name in transcriptions from official documents and cross-checked the dates with his pilot's logbook, which I still have. It was a strange experience, surreal.

Dad, like most of the veterans of that war, never talked about his experiences. I knew he was stationed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka,) and I knew he flew bombers, but that's all.

I contacted the person who owns the website and who transcribed the records, to thank him and let him know that his work is useful, and he wrote back, sending me some photos of two of the very planes (Liberators - bombers) that Dad had piloted.

I sent this fellow, Robert, some photos I had, and he has now posted them in his site.

I am rather thrilled!

Check it out: http://www.rquirk.com/160files/mullins/mulphoto.html

Here is the link from the 160 Squadron page: http://www.rquirk.com/160.html

Of course, this has been a diversion from my task, the writing of the "novel." I should not be researching (not for this kind of novel writing) or scanning old photographs, or, for that matter, wasting precious words here in this blog. "No words that don't count!" ought to be my slogan.

Another side-effect of having taken on this challenge is that two of my online friends have joined me: Stef from England and Suzi from New York. We have been cheering each other on, and I am most grateful for that.

You can visit their blogs: ca ne fait rien and Promiscuous Prose

I shall offer a book report later, on my "novel." For now, however -

NO WORDS THAT DON'T COUNT

NaNoWriMo

2008-11-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

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I'm going to say this very quietly:

I'm writing a novel this month.

Uh huh. I've committed to National Novel Writing Month, with the idea that by November 30th, I will have written 50,000 words of one sort or another. This is evidence of a tenuous hold on sanity, I'm sure. However, once again serendipity knocked: I happened to open an email from a local writers' association and happened to scroll down, and my eyes happened to fall upon a notice about NaNoWriMo, and I followed the link. It happened to be November 1st, the first day of the official writing month. I happened to have the book by the Chris Baty, the founder of the idea. I figure I have nothing to lose, other than many hours of time I would be otherwise wasting anyhow - for instance, cleaning the kitchen which just gets itself dirty again - and everything to gain if something decent actually emerges from my efforts.

I have written 5,699 words already (and this blog entry is not part of the count), in less than twenty-four hours. Getting started was not hard, because I locked my inner editor, the bitch, in the back closet. I'm writing vignettes, so far, drawn from my early childhood. The prose plods like a workhorse through a muddy field. It's really awful, dreadful, and yawningly boring, even for me, and it's my life!

I have no expectations for this "novel." I hope I can learn to fictionalize the truth. I hope I can learn to turn vignettes into narrative.

Oh, there is another thing I can lose: my pride. That's why I'm announcing my commitment here, if quietly: so that anyone reading this can prod me along, ask me about my daily word count, shame me into writing even when I don't feel like it.

I have to write an average of 1667 words each day. Today is day two and I've built a small cushion; I understand that week two is the hardest. I can see that. By week two, I will have run out of memories and might have to actually write fiction.

The beauty of this undertaking is that it's impossible. Novels take months, first novels years, to write. Therefore I'm allowed not to write a novel, but just to string together 50,000 words.

Wish me luck, and please bug me frequently.

And if you care to join me, visit the site: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

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The Trouble With Writing

2008-10-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

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The trouble with writing is starting. I want to write a book - along with every other idiot in the universe - and I just found a website with some tips for getting a book out. I found it through serendipity, of course, and something in the cosmos is directing me back to writing - muse flutters out the window like those mosquito/mayfly critters sparkling just now in the low midmorning sun, batting at the back door, the clicks of wings on glass. I read my Journeywoman newsletter, or the first few lines, and ended up at the site of Stephanie Elizondo Griest, who wrote, among other things, "100 Places Every Woman Should Go." She has a synopsis of how to write a book proposal, which I’ve duly copied, ready for my own. The proposal comes after the book is essentially written, however. So, still, I have to start.

My book will be a compendium (is that the right word?) of my passions: poetry, travel, photography. And I just over-toasted some Cape Seed Bread, and I was thinking - food. The book could have food in it too. Why the hell not.

I like this internal movement, the actual desire to write again. Could be it comes from being absolutely bored with all my mindless passtimes. The signal came last weekend when I bought myself several books about and for writers. I had stopped buying such books, since I wasn’t writing and my shelf was full of them already. I had stopped buying them because it seemed such a farce to buy them and not actually write. (Even reading them would have been some justification, come to think of it.) But spending all this money helps me access the sense of guilt I seem to need as motivation for writing. I’m thinking of those words-of-wisdom so often uttered, that if you have a gift you must share it.

So I have the instructions, the books, the guilt, the idea, and, if I’m lucky, a small gift to share. All I have to do is start.

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An Eagle, Two Wasps, a Honey Bee and a Fly

2008-10-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

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I bought myself a Nikon D60 as a birthday present. (This was the day before the markets collapsed, probably a good thing.) I'm experimenting with various ways of sharing the photos, hence the two different slide show formats. The eagle sides don't fit on the format of this page for now, but I'll ask a friendly expert (Liza! Help!) how to fix that; I don't want to make them smaller, obviously.

The header photo - bit of irony, I suppose, considering the title - is the view the eagles have from their nest. I've been wanting to take this shot for years, and finally can.

Feel welcome to visit my Picasa gallery if you want to see larger images.

This eagle is one of a nesting pair at Jericho Beach.

And here are some of my backyard friends, hangin' out in the blackberries.

To Save a Child

2008-09-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

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Vancouver’s North Shore has recently seen the influx of numerous Korean immigrants, and classrooms have become generously sprinkled with children who arrive speaking little or no English. We have Jin Joo, Dong Gwan, Jin Shiu, Hae Reen, and many more. It seems to be convention for these kids to take “Canadian” names shortly after their arrival, likely in response to the constant mispronunciation of their names by teachers and classmates - they become Jane, Mike, Annie, Elly.

Dong Baum (pronounced Bum) Shin went by his Korean name longer than most, and, surprisingly, his playmates didn’t appear to notice that it sounded like an unfortunate conglomeration of body parts. Eventually, however, he decided to take a Canadian name, and wanted to be called Harry, after the famous Harry Potter.

It happens that original names in the school registers are often typed up in parentheses after the new, assumed name, and so Dong Baum, as Harry, would become Harry Dong Bum Shin. This might escape the notice of his Grade 4 classmates this year, but what would happen in, say, Grade 6, or worse, high school, the name iterated by eight consecutive teachers trying to keep straight faces.

Poor Dong Baum didn’t know that Harry was a homophone with “hairy,” and he certainly didn’t know about “dong.” The teacher was in the awkward position of having to explain. How to advise a child about to invite slaughter by even the kindest of his classmates, and laughter from every would-be employer reading his C.V.? How to convey the Canadian meaning of “dong”?

His last name, as it turns out, was not so unfortunate after all. Dong Baum’s teacher was able to convince him that he would not want to be called “Hairy Shin” for the rest of his life, and he decided, instead, to become “Danny.”

And so Danny (Dong Baum) Shin - a sweet, quiet boy - is safe for now.

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The Art of Incomprehensibility

2008-08-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

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We visited the National Gallery in Ottawa in July, to take in the current exhibition, called “The 1930s: the Making of ‘The New Man.’”

[National Gallery of Canada site]

It was a fascinating historical documentary through the eyes of art, the contrast of regime-sanctioned “ideal man” art with the distortions of post-impressionism and surrealism – artists’ statements in paint and sculpture, for and against the totalitarianism of Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain. There were pieces from Picasso, Dali, Miro, and many more. Really exciting. The best exhibition I’ve seen yet at the gallery, topping last year’s Renoir.

These exhibitions make me hyper-aware that I have so much to learn about art, including literature. What instinctively moves me the most is the purely visual: the image, colour, form, composition. Art, though, goes beyond those, and maybe it must. The audio guide at the Gallery helped see symbolism and reference and political statement, but I’m still at the neophyte stage; those are not what move me, but rather are the added bonus, the superimposition of meaning on the joy of art magnificently rendered.

If I were to transfer this to poetry, the notion of colour, form, construction over substance, I suppose what I’d be drawn to would be the music of a poem – the sounds, the rhythms, the space. I’m not completely sure the analogy holds, though, since I like a poem I can find experience in, narrative experience. I have much to figure out.

I recently bought Jorie Graham’s book, “Swarm.” Ms. Graham is something of an It girl in contemporary American poetry, it seems, or so the reviews on the cover would infer. “Poetry” magazine, that journal-among-journals, recently published her in two consecutive issues, poems which required double-sized fold-out pages, and must have been quite an expense for the publisher. Another of her poems, “What the End is For,” was labelled “one of the greatest poems of the late twentieth century” by John Redmond in his book, “How to Write a Poem.”* I loved that poem, and Jorie Graham’s name kept popping up, which is what prompted me to buy her book.

Well. I can’t read it. I tried. I was confused, then bored, by the first poem. I read a few other poems, then set the book aside. I can be a clueless reader at times, but if I spend time with a poem or set of poems I can usually find a way in. Not these poems. The emotion these poems made me feel was like that of the excuded playmate; I thought, if this is the vanguard of poetry, this is a club I don’t want to join. To me the poems were an incomprehensible juxtaposition of carefully-placed disjunct lines, separated by asterisks. Nothing more. I understood not the lines, the spacing, nor the asterisks. I thought maybe I was supposed to “hear” the poems, but I could find no music in them, no poetic device (unless it was buried so deep it was obscured from me.) I can’t imagine these poems read aloud. If I were to see these poems out of context, I would likely dismiss them.

But what do I know?

I have much to figure out. I would like to find criticism of such works as Graham’s that can tell me what she’s doing – like the audio guide at the National Gallery – because I’m lost on my own. Most reviews of poetry, however, I find so vague as to be almost as incomprehensible as the poems they discuss. Maybe someone on the inside could explain this phenomenon, this apparent mutual back-scratching among poets. But I don’t imagine it’s easy to find anyone who has the nerve to question the clothes of the New Empress.

*Redmond, John. “How to Write a Poem.” Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. 2006. p. 146.

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Death By Coyote

2008-08-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Pip, 1994 - 2008

A Sense of Scale

2008-08-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Last Iceberg

2008-08-05T23:15:00.000-07:00

Newfoundland, July 22, 2008.

You might think Newfoundlanders would laugh at us, we tourists who traipse all over the countryside, paying big money to boat-tour operators, in hopes of glimpsing icebergs. After all, they see them every year, these megaliths of ancient ice broken off from Greenland glaciers each spring, drifting south on the Labrador current. You might expect a Newfoundlander to take them for granted.

We planned our Newfoundland trip around icebergs. The books said Twillingate was the top spot in the province for spotting them in June and early July, so we hightailed it from St. John’s to Twillingate, arriving there on the ninth, hoping that constituted early enough. We went to “The Iceberg Man’s” shop, hearing he was the best at tracking the bergs; he claimed an extraordinary intuition when it came to finding them. The woman selling the tours told us the outings that day had seen an iceberg and numerous Minke and Humpback whales. Sounded good to us.

We arrived at the dock the next morning. We were the only two booked on the tour, and, to his credit, the Iceberg Man told us that though there had been the remains of what had been a monster of an iceberg grounded in a nearby cove for the previous nine weeks, he couldn’t promise there would be anything left of it by today. He said we’d possibly see a few whales, but viewing wildlife can’t be guaranteed. However, we’d certainly enjoy the ride. We decided to take our chances. His daughter crewed for him, and was very informative, and it was indeed a lovely trip on a warm sunny day. The berg was gone, however, melted or floated away. The daughter said, smiling, “Just think, this is the first day in nine weeks the iceberg hasn’t been here…but you can still feel its presence.”

Right.

The Iceberg Man told us there was an iceberg down near Trinity, if we were going that way. But we weren’t, not for another week; we were on our way west and then north.

When we were in Rocky Harbour, we heard tell of the Trinity iceberg, again. And when we inquired St. Anthony, the northernmost town of any size on the island, whether there might be icebergs off the coast there, we were told again that the only iceberg in Newfound was near Trinity, Dunfield, to be exact. Seemed like everyone in the province knew where to find the last iceberg of 2008.

Before coming to Newfoundland, I had the notion that icebergs were parading by the coastline on the Labrador current, and that seeing them was a matter of chasing after them in small boats. I didn’t realize that they actually run aground – well, not aground aground, but that their massive underbellies get stuck on the bottoms of shallow coves, and there they rest, often for weeks. The Twillingate iceberg had been one such grounded berg, coming into the cove below the garbage dump when it was several times larger than a cruise ship. The Trinity berg, too, was grounded in the bay off Dunfield.

At the B&B in L’Anse aux Meadows, other visitors had just come from Trinity and were pretty sure the iceberg would still be there by the time we made it down there, which was to be in three days.

At the Doctor’s Inn in Eastport, Dr. Bob told us about a giant platform of an iceberg that had come into a nearby bay last year. It was like an aircraft carrier, he said, huge, flat. He described its colours when the sun hit it, how they changed with the time of day. He visited it three days in a row, and then it drifted off. He regrets not having taken a camera on any of his visits. He wished us good luck in finding our iceberg, and hoped we would see it in the sun. Like every Newfoundlander we had spoken to, he understood our quest.

We arrived in Trinity in the evening, tired after a long drive and a lengthy tour of the Matthew in Bonavista (replica of Cabot’s ship.) But I needed to see that iceberg, so we drove the few kilometers further, followed some other tourist cars, hiked over a small hump from one cove to another in the small village, and there she was. She towered like a spire over the cliffs behind her. She was shockingly white in the evening grey, and completely alien to the landscape. It was easy to understand why even the Newfoundlanders love their icebergs.

The next morning we took a gravel road that led out to a lighthouse behind the iceberg. We hiked a steep trail that led us to a meadow and cliffs overlooking the beautiful berg. We sat in the grass for three hours. As we sat, numerous minkes and three humpbacks fed in the water below us; they were there almost as long as we were. A few people came, watched for a bit, and left. Small boats carrying other sightseers came and went.

The iceberg rotated a slow 360° while we watched. She had broken free of the bottom, and was beginning to drift. She was turning and heading out to sea, south to warmer currents where she would quickly melt. It was as if she had waited for us; by the next day, she would be gone, the last iceberg of summer.

By the next day, every Newfoundlander would know it.

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From Newfoundland, July 15

2008-07-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

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L’Anse aux Meadows

3:45 p.m.

Behind the low reach of a peninsula, the head of an island peers, shaped like the crusty top of a soufflé fresh from the oven, before the exhale of steam and the slow collapse. There’s a breeze here, in the lea of a green pannabode house, while out front, the wind blusters, flags stick straight out as if pinned to a board. The sun is shining, though, with thin sheets of cloud that pretty up the sky, a welcome change from the storm of the drive up, fog thick with rain.

I’m sitting on a bench on a long, green-painted veranda, a white railing between me and tall grass spotted with alder scrub, buttercups, a few bushes whose names I don’t know. Beyond the grass, a thicket of probably the scrubby balsam fir we’ve been seeing near the sea, recognizable by the deep blue stress cones on the outer edges. The growing tips of these trees are brown, as if the weather is just too harsh for the extremities – the shrubbery grows thick rather than tall, clustering around itself like wintering penguins, giving shelter to birds who twit invisibly.

Here I have finally begun to feel the edges of inner movement – something like spiritual connection to place – that I travel for. Newfoundland has not snatched me up as some places do. I’ve been trying to figure out why that is, and the only thing I can surmise is that it is the sense of people’s imprint on an environment that makes the deepest impression on me. This land is more land than people, by far, and much of it is a nondescript land, miles and miles of struggling forest, black spruce, scrub. The west is best, barren almost like the west of Ireland, rock ridges cradling peat bogs, green velvet rolling landscape, not a tree to be found – or not what I would rightfully call a tree. Coming out onto the L’Anse aux Meadows peninsula, I began to feel some attachment, at last.

Norsemen landed here some 1000 years ago, and settled, building sod houses whose remains can still be seen. It’s easy to believe they saw a land much like the land I’m looking at; well, certainly the landforms would be the same, though climate changes through the centuries would likely mean they’d have seen quite different vegetation. Hard to say; maybe the interpretive centre will shed some light. The Norse came in a time of warming climate, came by accident, apparently (they kept records,) while trying to reach Greenland from Iceland. They must have been taken by these sheltered coves, the fertile soil, and of course the fish-laden waters. There would have been plenty to assure their survival here. Winters, I think, must have been dreadful, but they were northern people accustomed to harsh winters. The woman who showed us into our room said they don’t get a lot of snow, but the wind can be bitter, and the bay freezes over all the way out to the island.

L’Anse aux Meadows is a village as well as an historical site. It is typical of Newfoundland villages, consisting of a loose grouping of white box houses, vinyl-sided and characterless. Even in the larger towns, there is a randomness. A paved curving main street typically parallels the waterfront, bordered by wide gravel or dirt edges, driveways off the pavement into here a postoffice, there a shrimp plant, on the left a shack called the R and B Market, on the right the Anchor Restaurant, then a house or two or a boarded-up shed, then another market, a crab shack, a school with a large lot lined with yellow busses. I have yet to see a town with any kind of town centre, public space, or even a block of shops. Even St. John’s, though it definitely has a commercial centre, lacks parks, sculpture, public hanging-out spaces. I’ve never been to such a place before, and I think this lack is part of why I haven’t connected to the settlements here. Nova Scotia’s towns have an order to them, an aesthetic, but in Newfoundland, it’s all business, it seems – build as is convenient and hang the look of the thing.

We spent last night in Port aux Choix, another wind-scraped peninsula 200 kilometers south of here. The site has been occupied for some 2500 years, originally by ancient Indians, then by successive Eskimo groups, long before the Europeans came. We hiked to what is known as Philip’s Garden, an archeological site so rich in artifacts one archeologist said you could dig a spade full of dirt anywhere and find in it two dozen fragments of bone or flint. One house they excavated gave up some 35,000 bone fragments; this was how they were able to recreate the history of the spot.

Port aux Choix, like L’Anse aux Meadows, is nestled in the middle of three bays, perfect shelter for a fishing fleet, ancient or modern. At the visitor’s center in Port aux Choix, the stories of individuals were featured. There was a table of biographies – interviews with oldtimers – collected by the curator and typed up into clear plastic duotangs with photographs taped to the front. The language is colloquial, in the words of the interviewees, and in them I could hear their voices, telling of marriages and moving to town when the only way in was by boat, how one mother couldn’t get out to visit an ailing son, in hospital with tuberculosis in St. Anthony’s, for 15 months. The woman at the front desk said fully a third of the people portrayed in those duotangs have passed on now, even though the interviews were only done in 2005 or so. The curator has caught living history, just in time; typos and all, these are priceless documents.

Also in the centre was a display case describing the burning of a 65-foot longline fishing boat. It had been built in 1980 by a man named Kennedy, at the request of his friend. The boat had made the news before, being the first of a number of large longliners coming out of Port aux Choix and marking the beginning of a new prosperity for the region. She caught fire in the middle of the night, and all the townsfolk showed up throughout the next day to pay their respects, such is the connection of the people to their boats. The newspaper article (in the Northern Pen, I believe, out of St. Anthony’s and quite likely the inspiration for “The Shipping News”,) quoted Paul Watson of Greenpeace as saying that boats don’t catch fire by themselves in the middle of the night and that whoever did this was a hero in his eyes. The article said that Mr. Watson would be unlikely to find any doors open to him in this community. I had to wonder what he was thinking – did he assume this was a sealing boat, situated as it was in the Labrador Strait? And had he ever actually visited this community or others like it, to understand what I can only call the heart of the culture? I would like to look into this incident, to find out Watson’s perspective. To me, the article(s) poignantly told the story of people who live by the sea, out of the sea, who know her yields and her demands better than any conservationist theorist ever could. The industries here do not seem to me to be anything nearly big enough to cause the collapse of any fishery. It is clear that Newfoundlanders blame that on offshore fisheries, the foreigners allowed to fish mercilessly far off the Grand Banks, so that there is nothing left for the inshore fishermen. The blame for that situation, of course, lies with the Federal Government and their international agreements. And in placing that blame, Newfoundlanders again sound like any close-to-the-lander I’ve ever talked to – it’s all the Government’s fault, always. The truth lies somewhere between opposing points of view, I would guess. Getting close to the people who depend on these resources, however, tends to put me on their side.

That's it, isn't it? It's all about connection.

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Newfoundland Imagined

2008-06-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

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In two weeks, John and I leave for a trip east - to Ottawa, of course, to visit family and to cherish some moments with his mum, now aged 90, and then to Newfoundland for a 17-day driving tour.

Newfoundland would not have been my first vacation choice; I wanted to go to New York City. I've never met anyone who didn't love New York. Likewise, I've never met a soul who didn't love Newfoundland. I guess it depends which skyscraper - made by Mohawk or glacier - you want to climb for the view.

A bit of research raises the enthusiasm for Newfoundland. There are some World Heritage sites, and some landforms pushed up from the center of the earth. Some thousand-year-old Norse sites have been reconstructed, and are said to be particularly affecting. (Annie Proulx wrote "The Shipping Lanes" near them, that has to be a good sign.) There are icebergs broken off from Greenland and sailing south. The icebergs are what I look forward to most of all. Couldn't say why, just want to see them, smell them. I hear some bars serve drink with berg ice, so I might even taste them. Maybe I'm Titanic-romantic, or maybe it's the pull of things ancient, as these bergs are said to have formed perhaps thousands of years ago; I just want to see icebergs.

St. John's is the biggest town, with a population of about 100,000. I lived for a while near a town of 60,000. There were two main-ish streets and a strip mall up on the highway. So I kind of know I won't get lost in St. John's. The rest of "The Rock" consists of miles of wilderland and tiny outposts founded on fishing, which has for the most part dried up. I'm expecting peeling-paint wooden buildings, rotting fish docks, overgrown community parks. There will be a few "touristified" towns - Twillingate, Trinity - and despite my will to hate them, I will probably love them. I like fantasy made real, I have to admit; true reality is dull, if not horrific, when it comes to the places I visit.

That is the best part of travelling: the anticipation. I like to write down my imaginings before I visit, because those images that might occupy my mind for months will be obliterated once I arrive. There is no land like that of the imagination.

I envision Newfoundland as a barren, windblown land not unlike the Burren of western Ireland, a wasteland of rock interrupted by stone fences, neighbour against neighbour in the jealous guarding of patches of rock. I envision the once proud and now neglected fir boxes that represent East Coast architecture, standing alone in boggy lowlands or on storm-harassed stony bays. I imagine the clammy smell of the sea mixed with the fresh bite of passing icebergs. I imagine briny whale-breath, and the salty talk of old fishers now idle in the pubs.

All my life I've known folk songs like "The Feller from Fortune" and "I's the B'y that Builds the Boat." These songs are filled with the names of places I'll now visit: Fogo, Twillingate, Morton's Harbour, Bonavista, Carbonear. I'm hoping we'll find the ceilidh in Newfoundland, as we did in Cape Breton: families in the community hall, dancing up a storm. I'm hoping we'll find kitchen parties, fiddlers, the singers of the old stories.

I expect some sort of spiritual movement inside, as I always experience while travelling, no matter where.

Hey, it's Newfoundland, the only (?) land in the world that posts its time on the half hour, relative to Greenwich. It will probably be half past just about everything.

After Newfoundland, I will be escaping to the city, visiting Montreal, with my poet friend Lisa. She'll come in from Cape Cod, and we expect to . . . hmmm . . . speak about a million words, weep in galleries, consume undisclosed quantities of wine in sidewalk cafes, compete for poetry in the moments we share. We have a B&B booked in the middle of all the action, and, by God, I will need it!

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Idols

2008-05-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

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My almost-twelve-year-old students will be grieving tonight; their Idol did not win. Yeah, I mean American Idol, and though I can think of many reasons I shouldn't watch that show, or at least shouldn't admit to watching it, I'm as hooked as any tweeny girl. John and I watch together and offer up our criticisms, second-guessing the judges, actively agreeing with Simon Cowell usually but not always.

Sadie's gonna marry David Archuleta. She's got it all figured out: when she'll be twenty, he'll be twenty-six, and that sounds okay, he's really not too old for her. Norah won't claim him for a future husband, but her smile is more brilliant than ever when his name comes up. (But she could be an Idol one day herself, such a singer she is.) I found a poem on the classroom floor today, on a scrap of paper, describing his "sparkling eyes." Twelve-year-olds haven't been around long enough to know how tired that sounds. Twelve-year-olds know love as much as anyone, though.

I want to tell them how I loved Fang. I mentioned that to John, not thinking, really. He said, "Fang??" Oops. "FANG!?? Who the hell's Fang? You loved someone called Fang?? My best friend's dog was called Fang!"

Yeah, well, oops. Maybe some secrets are best kept.

But I want to tell them how, in the summer of twelve, Anne and I sat up in the cherry tree talking about Fang and Mark, how I'd have one and she'd have the other. (Oh, yeah, they were from Paul Revere and the Raiders, a pop-rock band who wore pastel American Revolutionary period dress.) I want to tell them about the poster I had on my closet door, and the ink that wore away from so many goodnight kisses. They'd shriek, they'd cry with laughter. And they'd know that I knew how they loved.

There was a flurry of "family life" questions today. I keep a box of little slips of paper and an envelope at the side of the room, expressly for the purpose. The envelope sits empty most of the time, but then something flutters in the room, a kid grabs a slip of paper and pretends to be subtle about putting it in the envelope. Everyone suddenly remembers the questions that have been burning in their brains since the last session.

"Why would a woman put her mouth on a man's penis?" I say that maybe it's because the man would like it, and hope that they get the message that it's about giving, not taking. I tell them adults can do anything together that they both want as a part of loving and communicating, and that THEY, the twelve-year-olds never have to do any of it if they don't want to. (Thanks to Meg Hickling for that, wonderful sex educator.)

"What happens if a man bangs a woman too hard?" How do you answer a question like that? I say, again, that sex is an act of love and communication, that as such, there is no "too hard." I say rape would be too hard, and would do the woman harm, but, again, rape has nothing to do with sex, no matter what it looks like.

"What's an orgasm, and how do girls have one?"

So many questions come up again and again, as if they want to be sure they heard me right the first time, or to see if the answer remains the same, or maybe they didn't understand the first time and now they hope they might. Or maybe they're just setting me up. Doesn't matter. I told them at the start there wasn't a question they could ask that would embarrass me. I think they've tried, despite that. Could be that they're mortified as I read the questions aloud and proceed with graphic answers.

Talking about Fang would probably embarrass me, though.

I thought tonight would be the coronation of David Archuleta; that seemed to be the prevailing opinion. Of the two finalists, his voice is the purest, one of those voices that sends shivers down your spine; at seventeen, he seems something of a miracle, such is his musicality. I shouted when David Cook was announced the winner; he was my man. I am not a fan of "pop" music. No matter how good the voice, I would not buy the record. David Cook, however, seems to be a real musician, competent on his guitar, arranging tunes in unique and tasty ways. I'll be interested in his album, when it's made.

Archuleta, meanwhile, has inspired probably tens of millions of tweeny girl fantasies, and at least a dozen questions in a classroom in North Vancouver.

(Students' names have been changed.)

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Rejection

2008-05-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

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Sigh.

A call went out in January to "mature emerging poets", asking for submissions for consideration for a new anthology, to be edited by kevin mcpherson eckhoff & Heidi Garnett (sic). A more apropos description of myself would be hard to find; though "poet" might be a stretch, I'm certainly mature, and if not emerging, well then, thinking about emerging, and would if the bed I'm in wasn't so damned cozy. So I submitted thirteen of my best more-recent poems, figuring (now that was dumb!) I had it in the bag, if anyone did. A notice from said kevin (sic, and I ought to have known that anyone who spelled their name without caps...well, anyhow) inferred that they would have made some decisions by the end of February, and when I didn't receive an instant notice of "you've got to be fucking kidding!", I remained optimistic that this might be my big breakthrough. I got my rejection notice this past Wednesday.

I realized the other day that I've been in a slow period, for poetry, for really about a year now. That's scary. For several years, I lived and breathed poetry - read it, wrote it, talked about it incessantly, critiqued, studied, practiced, obsessed on it. Then I seemed to stiffen up, somehow. I got bored with the online poetry I was commenting on; the friends I had made online, with a few exceptions, either drifted off or became less important to me; the comments I received on my own work lost their impact. The workshops and courses I attended all informed me of the same things: that there are many, many people out there attempting to write poetry, and that, among them, I'm not doing too badly. In my own heart, however, I know there's something missing. I just don't know what it is, or how to find it.

I passed a car on the way home from school late last night, after attending my students' coffee house evening (a mix of joy and horror, but that's another story), whose licence plate read "Duende". Of all things. I looked at the driver, and he was a 60-something coud-be Latin, but he wasn't Lorca. I wanted to do a one-eighty and follow him, however, once it was too late to yell out the window at him, and ask, "Why duende? What do you know of duende?" Because duende, I think, is everything in poetry. And maybe when I truly understand duende, I will be able to truly write poetry. Maybe.

Lute (an online poet-friend) linked me to a Canadian poetry site last night, and I found a few poems as I hunted around. Most were avant garde and incomprehensible to me. Others looked like just so much junk to me. I thought, "If I were to submit such poems to the Gazebo, they would be ripped to shreds and I would be told to go read 1000 poems before I considered submitting again." I'm talking personal, cliche-ridden, cheap, Hallmark poetry.

Lisa (another online poet-friend) linked me to another Canadian poetry site today, with a Canadian poet reading, saying the work reminded her somewhat of mine (lovely thought, thank you), and, while I enjoyed the poetry, it was . . . well, something I might have written. So what's up?

The first time I submitted poems, it was to a contest here in Vancouver, printed in triplicate, accompanied by $5 per poem entry fee. Nothing. The second time, to the same contest, an honourable mention. The third time, to an online contest - on a whim, the same day I wrote the poem - I won the thing, got a cheque in the mail for $100. The fourth time, the Vancouver contest again, I took 1st prize, another $100.

A strange thing happened to me after those heady first submissions, and all that winning. I got scared. Until then, I had pretended to poetry, made it a hobby. I loved it, loved the places it touched in me, like a spiritual awakening. Suddenly I was out in the world with it, exposing myself, confessing, yes, I am a poet. Suddenly I felt a responsibility. If I'm a poet, I have to write poetry, it has to be good, worthy of a prize-winner.

I stopped entering contests.

A year or so later, I sent out several packages to major Canadian literary magazines and received my rejections in due course.

I stopped submitting.

I did send three poems to the Gwendolyn Brooks society's 2007 publication in Florida, at the urging of a friend, and had two of them accepted. (I'm in consolation mode, here, folks, reminding myself of some successes.) I found it a bit embarrassing, after all that, to see the things in print.

My rejection notice this time wished me (and kindred rejectees) "continued bravery". Oh man, does that hit the mark! This striving towards some kind of art, and this putting it out there to be judged as such, takes courage, indeed!

When I first started writing, this round, in 2003, I was using my computer exclusively. I started to switch over to handwritten notebooks and eventually only wrote by hand. My best times were out in the back yard in the summer, feet up, a large glass of iced tea, a pile of books of poetry and prompts, and a notebook. I set up my private writing room with a table covered in cloth from Provence. I'd sit by candlelight every night, read a poem, write a poem, read a poem, write a poem. Lately, my table has been covered with crap. Even when I clean up, I can't seem to clear space. And I need space to write.

This past week, I was challenged to write a poem every day, as contribution to National (International, really) Poetry Month. Each night, around 11:00, I'd open up an empty document on my computer and start to type. After six or eight lines, a series of false starts, something would begin to emerge. Twice I ended up with drafts that I think show potential. Even a little duende.

So maybe it's time to write on the computer again. I remember in Taos, the subject came up, and most participants (very good writers, well-published, many English teachers in colleges) said they wrote by hand. I remember saying I found it qualitatively different to write by hand than on the computer. And at that time, I rejected the computer as a means to poetry. A couple of years later, I'd begun to run dry. This past week, the computer, and the obligation to write, has opened up the door. Think I'll keep it up. Maybe not every day.

I had a notion today to deny myself poetry, to refrain from even thinking about writing it for a period of time. I liken the idea to that of sex therapists who advise non-orgasmic women to refrain from sex or sexual touching for a period of time. Let the juices build up, so to speak. I have an image of poems collecting under my skin, crowding the fatty spaces, ready to burst out when I finally let them. I don't know. It's probably just another game to play, like all the other games I play to call forth poems. The best game in a long while has been simply to write some kind of draft every day, not to worry about its quality.

I picked up a little book today called, "The Art of Time in Memoir," the latest in "The Art Of" series I've been collecting. I realized that much of my poetry, if not all, is memoir, and that maybe memoir is what I ought to be writing, without the pretense of poetry. I shall read this book, or - more likely - the first third of this book, and decide if that is really what I'm about.

For today, I am about neither memoir nor poetry, but rather self-indulgence. If anyone has borne the irk of reading this far, please forgive me. I promise not to do it again any time soon.

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Antonio Forcione

2008-04-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

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It was my Maltese friend, Ray, who sent me the Women in Art video, and now he has sent me this. I've never seen such a ballet with the guitar before, so I'm putting it here to view and re-view. Thank you Ray!

And thank you Bob, who reminded me of the term I was looking for: viral video. "Gone viral"...what every YouTuber wants, I imagine.

Meet Antonio:

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Women in Art

2008-04-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

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A video to fall in love with:

The creator, Eggman, has numerous art-morph videos:

Eggman at YouTube

Women in Art, however, has had 7 and a half million views. There's a term for vid that becomes popular; I'm off to find what it is.

...

Haven't found the term I'm looking for, but I did find these videos which show the sources of the Women in Arts video.

Part 1
Part 2

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Songs from John

2008-04-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

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John finally figured out how to turn his tunes into mp3's that didn't sound like they were playing inside a tin can, and I finally figured out how to upload/download/crossload.

Here are two of my favourites.

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!

If you'd like to hear more, see John Palmer at MySpace. (<---That's a link!)

He would love people to make comments on the songs, IF we can now figure out how to enable that!

Incidently, the guitar soloist on Gulf Isle Getaway is Michael Dunn, a good friend. Do check out his website if you love beautiful guitars.

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Time and Tyranny

2008-03-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

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Okay, so the title's a little over the top. But I'm annoyed, and the thin edges of wedges crack my confidence like I wish the sun would pierce the clouds this misty morning.

Tonight we set our clocks forward. Exactly the week I was certainly certain it really was light out when my alarm rang at 6:20 a.m. Exactly the week. Now I'll be getting up in the dark again. The evenings will be nice, but in the morning I'll be getting up, feeling for my clothes, checking the streetlight halos, or the sheen on the road, for rain. Yellow will gleam from a few early neighbours' windows.

Until last year, Daylight Saving Time would kick in on the first Sunday in April, and kick out again the last Sunday in October. It was perfect timing. By the first week of April, the sky would be showing signs of fading into morning at the ungodly hour I would have to get out of bed, and by week's end, there would be visible light inside the house, enough to see my way to the shower, at least.

The timing was perfect in October especially, because suddenly, it seemed, the evenings were dark, just in time for Halloween. The kids, accustomed to light, would get to step out in the dark, swish their feet through leaves under great oaks and maples whose limbs threatened to reach down and snatch up intruders into the realm, the magic realm, of night. Now, however, with the time change a week later, the sky is still light when the smallest of trick-or-treaters venture out, and half the thrill is gone.

The reason for the change in timing? Our friends, the American Bush government, decided it would save energy. Whether it does that is in question. There has been at least one study done that suggests energy use is actually increased with the advent of daylight savings time. (See article.)
Other arguments against the change hint that the Bush decision may have been disingenuous. (Check this out.)

My real concern, however, is that we Canadians had no part in the decision to change. It was typical of American decisions, in that they simply forgot their little neighbour to the north. They forgot that we are joined at the hip, commercially. (Rather like a mole on the butt of the great nation, we are.) The Canadian government heard of the plan and kicked up a fuss, pointed out the problems that would be created if the two countries were on different times for several weeks, everything from problems with cross-border trade and trucking to mis-timed TV shows and lost advertising revenue. Canadians needed some time to prepare, if they were to join the U.S. in the time change. Money speaks, of course, and the U.S. decided to delay the onset of the change so that Canada could be on board.

It's not comfortable living in the shadow of an economic and military giant. We are often made to feel insignificant. The current president's slights on Canada break news and create outrage across our country, the breaking of trade laws costs us billions of dollars. We have little recourse; we're too small.

I worry about resources running out in the U.S. British Columbia has already rescued California when the Golden State has run short on electricity. (Last I heard, we had not been paid for that electricity.) Americans continue to plan to build dams on rivers which originate here and nuclear plants near our borders. When we protest, it's as if they say, "Oh? - there are people other than ourselves to consider?"

We are a country rich in oil reserves, which is an obvious reason to be concerned that the U.S. could simply step in and take them. We are also rich in water resources, while south of the border, there can be shortages. In the presumably coming global warming, what is to stop the U.S. from demanding access to our water? Would we demand payment? Even if we did, could we enforce it? What's to stop the great American machinery from simply moving in and taking over?

We console ourselves with beliefs that they wouldn't, that it wouldn't fly internationally, but the U.S. routinely flouts international law and disdains international institutions when they are not convenient to American interests. If they need our resources, they will take them. I do not feel safe.

Tonight I will set my clock ahead. Monday morning I will wake up in the dark. I would like to have had a voice in this, but the elephant's ears are not attuned to the squeaking of thirty million mice.

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A Dream, At Dawn, When Dew

2008-03-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

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Oh.

I'm supposed to find a poem
strung from Lvov to Djemaa el Fna,
from a spirit bear and pubescent angst
to plague and broken marriage

who

like the time I found my cat
leaping for dragonflies
in a poem about laundry,
the laundry-list of stolen verbs
become metaphor
when applied to Pip

do you think

or when I wrote a poem
about "f" and "l"
that became the farmer Albert,
gone fallow.

or the love poem to a ceiling fan
and the butter-stripes of sunlight
on the bedspread.

you are

(RUBBISH)

skitters across the square,
a ballroom contest with the dust
as warriors settle
into the soil again
at dawn

and the boys in white go home,
drum skins flaccid on their frames,
the dance ends, the snakes coil
in their baskets

the waterman,
weathered to leather,
stinks up the alley way
into the souk

no one would want

but that was years ago

here on a cliff over the Pacific
I roam naked to the sun
and the white bear,
my totem
and my torturer

to read this

I pack my mask with pungent herbs
that he might not attack me

There is no poem in these things - detail
at the front door
refusing to be beaten away -
only voices
the bad ones
who whisper

"fraud"

The day after my eighth birthday, my father
told me I couldn't go on the roof any more.

"pretender"

Little girls cry saltdew
on my dream.

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Like the Plague

2008-02-29T21:41:00.000-08:00

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(continuing from the previous post)

3. Conflict

I am embarrassingly drawn to idiom. It's a dreadful curse for a writer, especially for a would-be poet. Yet, there is something wise and playful about those silly nonsensical phrases, and I miss the freedom of searching my mental file for just the right one to fit the moment. I stop myself from uttering them, but it's like stopping myself from laughing - I feel bottled up, repressed.

I got to thinking about conflict, and how I avoid conflict "like the plague." I became side-tracked by the idiom. Image: the costume of the plague doctor, the broad-brimmed hat, the bird-beak mask, the black greased robe, all meant to instill fear as much as to protect the wearer. Scent of pungent herbs, to kill disease, or to obliterate the smell of death. The masks are for sale in tourist shops in Venice; you can play Doktor Schnabel von Rom crossing brick bridges across backstreet canals, rustling in the 14th century night.

But that's the digression, and the avoidance, of the subject at hand. Conflict, which I avoid like the plague, and didn't I just?

I've become two things, at times, from avoiding conflict: frustrated; and a very good diplomat. The frustration of non-confrontation cost me my first marriage, while good diplomacy has saved my second. I have learned, painfully, that anger or even annoyance not expressed makes me bitter and snarky, and fills me with death-wishes for those I purportedly love. It's a pattern I didn't want to repeat when I entered into a relationship with John.

Diplomacy doesn't come instantly; I'm a percolator. When shit comes up, I need time to think about it. It's maddening to someone who likes to out-and-out fight, I suppose, if they don't understand what I'm doing. I need to wait for the emotion to pass, so that I don't say things I later regret. It might look like refusal to engage, but really it's a refusal to engage badly.

Am I supposed to be describing a specific conflict here?

There's conflict going on in my classroom right now. Pre-pubescent girls, need I say more? There are two circles of girls suffering almost identical problems: each has one girl slightly on the outside. Each of the "outside" girls is trying too hard to fit, I think, and has ended up doing or saying things that, well, piss the others right off. All the girls, however, are basically nice girls, and have come to me asking how they should handle it, how they could let the "other" know without hurting her or outright dumping her.

The most recent situation came up in a class meeting (no names named), girls describing the behaviour of a girl who happened to be away that day. After hearing about backstabbing and badmouthing, a boy's response was, "Why bother playing with somebody who does stuff like that?" Boys, gotta love 'em: they'll pound each other out, then get back on the soccer field together. For girls, though, it’s so complicated; they will allow themselves to be hurt repeatedly rather than intentionally hurt someone back. And the drama can last for months.

I told the girls the only right thing to do was to talk about the problem with the girl involved. I told them it wouldn't be easy. I told them feelings would be hurt. I told them they didn’t have to say anything, but that the problem wouldn’t go away and that the girl would end up hurt no matter what; at least if they talked to her, she’d have the opportunity to change her behaviour.

They took me at my word. They talked. Tuesday at lunch the one girl was crying in the washroom. By week’s end, there were seven of them. (And I'm supposed to teach curriculum!) Parents have jumped into the fray, and I've had more meetings with this mom or that dad this week than I have all year, or so it feels. There have been emails printed and passed around, rumours spread, secrets revealed – by parents.

The girls are working it out. They forget themselves and smile and laugh together, moments here and there. ("Oh, right. I'm mad at her," I imagine the inner dialogue.) The parents, not so easy a fix.

These girls, eleven years old, mustered more courage than I ever could have, and confronted a friend who was behaving badly. I don't know, and they don't know yet, if it made things better.

Or if the real lesson they've learned is to avoid conflict like the plague.

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Synchronicity

2008-02-22T21:36:00.000-08:00

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An exercise adapted from a book called "The Portable MFA in Creative Writing," compiled by The New York Writers Workshop.

1. Poem. Write a paragraph or two based on a line from any poem. You have to reference the line and poem title (preferably author, too). You will use the line as your poem's title.

2. Dream. Write a paragraph or two from your last dream or a disturbing dream you can't get out of your head.

3. Conflict. Once again, write a paragraph or two concerning a minor (or major, if you must) conflict in your life right now. It could be something as minor as someone that irritates or excites you.

4. Conclusion. (this is where the poem part comes into play) Weave 1 - 3 together into a poem. Length is up to you. Also, the poem doesn't have to be about 1 - 3 directly (or even at all).

The only real rules to this game are to reference the poem prompt and use the line as your title. The rest is up to you.

1.

To Go to Lvov
by Adam Zagajewski

To go to Lvov. Which station
for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just
in my new passport, if lances of trees
--of poplar and ash--still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets . . . .

...a dream, at dawn, when dew

When I first heard this poem - it goes on for some eighty-five lines - I drifted off into my own dreamland, Morocco. I wrote about the plaza of Marrakech, how the dancers erupt like the shoots of dragon's teeth from the dust of Djemaa el Fna, whose name I had to look up. I was delighted that Djemaa el Fna shared a strangeness of consonants with Lvov, and that I hadn't known that when I left Zagajewski's poem for my own.

Synchronicity.

Tonight when I revisited the poem, again I drifted off part way through, this time taken by the sense that the poet is recounting his childhood. I went back to Victoria, to the willow grove on Braefoot Road, the place we called Fairyland, the one great weeping tree with the boards nailed on a limb, where a young girl could perch like a panther over the street, unseen by passersby. This place has tried again and again to inhabit poems, but it has yet to really fit.

Tonight I returned to read the rest of Zagajewski's poem, and read how Lvov was pruned away, destroyed, it seems, how Lvov is nowhere and how Lvov is everywhere. Now, of course, I have to look it up.

Here is a helpful bit of background.

And here is a YouTube video that captures some of the flavour of Djemaa el Fna.

. . . a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams

Zagajewski didn't write those words, I have to remember; he wrote in Polish. Who knows what music I would hear in that language?

2.

I don't often remember my dreams. Oh, I know, remembering can be practiced, but dreams are not something I place great importance on. They are the workings out of the subconscious, I suppose: a nightmare signifies stress, an erotic dream, well.... When I do remember my dreams, they seem to be repetitions of previous dreams, though I can't be sure. In one recent dream, which I think I may have dreamed numerous times, I was desperately trying to find my way out of a beautiful hillside town, a place I imagine to be typical of, say, Tuscany, and why I'd want so badly to leave makes no sense to me.

But one dream that has stuck with me is the one about the bear.

I spent some fifteen summers in the "bush," as we call it, of northern British Columbia. If you were to look on a map, it wasn't truly the northern part, but rather smack in the middle of the province, in the area around Prince George (which we affectionately called the armpit of BC, a tribute to its pulp mills.) When you're there, however, it's definitely North. Nine months of winter and three months of bad snowshoeing. Long long summer days, and long long winter nights. A cold snap would reach minus forty; your breath would freeze before it left your body. This was North.

We supported ourselves in the silviculture industry, which is to say, we planted trees. Millions of them. In fact, we ran treeplanting camps, with crews of 20 to 30 people, for two months every spring. And we had plenty of encounters with bears.

I have baked for bears, though not willingly: one came into camp one night and ate a whole bucket of oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies. I have tried to ward them off with cayenne pepper mixed into bacon-grease balls, but one bear was a spice aficionado, and returned night after night. I have had a growling contest with a bear; the bear won. I am not afraid of bears, as long they know I'm there. Wouldn't want to surprise one.

My dream. I know the date I dreamed it because of what was on the news the next morning: it was February 7, 2006. I dreamed I was staying in a cabin on a cliff above the Pacific, alone. The weather was mild, about as warm as the upper west coast gets, which is not very, and the chop below my perch glittered in the sun. I took a shower outside, in a stall made of transparent plastic sheeting, under a bucket filled with warm water. When I got out of the shower, the white bear was there, a spirit bear. He walked away.

I slept the night and wished he would return, and in the morning he did. He sat on my doorstep and I could not go outside. He stayed, as if standing guard, and I finally woke up.

In the morning, on my way to work, I learned that the government of BC had struck a deal with a conservancy society and set aside a massive protected area for the spirit bear. I hadn't known anything about it, previous to the newscast.

Synchronicity.

(Read about the Spirit Bear Protection Area.)

3.

Conflict: not tonight. I'll continue this post another day.

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Light

2008-02-13T18:59:00.000-08:00

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I can't mention it any more, because John smirks, and that ruins it. I guess my comments on the lengthening of days have become predictable.

Every year around this time, I notice: it's still light out when I drive home from work; at 5:15, then 5:30, now almost 6, it's still light out. I celebrate it, the return of the sun, the light (pardon me) at the end of the tunnel of winter, of endless grey days and long wet nights that are the price we pay for residing in Paradise, the Rain Forest Edition.

"Look how light it is! Look at the light over the city! It's 6 o'clock, and it's still light!" I'm a bit mad for it, I guess.

When I lived at Mudslide, our homestead 20 miles northeast of Prince George, about 500 miles due north of here, winter meant lighting the lamps at three; even kerosene was brighter than the winter afternoon. The good part was that we tended to huddle together, our small community, and there would be all night dart games or poker games, boisterous and boozy. The airtight heaters would rattle with hard-burning birchwood, and we'd cluster around them, turning our various parts to the heat. The whiff of woodsmoke was always in the air, inside the houses from fires being stoked, and outside on the flashlit stumble to the outhouse.

I still get the impulse to hunker in on short winter days, to light a lamp and curl up with a book and a cup of tea. Winter is when I light candles and heat essential oils, hover over the heat register, cover myself in whatever throw the cat hasn't claimed. There is comfort in this, a sense of hibernation - home becomes a nest.

Still, the first hint of spring uplifts me, and I get so excited. The cave is great, but emerging from it is better.

***

Summertime up north, when the sky was deep violet at midnight, was the payoff for dark winters. We could work outside till ten at night and later. Evening took up much of the day, as the sun dipped below, just below, the horizon and hovered there, winding its way north and back again to rise in the northeast. Evening meant swallows flitting overhead with their beaks open to catch the bugs, redwing blackbirds calling from the lakeside, nighthawks laughing as they dove toward the earth. We'd light a fire in a pit on the hill above the lake, barbecue chicken on pine coals, drink white wine, play guitars. The nights were rarely warm, but they were light.

By September, however, winter was hinting its arrival. September, if you bundled up, was for star watching, far from the lights of the city. One year in September, there happened to be a night odd for its balmy air, when we could sit outside without jackets and not freeze. The same night, the Aurora Borealis were dancing particularly rambunctiously a hundred and eighty degrees across the sky. The whole community - maybe a dozen of us, including guests - gathered in the field with our lawn chairs, lined up, and watched the show. It was the only time I've seen hints of any colours other than green, and I swear I heard them buzzing. We shouted our appreciation when an especially spectacular flare would streak across the night. We chuckled at our own enthusiasm and thought about the city folk in front of their TVs. I don't imagine our ancestors were ever bored for want of entertainment.

***

Today the ophthalmologist put drops in my eyes that spread my pupils like midnight. It was fine till I went outside into what happened to be the only sunny day we've had for what seems like weeks (not true, of course, but the rain has seemed relentless.) The light was like knives thrust into my eyes. Fortunately, there was an optometrist's shop nearby selling sunglasses. It was strange to buy sunglasses in February, but without them I couldn't bear to open my eyes, the light was that painful.

I had to be out, though, because a block away there had been an explosion in the night and I had to walk down to see the remains of shops. Broadway, one of the busiest streets in Vancouver, had been closed to both cars and pedestrians since the blast at 2:30 am. From the doctor's waiting room, we patients watched the police and the cleanup crews clear away truckloads of rubble and glass. The street was opened to traffic just as I was finished with my appointment.

Things like this don't happen in Vancouver, I thought. But I am a bit Pollyanna about these things. This is the first bombing I've heard of in the city, but gang violence and nightclub shootings have lately become unfortunately regular occurrences here. Even on the way to my appointment this morning, the guest on the CBC was the mother of a boy who was attacked randomly at a party a year ago, and is now a quadriplegic. Violence happens here, but this is the first time I've witnessed the results.

The scene looked like a movie set to me, the glass splayed out across the sidewalk, shards embedded in tree trunks, the twisted metal Starbucks sign, three stores looking like black holes, windows blown out on the second storey, furniture tossed into the street. The police are calling this an act of arson, but that sounds so mild, a few flames licking the interiors. No, this was a fierce explosion. Even a hotel window, across the street and half way up the block, was blasted in by flying debris.

I stood with a small crowd and stared for a bit. The press arrived, newscasters and camera crews. People were taking photos with their cellphones and speculating with the strangers beside them. A little community brought together in incredulity.

I didn't stay long, as the scene was attracting more and more gawkers like myself. I made my way, new shades saving me from the sun, back to my car and home to my twilight cave.

Photos of the blast scene

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P.S. Eyes - Windows

2008-02-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

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All is well. It was a floater, after all, a bit of jelly in the vitreous humor, completely innocuous.

What I learned was that if your vision is good, other than age-related farsightedness, there can't be anything seriously wrong. That is good to know.

I should probably keep my petit fears to myself.

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Eyes - Windows

2008-02-12T22:47:00.000-08:00

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There's something in my eye. Not an eyelash or a speck of dust. This I can't feel or see. I discovered it by accident.

We got two new microscopes at school, ones that actually focus, that have a light built in instead of depending on smudgy mirrors and sunny days in order to see microscopic entities. The new microscopes inspired me to renew the search for micro-organisms in local ponds, despite the ice coverings and the apparent disappearance of all such creatures at this time of year.

Last week I was searching a slide I'd prepared, again finding nothing squiggly, only short dead strands of blue-green algae, boring. I was using the highest power, 400X, I think, and the cells were clear, luminous, but I wanted paramecia and amoeba, the vision of the battle of species in a world we can't see.

I don't know why I switched from my right eye to my left. Maybe I thought one eye would catch what the other missed. But switch I did, and instead of greater clarity, I saw a shadow. It was the shape of a rent in loose-woven cotton, like something had split open, frayed at the edges. I switched back to the right eye and all was clear. I checked in the other microscope - same thing.

I checked again the next day, thinking maybe it was a corneal scratch or a floater, and that it would have healed or changed or moved, but it was still there, the same.

I visit the ophthalmologist tomorrow. I wanted to write this tonight, in case this is the "before" of a bad diagnosis. I suppose it's universal to fear the worst when anomalies happen in one's body. The pain in the stomach becomes cancer; the strain in the chest, a heart attack; the headache, a stroke.

A student of mine, Julia, was having eye trouble a couple of years ago, when she was just seven and in Grade Two. She, with her mom, paid a visit to an optometrist in a shopping mall. He saw something, something not right, and sent them to the emergency ward, calling ahead to ensure they would be seen immediately. Within 48 hours, Julia had a tumour the size of a Mandarin orange removed from her brain.

She returned to school a few weeks later, with partly shaved head and a scar that looked like the curving stitches on a baseball. I talked with her a bit (I was the music teacher and went to visit her in her classroom,) and she told me she'd had five needles the day before. She said, "They told me it wouldn't hurt, but it did!"

Julia soon left for almost a year of rounds of chemotherapy. She returned last winter, wearing a pink bandanna, wisps of brown hair peeking out, hair that slowly grew thicker so that by the end of the school year she abandoned the bandanna and sported short but shiny waves.

At a check-up in the summer, it was found that the tumour had regrown. She's back in hospital most of the time, though she has dropped around the school a couple of times.

She's something of a celebrity: we've held fundraisers to help her family, and just this week every kid in every class in the school contributed to a giant Valentine's scrapbook to give to her. She's on TV in a one-minute advertising spot asking for support for Children's Hospital, saying, "I just want to go home." Again the pink bandanna, though the last couple of times I've seen her, her head's been bare, the few long strands of hair flaying out wildly. (Her "freak flag," I keep thinking, sensing there is something of that old David Crosby song in her, that she is fed up with pretending and covering up.) Recently, when she arrived at the school, someone in my class, which overlooks the entrance, spotted her, and instantly the whole class was at the windows, calling to her. It's quite moving, how these kids have attached themselves to her, how they care.

Julia's life changed with a visit to the eye doctor. I'm a wee bit worried.

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Harold

2008-02-09T23:03:00.000-08:00

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Too overwhelmed by the day to focus on object writing, instead the past comes roaring out of its cave.

Got a summons today. Phone rang about 10 this morning, a fine Scottish brogue asking for Margaret. "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number."

"I'm calling for Margaret Mullins, in regards to the estate of Margaret Hellen Mullins."

"Oh yes, then, that would be me."

"I did say Margaret."

"Ah, well, I'm not known by that name."

I readied myself for his arrival; I knew the news could not be good. Sure enough, the Public Trustee wants to grab a share of Mom's estate; they want "adequate provision for the proper maintenance and support" of my brother. The money in the estate can't begin to "adequately provide," of course, for a man who needs twenty-four hour supervision, who cannot care for himself.

When I faced the death of my mother, I did not expect to confront the fact of my brother's life, the tragedy of my family, my own guilt for having been born healthy, for having ignored him all my life just as Mom and Dad ignored him. I have had to contact the people who work with him and the people who represent him (who will not confirm that he is, in fact in their care, due to some principle of privacy - even though I'm his only immediate family.) I've negotiated the maze and reached him through his caregivers, doing all the right legal stuff. But I don't know how to negotiate the emotional knots.

When Mom wrote her will, she neglected to mention that she had a son, Harold. Her lawyer certainly would have told her to arrange her affairs differently, had she mentioned it, because the law would have parents provide for all of their living children, regardless what was written in a will. Mom knew that Harold would not, as a ward of the state, benefit from anything she could leave for him; instead, it would be swallowed by the state, put towards some general fund to provide general services. As such, her savings were not nearly enough to make a dent in the public budget. To me, however, the difference the money would make in my life, and in that of my sons, is significant.

The probate runs out in six weeks, this after three years of waiting. Now the government weighs in. I sent a long sob-story of an email to my lawyer, and all I can hope is that the judge on the case sees this as government vs individual, and award the greater part of the estate to me. I don't know how long the process would take, but I'm fairly certain it won't be settled by summer, as I had hoped.

The other way the judge could look at it is that I am the healthy one, I am the one with the advantage of living a full life, whereas Harold has nothing, no loving family, no prospects, no hope for anything that can mitigate his condition. This is where the emotion kicks in for me. I feel like an ogre trying to keep anything from him, even though reason says it will make no difference to him - he won't even see a penny of it. I don't know how to not feel greedy and guilty, that I have failed him.

Reality is that life has failed him. He was born just after the war, when, Mom claimed, most of the good doctors were still overseas. It was a difficult labour, and the attending physician refused to perform a section, with the result that Harold's was a high-forceps delivery. He was so battered, Mom was not allowed to see him for several days. The brain damage did not become evident until he was about two, when scarlet fever took out what remained of his capacity to speak and to learn. When he didn't develop as expected, Mom began consulting doctors. One finally told her, bluntly, "Your child's retarded - there's nothing I can do."

She kept him at home for close to six years, despite the practice at the time to institutionalize such children; she refused to let him go. Her own health suffered, since he was a wild child and untrainable. One of his favourite tricks, when he could escape the house, was to lie down across the road out front, which was a blind curve, to make the cars come screeching to a halt. He would laugh and laugh at this - it was the greatest joke to him. Mom's weight slipped down to something like 90 pounds and she was unable to maintain a pregnancy. The doctor finally convinced her that if she didn't let Harold go, she herself would end up hospitalized. He was sent to Woodlands School. I was born some nine months later, their miracle baby.

Visiting Harold meant riding the ferry to the mainland, a major excursion which we took only three or four times a year. A visit to him, to take him out for a drive, was part of the ritual of our visits to Grandma and Grandpa. I remember the "school," a dreadful mental hospital since come under scrutiny for its inhumane treatment of inmates. I remember riding in the back seat with Harold as he threw candy wrappers and cereal boxes out the window, laughing. I don't know if he knew us; it was impossible to tell. There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes, not much of anything, really.

Woodlands was designed for children, but Harold stayed on as an adult, having made a niche for himself helping keep the grounds. He was moved to a facility in Victoria in the 1970's or 80's, I imagine to have him closer to family, but the only time Mom visited him was at my request. We met him in a bright foyer, sat on the bench beside him. He had no idea who we were, fidgeted and huffed and looked everywhere but at us. Mom had brought him his old favourite candy, Licorice Allsorts, and he ate them enthusiastically. We left with the impression we had done him no kindness with our visit.

As these institutions fell out of favour in the 1990's, residents were moved into group homes, several men or women in a house, cared for by a regular staff. Harold lives in Shelby House, in Metchosin. (It was quite a task finding that out.)

In recent years, Harold's caregivers sought out Mom, and began bringing him to visit her about once a month. He would find the TV in the den, leaving the caregiver and Mom to chat, and he would fall asleep on the little couch in there. Mom enjoyed the visits, as much for coffee with the young man or woman who brought him as for seeing Harold. She seemed curious but distant about him. She seemed bemused by him.

In my search for him, I finally made contact with his primary caregiver. We exchanged some emails, but I haven't been in touch since last spring. She described him as a trickster, slow to take to people; the sign that you had gained acceptance with him was that he would start to play practical jokes on you. If he steals your keys, you know he likes you. He still does his "hoo hoo hoo" thing, the panting I took to be self-comforting at a time of stress. It's hard not to think of him as ape-like, and maybe that's not such a terrible way to see him. I suppose I love him, in my own way.

I asked if there was a regular newsletter that I could receive, and there was; I asked to be kept updated about him, but I have yet to hear anything. It's time to make contact again.

I don't know how the will business will shake down. It seems it is my lot that nothing will be settled easily. If there is good in it, it is that I am forced to face my demons. And my history.

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Wind Farms

2008-02-06T22:21:00.000-08:00

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The first wind farm I saw was in northern California, somewhere between the I5 and San Francisco, and it was breathtaking. There were hundreds of tall turbines, occupying miles of green hilly ground. I found them stunningly beautiful, enormous, slowly turning, white and gleaming in the sun.

Last summer John and I toured Nova Scotia, hitting the off-sites and backroads. We were interested in the Acadians and had read about a reconstructed Acadian village near one of the five towns called Pubnico - Lower East Pubnico, Pubnico, West Pubnico, Middle West Pubnico, Lower West Pubnico - and drove down the narrow Pubnico Penninsula to visit it. We spent some hours there, chatting with the folks about their history and the revival of their culture. They told us to be sure to visit the new wind farm down the way, at the tip of the penninsula, the end of the road - "You couldn't miss it!" However, by the time we headed out, we only wanted to get to Annapolis Royal, where we planned to spend the night. We decided to forego the wind farm.
Acadian Village

Two weeks later, I flew from Halifax to Boston to meet Lisa. It was perfect flying weather, and since it was a short hop, we flew low. From my window seat, I could retrace the trip we'd taken. We followed the south shore: there was Lunenberg, and Shelburne, most likely (we were just that much too high to see buildings or roads) and there, certainly, was Sable Island, emerged for a moment from the fog, and then, that would be mostly likely the Pubnico penninsula, there the Village Museum. Then, confirmation: the windmills! Even from the plane, they were huge, and I could see them turning gracefully.
Pubnico Wind Farm

The plane then flew over the Bay of Fundy and on to Boston. As we approached the city, I could see Cape Cod, where Lisa lives. The following day, we stood by the water there, looking south across Nantucket Sound, where an offshore wind farm is slated to be built. I remembered reading about the resistance to the project, how it would mar the view from the windows of the wealthy.
Cape Wind Project

My friend Stefan DeBracey got me thinking about wind farms and Nova Scotia. Remembering has brought up more stories: the Canadian Idol of Pubnico (I think he ended up in in fourth place,) and the history of the region, the settlement of which was so stable that virtually all the people who live there now can trace their roots to one of four families. There are more D'Eons there than you can shake a stick at. But those stories are for another time.

Visit Stef's Blog

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The Spark of Divinity

2008-01-16T20:13:00.001-08:00

I don't want to lay a stone on the heart of my children.
...[I] recognize the goodness, tens of thousands of Christian people
who risked their lives and the lives of their children
to save, protect, my people, people of a different faith.

You gotta look hard for the sparks of divinity in the ashes
of atrocity.

~Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, founder of The Jewish Foundation for the Rescuers, in "The Jewish Americans," aired tonight on PBS.

Watch the video: third clip in "America's Response to the Holocaust"

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Bog Walk

2007-11-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

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When I trudge the slow hill, I look at houses, the old and faded on their mossy lawns, soft places on the sills barely visible, cracks in the walk, dying needles on the lower boughs of planted pine - and the new, crisp at the edges like fresh-pressed shirts but shaped to match their neighbours, worthy of their million-dollar tag, second storey dormers peak above cottage facades - all I can think is that I’ll never own one, how the zeros keep joining the end of the priceline, zeros behind zeros. What normal human has so many to toss onto house-posts-come-hitching-posts?

A woman rakes leaves and doesn’t look up, sweeps one-handed and grim as if they were dust on her kitchen floor. Another leads a writhing Chow, a squirming would-be escapee, and doesn’t greet me. I suppose I look odd, my jeans and down coat, woolen hat pulled low against November afternoon, a twice-used bag swinging from my arm, hands in pockets, headed for the bog.

The boardwalk sports rolled roofing, gritty and safe. I’ve come for standing water, but the puddles are frozen over, thick hollow slabs splintered from knobby peat to woody shrub. There's a new path since last time I came, a scenic loop, well walled so that even dogs are penned from young mosses planted by the bogslogging mistresses of Spirit Park.

I bet those ladies have English accents and fine wrinkled skin; I bet they’re chipper and chatter while they dig. Cloth gloves and spades and gumboots and fleece, they transplant packets of sphagnum. A new patch here, black earth measled with green, the salal and blackberry slashed back - the natives reclaim stolen land. The English bid ta ta and return to pricey homes, read classic novels, a stew on the stove. Tweedy husbands putter home from golf.

Fresh daisies clash by a signpost, bouquet for a bog lady recently passed. A bit of water below, so I kneel on my plastic bag and scoop with a yoghurt cup, but it rolls away, my god, a plastic blight on this holy spot. I borrow Muriel’s bouquet - I’m sure she would approve - and use the stems to coax the culprit back within reach. She would have preferred, I’m sure, a mossy pot with curling mushrooms and arbutus bark. I scoop some peaty water to take home, take the circle tour around the haven, greet another dog walker who doesn’t greet me back.

The old moss field blooms now, knolls of purple roll across the clearing, and at the edge a planted rose, blooming fresh and foreign, put there in the night, no doubt, by a rebel gardener.

I wish life into my yoghurt cup. I wish paramecia and amoebae, cilia, flaggellae, so kids can gaze in microscopes and shriek and shake and giggle at the sight of small things they never knew were there.

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Picasso's Bulls

2007-10-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Picasso's series of sketches seems to be not only a lesson in abstraction, but a metaphor for disintegration. This series made me wonder if Picassos's work in cubism offers a similar message. It is generally said that cubism is an attempt to represent objects as seen from all sides, or the many planes of objects, but I find cubist images to appear more fractured than composite.

Picasso retained the important bits, of course, the bullish genitalia!

I know nothing to speak of about art, by the way, other than how it makes me feel.

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Slide Show - France & Venice & Me

2006-12-10T18:57:00.000-08:00

Pickpocket

2006-11-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

written October 31

The Paris metro reflects the levels of Paris society. Some stations are artist designed, beautiful with fresco or archeological installations or mosaic. Some are sleek, stylish, ready to walk the runway, catch the eye of the world. Some, though - most, probably - are worn and grafitti-ridden, the black walks spotted with old chewing gum, the concrete walls sooty, the smells of mouldy stone and old urine predominant. It was in a station like this I watched the pickpocket. I was slung like a burro with bags, making my way from the Gare du Nord baggage lockers to my hosts’ home in the suburbs. I was digging through, looking for something, a map, my tickets, and I saw his curiosity, his slight smile, looking at my open pack. His eyes met mine briefly and he moved away. His gaze was always low, at purse and pocket level. He seemed well practiced, his eyes always moving, assessing, peering around, studying for signs of vulnerability. He zeroed in on some Japanese men in grey business suits. He moved close as the train approached, the wind from the tunnel ruffling his hair. His nudge would be barely stronger than that tunnel wind, the wallet would disappear imperceptibly. The doors opened, he swooped. I swooped faster, between him and his prey, and he veered off. No acknowledgment. The denial of a pro who’d been discovered. Nonchalant.

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Ezra Pound in Venice V

2006-11-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

Ezra!??

The information I had: "He returned to Venice in 1958 and lived finally on Calle Querini, one street off the Guidecca Canal on the Rio della Fornace. There is a plaque identifying the house. He shared this house with Olga Rudge who was its owner."
(source: http://venice-art-tours.com/Unusual.htm - the only source I could find about Pound's or Rudge's domiciles in Venice)

With the maps I had, none of which had much of an index, I found a Calle Querini, but no Rio della Fornace, and no plaque. (There were a couple of missing plaques, however.) I took photos of everything anyway. Now at home, with the help of Google maps, I have found the Rio della Fornace and another Calle Querini.

This home, like his others, is in the Dorsoduro district, across the Grand Canal from the central part of town, not far from the Academia Bridge. I may well have passed by it, as I traipsed all over the area, but did not recognise it.

I guess I'll just have to go back.

These photos are of the wrong Calle Querini, the wrong missing plaque, and me, searching.

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Ezra Pound in Venice IV

2006-11-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

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These are views of the squera (gondola builder's shop) and the canal alongside Pound's first apartment in Venice.

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Ezra Pound in Venice III

2006-11-06T17:40:00.000-08:00

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Views, from the south, of Pound's first apartment in Venice.

Up next: views of the neighbourhood.
Coming soon: Olga Rudge's house, more or less.

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Ezra Pound in Venice II

2006-11-05T17:54:00.000-08:00

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Pound's apartment viewed from the Ogni Santi. His room is at the top of the little building in the center of the shot, next to the walled garden. The shed on the left is a gondola repair shop, the "squero", or boat-builder's shop, that Pound refers to.

"Well, my window . . . looked out on the Squero where Ogni Santi . . . meets San Trovaso . . . things have ends and beginnings." ~Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI

Pound wrote his first book of verse, A Lume Spento, in this apartment, according to my information.

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Ezra Pound in Venice

2006-11-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

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In a recent visit to Venice, I went on a quest to find the places Ezra Pound once lived. The next few posts will be of photos I took there.

My information about his domiciles came from http://www.venice-art-tours.com/Unusual.htm

The search for the locales took me off the tourist trail and gave me a sense of having a piece of Venice to myself, shared only with a few locals eating lunch on the nearby squares. This delight I owe to the poet known as Lute, who wanted a picture of Pound's home. These photos are for him in particular.

Pound, according to my information, first lived in Venice in 1907, in this apartment on the Rio S. Trovaso. His was the top right window in the three-storey building in the center of this photo, next to the walled garden.

He mentions the view in Canto LXXVI.

More to come.

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Sunset at Tenacatita

2006-10-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

Written June 2, 2006.

No clocks. The sun gets close to the horizon, the wind changes direction, the burn leaves the air. I still don’t know what time that would have been, but in March, so close to the equator, must have been pretty close to six o’clock. We were camped on a small beach on the east side of a penninsula, a bar of sand between the mainland and a large rock. Across a grassy hump was Tenacatita, the village, with it’s broad curved beach, and the other side of our penninsula was the southern end of what we called the Long Beach, the beach that stretched literally for miles, north past El Tecuan, north north who knows how far, towards Puerta Vallarta. At suset our loose community, the several camps of Americans, would walk to the long beach to watch the sunset. We’d sit in silence, enjoy the breeze, listen to the rumbling crash of deep waves. There would be the scuttling of hermit crabs, the growing shadows on the sand. I would practice yoga then, a few asanas, for about 20 minutes. Mostly I liked to stand on my head. I got good at it that year, the only year I ever practiced regularly, and it got me in shape, I noticed, when the treeplanting season started. We’d gather at the high part of the beach, where the grass started, where the sand was soft and our feet sunk deep as we walked. The cool air fanned our sunbrowned skin.

Naked

2006-10-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

Written May 7, 2006

The auto court at Kathleen Lake was old even in the 50s. By then there were modern motels, long two-storey rectangles with marked parking on the pavement outside. Pink trim, or turquoise, on white stucco walls, wall to wall carpeting inside, often a kitchenette, a modern bathroom with shower curtains, something new to me as a kid. But Kathleen Lake wasn’t like that. We had our own cabin there, with a staircase up to it, and a porch. The outside walls were asbestos shingles, I think, mottled grey and scratchy to the touch. The parking area, the central court, was gravel, or mud or dust, lumpy. We had a kitchen as big as the one at home, open to a sitting area, at the front of the cabin, a yellow formica table with chrome legs, matching chairs in shiny padded plastic. My legs would stick to those chairs on warm days when I only wore my bathing suit all day. There were two bedrooms, one for my parents, one for me, and a bathroom between. No shower, just a bath. One morning, before the heat of the day, I wandered out onto the porch after my bath and stretched my arms over my head, felt the brisk touch of air on my skin, looking forward to the day of swimming and fishing and communing with toads, when the sharp voice of my mother said, “Anne, get in here!” “Why?” I asked. “You shouldn’t go outside naked.” First I’d heard of such a thing, and I asked why not. She said people didn’t like to see naked little girls, it wasn’t polite. That made no sense to me, who’d always run around comfortably in my own skin and never felt judgment for it.

Driving into Lake Kathleen

2006-10-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

Written May 6, 2006

I sat on my daddy’s knee and drove the Volkswagen bus when I was 5. The dust from the gravel road split the sunlight into beams, great clouds of it bubbling up from the tires. The steering wheel was almost horizontal, a huge disk I had to wheel around, a platter, to get around the curve into the parking lot of the auto court. Parking lot! more like a dirt clearing. My dad made a fuss about me driving, and I made a fuss about it afterwards, and for some reason, that moment, must have been less than a minute, resonates still. I can hear the crunch of gravel, smell the August air, feel the pull on my body, leaning to the side, as we rounded the bend. I can see aspens, pale green with sun shining through. The big house on the left as we enter, the rows down each side of small grey shingled cabins, the lake down the slope with it’s weathered dock and lily pads and toads and leeches. I remember grass or some grassy water weeds at the edge of the lake, the silty silky mud of the bottom between my toes, the cool water on hot days, the touch of current on my skin as I waded waist deep slowly through the lilies, the toads. Learned to haul myself up onto the hot wood of the dock, gazed at the tops of pilings, black with creosote and topped with such fat toads, as fat as 5 inches, even. What’s the name of a top decoration on a spire or a flagpole? That’s what those toads were, when they sunbathed.

21st Avenue Dawn on Sunday

2006-10-29T13:35:00.000-08:00

written April 23, 2006

The grass hints at dew, a fuzziness about it, an occasional glint of a droplet reflecting the sun. Most of the lawns are scruffy, jagged. People are reluctant to get the mower out and start the ceaseless chore of mowing for the next six months. Shadows are long and stringy this time of day, when at last the sky is clear and the sun shines all the way in from Surrey, the Valley, that catchall for the smog of the city. Here the air is clean, the edges of the mountains clear and crisp against barely blue, almost white sky. The oaks on 20th, as I look north, are leafing out unevenly, some still twiggy and sparse, some quite covered in the olive colour of shiny new leaves. There’s the burnish of a short maple peeking through, over top of the brown box of a house across the street. A small magnolia, the kind with the big pink tulip flowers, is displaying perhaps its first blossoms ever, I can count three of them from here, competing with its own foliage. A tiny miniature red maple, glowing in this light, a rose bush (looks like my own is dead, without a sign of sprouts). The dew is already coming off John’s blue Honda; it’s wet on the top, but shiny dry patches are growing on the front, facing East. I know it would be chilly if I were to step out there. I would breathe deep and feel the cold air fill my lungs, down to my belly.

Imaginary Cafe on 10th

2006-04-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

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The rain outside falls in sheets, in torrents and I can’t find a word to describe this heavy cold rain, the drops like god’s spitballs, not tears, as big as pingpong balls, so that it hurts when it hits your face, like speedballs, not dropped or falling, but pitched at the earth, bouncing off the pavement, bouncing off the deep blue car, bouncing off that black umbrella with the man underneath, bouncing off itself on the sidewalk, like the splash of divers in a pool. We’re being dive-bombed by rain, like the bird - what bird is that anyhow - that folds itself into the ocean to catch the salmon. Must look that up, magnificent unique bird, unlike the eagle that pulls up short of the surface and swings those thick feathered legs like a gate, to lift the big fish and fly off with it hanging like a keel below the great noisy wings, to a twig nest high in the Douglas fir. How did I get from here to there? The rain, my train, my helicopter into long wet days, where no cafe could offer shelter. The end of a long run, a break for coffee slightly rancid from the thermos, the terrible cold of the wet gloves, and the owl overhead, silently glancing our way. This cafe, small on 10th, flatscreen monitors for those who would pay by the minute to connect with their people. Someone writing, someone studying. The brain is so thirsty and all this rain can’t satisfy. Sweets beckon from a gleaming glass cabinet, the hiss of the barrista, clink and clatter, white wedge cups. The bitter richness in my mouth, the pen in hand, the mind opens, pours out memories of rain.

ah...the osprey!

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Stone Wall outside Yeats' Churchyard

2006-01-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

If this wall isn’t old, it could be, settled and filmed over with green algae, mottled with the white concentric growth of fungus. Who knows if the growth was there before, or since, the building of the wall. The rocks have come to fit together like old spouses, his lumps molded to her hollows, but even when new, the thoughtful eye and hand of the builder would have been evident - where’s a small chink for this small space, ah! there! a place for that big cube! And the wall grew up like a 20th Century art lesson, balance, form, and abstraction. There must have been some failures sometimes, sections surely collapsed in rain or in the shudder of the wind, to be repaired by yet other hands, other eyes, and maybe that’s why there’s a juxtaposition of green rock stark against white. And maybe it was less tall, once, and hence the strata, here a layer thick, built by someone young and hardy, here a thin line of hearthstones, almost. Over the top, some prickly vine creeps down, and if the stonework holds, it will one day disappear under greenery, and become as if a hedge. All the walls of Ireland are like this: organic, living, speaking their story and of the hands that built them.

Log Drum

2006-01-22T21:49:00.000-08:00

The walnut wood has a black cast over brown grain, like coal dust, like shadow. There is a slight sheen, a gleam in the yellow light of the room, an almost reflection on the surface of this small hand made wooden box. The top is carved into 6 tines, slightly dipped and arched, reaching for the mallet at the sweet spot, the place which, when struck, gives the purest tone. I’ve searched for this log drum for years, testing each one as I encountered it, not finding the tuning I like, always a tine that doesn’t ring, but this one was lovingly crafted by a small French man with an eye and an ear for beauty. Its name, Tamboa, is stamped deeply in its front. Mostly it sits on the also-walnut table I salvaged from the remnants of Mom’s furniture, sits darkly waiting with its mallets. I pick it up as if it were a cat, living and persnickety, place it on my lap, and tap it gently. The sound, at first, seems rough, dry, a scratching on the eardrum, but soon it seems to loosen and sing as I find the place to strike each tine, and I set the mallets to bouncing like small children on a trampoline, springing, the tunes like laughter rippling off the surface, bubbling and joyful. I lose all sense of self and let the drum speak, let its tones fill the room fill my head, supplant the thoughts that trap me otherwise.

Touch the Stone

2006-01-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

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The green fields, that fantasyland green, the Emerald City green that gives Ireland its nickname, gives way to stone as you approach the west coast, that flaggy shore of Heaney’s poem. “Is this the Ireland you remember?” I’d ask, and he’d squint a little, see the old picture in his mind, and say “Not quite - it’s when we get out west, that’s the Ireland I know.” And there it was, suddenly, as if emerging from a green haze, a cobblestone hill, a hill of boulders, like the land had been scraped by the west wind off the base that supports all that greenery. Small shrubbery clings to the stone, and without the daily rain and constant mist, the coast might be a barren place, swept clean of any chance of growth. This stone was as a magnet to me, and I gave myself to it, drawn to stone and the Stone, so that everywhere I stepped outside, my fingers had to touch, my arms hold, and when I could I’d press my body to it, a big boulder in the Burren, or a Castle wall over the Cliffs of Moher, press and close my eyes, feel the warm/cool texture of it, offer myself to him, the Stone, so far away and so fresh in my mind. This was as close as I could get, from across the Atlantic, the Allegheny hills, the midlands and the Texas scrub. I could breath the breeze that came from him, ultimately, think “Maybe just a particle of this air was in his lungs yesterday, or several days ago.” And somehow, touching stone, I kept in touch. And somehow, on my return, we were deeper in each other than before.

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