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    Monday
    16Nov2009

    in the cabin

    What a day. There's a crisp breeze rustling the trees, and the sun's beaming. Justin finished the demolition on our fireplace insert to prepare for a new little woodstove in the living room (so that we don't freeze and starve during multi-day January power outages, as per usual) so there's soot in the air, a hole in the roof, and a chimney on the grass.

    He's gone to pick up the new rig and I seized the chance to answer the questions submitted for the launch Q&A (there's a delay on the event video, hence the audio). Go here to my other blog for thoughts on writing, the book, and blogging. And death. And expensive jeans. You know. As per usual.

     

    Comment10 Comments |
    DateMonday, November 16, 2009 in
    Tuesday
    10Nov2009

    my grandfather in quotes, his beloved in parentheses  

    “We flew through the Alps in the pitch black. If we flew too high, there would be no air for the propellers, and planes would drop out of the sky. If we flew too low, we’d crash into rock. We were flying blind. Those were some of the longest nights of my life.”

    (We all dreaded the doorbell. There was always a chance it would be the war department with a telegram saying our husbands were missing or killed. Our lives revolved around those little blue airmail letters. Once I got thirteen letters at the same time, but then nothing for weeks and weeks. I never got used to him being away. Not ever.)

    “Our Hamburg effort last month was a real honey. Boy, we really gave them a pasting. We were very fortunate to get back as our kite was hit in many places by night fighters and flak. Luckily none of us were hit but those cannon shells make quite a hole! Our ‘W for Willy’ looked like a salt shaker after that do."

    (Reading through his logbook, you have to think about everything Gord couldn’t say. He had to write just the basic facts – how many bombs were dropped, how far they flew and for how long, and where they were sent. But so much happened up there. So much.)

    The vibration of the plane, the noise and yelling and roar. Exploding flak, the concussion as hundreds of bombs found their marks. The fumes, the smell of fuel and sweat. The biting cold of high altitude. And an urgent need to concentrate.

    "As a member of the Pathfinders’ Squadron, it was my honour to be among those responsible for the canceling of Hitler’s speech at the Beer Hall on September 9, 1942.”

    Caught in searchlights on the way to raid Dusseldorf, minutes become eternities. Riddled with flak, their navigator hit in the abdomen, knee, and leg, and one finger on his left hand shot off, they made a desperate push to make it back across the Channel on fumes.

    One up on his mates, Grampa opted out of a routine mission the following day, staying on the ground. On that flight, the plane was shot down. All but two of his best friends were killed.

    Gerry escaped a prisoner of war camp through the French Underground, smuggled from farm to farm over several months until he reached England. Jock was discovered in occupied France and taken to a camp in Germany where he spent several years until the end of the war.

    (When Jock landed in Toronto he came to our house for a visit. I asked him to get something for me in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and saw steaks, eggs, butter, bacon. He broke down and cried. It was the first time in more than six years he’d seen food like that.)

    “As I sit writing this I can hear our Bombers going off to places unknown. The boys certainly are giving old Jerry a pasting these days. It gives on a funny feeling to hear all the aircraft in the sky. I wouldn’t like to be underneath when they lay their eggs.” ~ June 1943

    After the loss of his first crew, Grampa anticipated the christening of a second tour upon his return to England. But, as was so common during the war years, he was held up due to transportation difficulties. Grampa’s newly-assigned crew, all as familiar and close in friendship as the first, waited as long as they could but went ahead without him, not knowing that he was landing in Britain that very night.

    “Fraser Barron, being a very experienced Pathfinder, led a raid in which he and his Deputy Master Bomber collided over target,” he wrote. “All were killed.”

    (Gord felt he should have been on that plane. He regretted that he wasn’t with his friends, if that was to be their fate. He couldn’t believe it happened a second time, losing his crew. He couldn’t understand why he survived and not them.)

    With Scotch parents he'd gone to England to enlist, the fastest route at war's first outbreak, and fudged his youth in order to qualify. He stayed for dozens of missions more than he had to over three tours of duty. He had been years abroad when my grandfather went from dropping bombs on the wrecked cities of Milan, Paris, Dusseldorf, and on Hitler’s beer hall itself to bowling in pristine Toronto. To a pretty dress on his wife, cocktails, shingles to paint. And ghosts, too many, that stayed with him always.

    (Gord didn’t talk much, especially right afterwards. Later on he opened up a bit, but he never slept well. You can only handle so much. They lost so many friends. But the only time he would really get down was on Remembrance Day. He would sit in the den alone, and I wouldn’t go in to him or ask him for anything. He wanted to be alone. He just wanted to think.)

    Notes stray across the album page, white on black. Tailgunner, lost nerve, 1943. Pilot killed in action, 1942. Navigator hit by flak, 1941. Bombardier shot down 1943, P.O.W., whereabouts unknown.

    And then simply Darling, home.

     

    Comment58 Comments |
    DateTuesday, November 10, 2009
    Monday
    02Nov2009

    it's here.

     

    Comment91 Comments |
    DateMonday, November 2, 2009 in ,
    Thursday
    29Oct2009

    sydney mines, vol. 1

    We're too much of laundry and past-date sour cream and power bills and the broken camera and the abandoned yoga practice and the sneaking suspicion that we are, in fact, a 72-year-old recluse trapped in a 36-year-old body.

    Did you know

    says a friend

    all the old ladies in nursing homes drink nothing but tea, because who says no to tea? and they end up dehydrated, and they're put on tea rationing.

    I pause for mathematics.

    Six teas in one day, each with two heaps of sugar. One bottle beer. Zero glasses water. But the house is peppered with a string of forgotten mugs, a trail of tepid Yorkshire Gold that represents nothing more than scattered sips. Adding up to one, maybe one and a half. Reasonable. No need, yet, to begin playing bridge.

    Still, such a rash of mug misplacement can't factor well in the reckoning of senility.

    +++

    We trudge. God, how we trudge. Each of us forgets to look sidelong at the person next, the person behind, all trudging souls.

    Woe!
    but for more hours, more started, more finished
    more of what I want
    more of what I need
    more of what I deserve

    And there we are, caught in the snare of our own trickery. Restlessness seduces.

    What is it to feel unrealized, other than strangely exquisite? It is the soul's plea to matter. It is the exhausting submersion of caring for others, sometimes at the expense of our own creative spark. It is age and mortality settling upon us like a kneading cat, prodding us to Hurry up and do something. Make something. Be something, before they start rationing my tea.

    What do you see?

    I see a kid whose every adventure is already written. All his loves and words and chance encounters carved into each and every bone, waiting for him to notice.

    I see the force that made him, and it smiles.

    You have everything you need. You have fortitude. You have stories. Be quiet, be still, until they slink out from underneath forgotten freight to sniff around your ankles like feral cats.

    Never mind the trudge. Everybody trudges. Just keep going. But be sure, as you do,

    to listen.

    +++

    Sydney is on fire. He illustrated The Dread Crew (due to arrive any day now from the printers for shipping to retailers, and then to you) and he's been uploading new stuff and I accosted him and said oh my god please let me brag about you and he replied only if you mention the private jet.

    He said okay. And so every now and then I'm going to sit here with a glass of wine and stare at one of his drawings for a while, something wholly unconnected to what he did for the book, and I'm going to write a bit.

    Swear to god I am not on the doobage.

    It's better than doobage.

    It's Sydney.

     

     

    Comment19 Comments |
    DateThursday, October 29, 2009 in ,
    Thursday
    22Oct2009

    fire flies from the crater

    One of them swayed as she stood there, one hand on the tiny rump slung round her torso. pat- pat- pat. She was tired and hobbling a little but glowed with exertion, production.

    She was one of three mothers, all having given birth seven days ago, thirteen days ago, eleven. Friends of mine, halloween party invites and playdate companions and sandpit watchers. Two mei-tais, one sling. The last time I saw them, all three were round. Now they are two. four. six.

    I feigned a need to catch the last of Nelson’s eggs and weaved through the crowd to the sound of a fiddle and a guitar and a box-bass, of people ordering organic coffee and ooohing at fresh olive baguettes, and greenhouse raspberries, and earthy portobellos, and babies so new they do nothing but sleep where they belong, safe and enfolded, always the one escaping hand, fingers splayed, cheek squashed up hot and down-deep against familiar breast.

    It’s raining.

    I contemplated standing next to the fire, an old metal drum that yawns a lazy column of ash into the air, but it was occupied, even in drizzle. I saw the path into the woods and kept walking. I saw where the path turned over the creek. I kept walking.

    They’re not going to know where I’ve gone.

    +++

    Ingiddboogoomin.

    Ingiddboogoomin, mommy.

    In the dark just after lights-out I sing a song about a drifter, Woody Guthrie, who fell in love with a movie star. Every night for weeks now, months, they want the same song. He offers her his seed rather than his pennies. He is a mountain. She treads upon him, and he awaits the touch of her hand upon his hard rock.

    Ben helps.

    Ingrid Bergman, yer so…

    PURDY!

    You'd make any mountain….

    QUIVAH!

    You’d make fire fly from the…

    KWATEH!

    A horny drifter teaches my sons the arts of both wanting and drifting. It’s a more authentic romance, after all, one free of platitudes. It is human. Urges and blackness and aches and sidelong glances and parked cars that double as refuge from gold standards and rain.

    Sometimes, contentedness is poking a finger into our wound and giving it a wiggle. For sheer sensation. For summoning. For a beginning, a balm, an unlocking key.

    We yearn and mourn and scrape calloused heels in unbecoming ways. We covet. We hardly ever say what we mean. We disrespect a perfectly honourable and universal dark. We pretend despite instinct. We grip white-knuckled to precious truth with one hand, whipping ourselves with the other as though we should somehow be more enlightened than the animals we are.

    I need you. I don’t need you.

    We are unaware that even at our most absurd, there is no need to apologize. We wander, dreaming like meat of the sweet, hot breath of a siren.

     

    Comment24 Comments |
    DateThursday, October 22, 2009 in
    Thursday
    15Oct2009

    one day in a life

    Your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.

    Is it? Really? Let me chew on that again.

    …
    …

    Your birth

    is the most important event

    in shaping your life as a mother.

    Important distinction: you call it my birth. But it’s not. It’s my kid’s birth.

    Still chewing.

    …
    …

    Sometimes, motherhood is destined, and yet the experience of birth is not. Are those women lesser mothers?

    …
    …

    Are women who are indifferent to method lesser mothers? Lesser feminists? Or just unenlightened and pitiable, even if they’re content with their experience?

    …
    …

    There are birth advocates in my life whom I love and adore, even though it took me too long to figure out I wasn’t supposed to say isn’t it more about having a baby than having a birth? with such coarseness. Which is pretty much the same thing as walking into a tabernacle wanting to know, with genuine earnestness, why any of us should mind if someone else's bum isn’t just an out-door.

    These friends and I have pretty much agreed to talk about other things like high heels and muffintops, because for a while there, I was an unintentional cannonball. But today I saw this declaration and it broke my heart.

    Then it made me cranky. Which makes me unfashionable. But I have to stand up and raise my hand, even if it means I risk looking like I stand against them, which I don’t. It's the discourse—the language used and what lies implicit in it.

    Your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.

    So you’d better make it beautiful and serene and victorious and on your terms. Because if it gets screwed upside-down and sideways, you will be forever marked as having been robbed—and your baby, too, who will never forgive you for not being more like a goddess and less, you know, unconscious.

    +++

    Birth is absolutely not the most important event that shapes my life as a mother. It’s just not. Allow me to elaborate.

    IMPORTANT EVENTS THAT SHAPED MY LIFE AS A MOTHER

    1. The day I let down and my toes curled and I went YEEEEEEOWCH and Evan started to drink and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and I transformed into an eminently useful mutant.
    2. The day I found those sneakers with the flames on the sides. Also: the corduroy shearling vest, and the famed paperboy hat. Revelation: little banker haircuts are not a given. Neither are velcro Spiderman shoes. Not that there’s anything wrong with velcro Spiderman shoes. Some of my best friends wear velcro Spiderman shoes.
    3. The day I figured out that Evan was making himself throw up for the pure spectacle of it, and realized that if I nonchalantly stuck a barf bowl under his chin and loudly proclaimed it to be a BARF BOWL like I couldn’t care less if his intestines came out his nose, and he looked up at me, huffed, and went back to bed.
    4. The day Liam died and I snuck a look behind the curtain of the universe.
    5. The day Ben realized that cupcakes were actually EDIBLE.
    6. The day I watched Justin tussle with his sons, and his sons were clearly winning, and I saw him loving that they were winning.
    7. The day Ben said SHIT in a context-appropriate manner.
    8. The day after Evan was born and I had my first shower, and my crotch was ground beef, and all that blood ran down my legs and I felt clean but strange, and I realized I couldn’t go back to bed and sleep, as much as I needed to, because Evan would be hungry soon. That was the first time I couldn’t rest of my own free will. And lo! I couldn’t wait for him to wake up and need me.

    I don’t mean to scorn the birthwork-inclined. They want to keep birth as serene and as natural as possible, and they do it passionately, and uphill. This is important. This is required to counter a history of c-sections prompted by imminent tee-offs.

    The problem is the flip side.

    Birth cannot be controlled. Or promised. Or unfailingly protected, or made reliably miraculous and beautiful. It can be nudged, and sheparded, and prepared-for, and supported, and informed. But sometimes, birth is just a gong show. When that happens, it is imperative that we do our best to shrug at the mechanics and hope for better luck next time.

    Because I can’t carry any more guilt. I don’t need birth idealists piling themselves upon my thoroughly buggered psyche like a well-intentioned rugby team, calling me or any other woman a warrior for delivering one way as opposed to another.

    They’ve got the best of intentions, but the wildly overstated significance some people heap onto birth in order to steer more women towards labouring self-actualization is just too heavy a weight. This weight doesn’t make everyone feel empowered and guttural. It makes some people feel anxious and pressured and damaged and unfulfilled.

    I was not a warrior in the operating room. I was a warrior in the pumping room.

    My motherhood is not defined by catastrophe. My motherhood is defined by love and magic and talking trees and waning butterflies. My motherhood is defined by how I live my life in an effort to balance the woman and the writer and the nurturer I want to be. All that and the quality of my whoopie pies.

    My motherhood is no more misshapen than anyone else’s, except for how it’s been touched by death. And so that declaration makes me want to say Come with me, right this way, into the NICU, won’t you?

    Then look at my kin and look at how fierce and how brave and how wounded they are. Tell them that the mechanics of birth will be the most important thing that shapes them as mothers. Tell them the catastrophic births of their children—their loss of control—forever marks them and renders their babies (if their babies survive) poorly-bonded basketcases.

    Does our experience of birth matter that much? Does it, really, given everything that may or may not follow that makes us into mothers?

    Is birth the everything? Or just one thing?

    Come with me. Right this way.

    +++

    My edits, below.

    Birth is one of countless important events and encounters that all mash up together to shape your perception of your life as a mother.

    Birth is one day in a life that will give you all kinds of chances to become much more than a birther. It can heal and inspire and give cause for delight and awe. It can be medicalized or marginalized. What determines one or the other is not your skill, nor the divinity of your preparation, nor your stamina, but random fortune or misfortune. In the case of the latter you’ll have to let it go and find your pride again, and trust that your kid won’t remember it. Because she won’t. Or if she does, she’ll only remember it in an unconscious kind of way such that her innermost self, which is more worldly and less delicate than we all know, says Yikes! That was a friggin’ startle. Hmph. (kid’s innermost self shrugs)

    +++

    A friend has an anonymous confessions board now and then and I read it and swear not to read it and read it and swear not to read it. It’s where people say stuff like this

    My husband wants to have kinky sex. I'm not so sure.

    and this

    I pretend to like dogs but really i can't stand them. Too sloppy and smelly. Why would anyone want to have one in theire house?

    and this

    I used to know a really spooky girl who had a twin sister who died at birth. The girl said she could communicate with her sisters spirit. All us kids were terrified of her and we wouldn't ever sit with her at lunch.

    and so I said this

    I used to know a really spooky boy who had a twin brother who died at birth. The boy said he could communicate with his brother's spirit. All us kids thought he was a goddamned superhero. He was swamped with admirers at lunch.

    I feel the same way about birth as I do about death.

    I need perspective, and adaptability, and beauty in chaos.

    So I choose it.

     

    Comment185 Comments |
    DateThursday, October 15, 2009 in ,
    Wednesday
    14Oct2009

    the dread crew meme: stories that stick

    Roald Dahl made an impression on me as a kid. His books were so compellingly black, so unafraid of weirdness and twistedness, I wondered about the mind that made them up. The good kind of wonder. If I’d ever met him, I would have found something to hide behind. And he would have waggled his eyebrows at me. He would have moved elsewhere in the room. And I would have moved from behind a large plant to behind the buffet to behind the fat man with the tuba in order to be close to him in case he waggled his eyebrows at me again.

    Starting today at my other blog, share the stories and characters that have moved you.

    On Halloween night, I'll randomly choose five participants to receive their own signed copy of The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods a few days before it hits stores. Go check out the questions. My answer to the first one?

    James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series for naughty backrubs, Phillip Pullman’s subtle knife for passage into alternate worlds and Willy Wonka’s glass elevator for transportation. As long as I can get it customized to accommodate a heart-shaped jacuzzi and a mirrored ceiling.

    C'mon. Play along.

     

    Comments Off |
    DateWednesday, October 14, 2009 in
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