SONGS OF STARK REALITY

Blake had his Songs of Innocence and Experience.  I am proposing to write a series of little ditties under the heading Songs of Stark Reality.  One goes like this:

I'm a little brown cat
sitting in the window.
A little brown cat watching how the wind blow.
There's a bird in the maple tree.
If I were outside
there'd be no more he.
O I'm a little brown cat sitting in the window.
Miaow miaow miaow.

Or this:

There are snakes at the bottom of our garden
happy keeping all the slugs at bay.
Out near the garden wall
you sometime see them crawl
but only 'cause they're trying to run away.
There's a mower with big noise and whirling knife blades
and sometimes accidentally it chops
a little snake in two
which makes me feel quite blue
'cause I hate slugs that lunch upon my crops.

Sometimes reality gets too stark for me and today is one of those days.  It is a headshaking day indeed.  I simply do not understand how such unmitigated fools get to run the world.  And even more puzzling, why we let them continue to do so.  Blowhard pronouncement from the leaders of the country to the south of us on the Iraq situation.  The likelihood of our own fools giving the nod to Enbridge.  It is all in the name of oil with the added "be afraid, be very afraid" threat of economic woe.  But doesn't anyone else see that if all the money  invested in oil companies was invested in alternative energies, we wouldn't have the huge reliance on oil and thus the wars over its accessibility?  Yes, we will probably always need some oil.  But with alternative energy sources, not nearly as much as we do now.  And what about all the money that will be spent, not only on arms and armaments and personnel to protect oil resources, but on the lawyers' fees that will go into the court challenges over pipelines?  I know there are better uses for all that money.  Sigh.

But there is one spot of hope shining for me today.  This morning I heard about a teacher at a middle school in Victoria who has developed a music notation system, based on colour, that enables children with a form of dyslexia that makes it impossible for them to read regular notation actually learn to play music on any chosen instrument.   What a wonderful thing!  And a fine example of the change for the better that one individual can make.  This is the human spirit we need.  Not megacorps making the rich richer.  Not big governments riding roughshod over the world.  Just small changes that bring joy and quality of life to people in their day to day lives.  That is what really makes people happy.

THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SARDINE LOVERS

I have decided that I belong to secret society.  I love sardines.  I have done since I was a kid.  Those nice big fat sardines that are canned in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick.  A hark back to my roots, as it were.

I only know one other person who likes sardines.  But he prefers those scrawny little Norwegian brislings. No accounting for taste.

When I was pregnant for my first child I craved sardines.  A lunch of sardines with mustard on toast and a 7-Up became a regular ritual.  Then many years later I would sometimes take a sardine sandwich to work for lunch. Admittedly they do have a strong odour but the only person ever to complain in our lunch room was someone who would have benefited greatly from eating them herself.  She had inherited high cholesterol and the omega-3 and polyunsaturates in sardines would have been good for her. Sardines do not taste as strong as they smell either.  But I digress.

Back to the secret society.  If only one other person admits to liking them, how come both varieties are always in stock on grocery shelves?  There must be hundreds and thousands of other sardine lovers out there buying them.  But not once have I seen another shopper reaching for the telltale flat can.  Not once do I remember seeing  a can of sardines in another shopping basket or on a check-out counter.  Thus my conclusion that I am part of a society so secret we do not know the many other members.  Okay sardine lovers.  Time to stand up and be counted. There is no shame in eating those fabulously healthy little fish that are chockablock full of calcium, protein, vitamin D, selenium plus the aforementioned omega-3's.  And the icing on the cake so to speak?  They are Canadian!

REMEMBERING PETE AND SOLO

Jim made chicken salad for lunch today. I was suddenly transported back to a restaurant on Monk Boulevard in Montreal and became again an 8 year old girl who was captivated by the icecream making machine in the window of what I grew up calling "Pete's Restaurant". I would always stop in front of the window on my way home from school and watch as the green pistachio or tan maple walnut icecream 'pooped' out of the pipe into containers that would then be put in the freezer for sale in cones. One very hot day, I was convinced I was not going to be able to walk the last 3 1/2 blocks to my house without a drink of water. I don't know what posessed me but I went inside and asked the man at the counter for a glass of water. The man, whom I later knew as Solo, graciously and gravely presented me with the coldest most refreshing drink of water I remember ever having drunk. This for a while, short or long I don't remember, became a ritual.

Five years later. January in Montreal. Elvis had just appeared for the first time ever on the Ed Sullivan Show and Mary Yersh, Kay Frate and I were giddy with it. We walked down the middle of snowy Springland Street in the tracks left by passing cars, giggling and nearly wetting ourselves with laughter over Mary's very excellent, very funny immitation of Elvis' performance. We were going to Pete's for vanilla cokes and to play some of our favourite tunes on the juke box. Pete or Solo made these specially for us from the fountain Coke machine and a dash of vanilla.

Some years later Pete's had moved right to the corner of Springland and Monk Boulevard. Its official name was the Ville Emard Restaurant. I was pregnant and had cravings for their oh so yummy chicken salad sandwich which I phoned ahead for and went to pick up on a fairly regular basis.

Who were these men, Pete and Solo? I know almost nothing about them. Not even their surname. I think they were brothers. I think they were Greek. They were young men when I stood watching the icecream machine 60 years ago. If they still live they are now very old. But the thing I do know about them, and the most important thing to know about them is that they were good men. Hardworking honest new Canadians who treated an 8 year old girl with dignity and respect and who continued to do so for all the years I continued to frequent their establishment.

The last time I was in their restaurant was in 1996 when I was visiting another childhood friend who lived in the neighbourhood. We went for barbecue chicken. Pete was behind the counter, greyed and very handsome in his later years. He claimed to remember me. And maybe he did.

CELEBRATING BATWINGS

I'm talking those flabby flaps that develop on women's arms as they hit middle age, not the leathery appendages of flying mice. Until this morning I felt pretty negative about them. Lots of yuccckk factor. I haven't worn anything sleeveless in over twenty years!

I used to have really nice arms, firm and shapely. So I started thinking back to when that was. It was when my kids were little enough to need picking up. That period of my life lasted about ten years spread over three children. So I started imagining I was talking to a grade 11 class of girls about body image in one's later years; about how easy it is to criticize looking older and to buy into the youthful image that western women seem to want to retain forever. In doing so I've reversed my attitude toward my own growing decrepitude. Here's how.

I started remembering. The six to eight feedings a day, the naps, the "uppy uppy Mommy"s, the into the car and out agains, the too tired to walk any mores, the cuddles, the book readings, the rockings. Such happy precious memories.

From now on when I look in a mirror I will no longer see those old bat wings. I will be remembering love and the babes these arms embraced. Along with my stretch marks and soft belly, they are the badge of being a mother. How can I not celebrate that?

Rutting buck sees red. Challenges approaching scooter.

There's a blacktail buck on Saltspring this morning with a roaring headache and there's a fellow with a story to tell his grandchildren. Picture a ferry worker riding his red scooter along a peaceful wooded road on his way to an early morning shift on the Queen of Nanaimo. His headlight is on, his windscreen is up, his gloved hands grip the outstretched handlebars, the motor is roaring gently. Out of the woods trots a buck who, seeing the oncoming challenger lowers his antlers and stands his ground. Ferry worker flies head over buck ending up sprawled on the road with a badly broken ankle. Blacktail buck collapses for a moment, gives his head a shake, gets up and trots back into the woods. Another rival vanquished.

LABELING IN-LAWS

Listening to Margaret Visser this morning and she mentioned that marriages were a way of joining two families ... either for the purpose of expanding the family wealth or of making or keeping peace. I got to thinking about what a friend told me yesterday about her daughter's husband's parents. Several months ago they moved to the town where she lived and didn't once get in touch. So much for the joining of families.

All that aside, I want you to look at how I have described the conection of those folk to her. I could have said "her son-in-law's parents" but it is still cumbersome. Why, in our western culture, have we never developed a relationship term that describes the connection between two sets of parents whose children marry one another?

Equally as uninformative are the terms "brother-in-law" or "sister-in-law". Why don't we have special terms that delineate their exact relationship to us? Is my sister-in-law my brother's wife? Or is she my husband's brother's wife? Other cultures have exact labels that tell the hearer whether a cousin is male or female and whether the connection is through the mother or the father. Similarly with uncles and aunts and even grandparents. I suppose we can make do with "maternal aunt, cousin, grandparent" etc., but it seems awfully casual for a culture for whom family is, and historically was, supposed to be paramount.

I wonder how she did it?

Reading AS Byatt's Still Life. In it she has written a description of giving birth that is so precisely accurate that my aged innards squirmed in recollection. Most of us who have had children were blessed with amnesia following the ordeal. Good thing too or we would never have gone forth and multiplied! But that's the subject of a possible future musing that will depend on how irked I am feeling with humankind. Meantime, this wonderer wants to know how Byatt was able to recall so vividly those sensations I so completely and gratefully had forgotten.