Home Sweet Home

Fraterfamilias interviews

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:36:13 GMT

Nikki Leigh, who runs a book promotion site, has generously agreed to host "Fraterfamilias" on some of her blogs. These interviews are all focused on characters from the book:

Share Your Hero

My Best Friend's Story

It's All in the Setting

Bad Guys & Villains

Paula Stiles (other half of Peter Ferrer)

Fraterfamilias

Review at GUD and Fraterfamilias up on Fictionwise

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:08:59 GMT

Fraterfamilias was reviewed at GUD on the 24th.

The book is also now up on Fictionwise.

Paula Stiles (other half of Peter Ferrer)
http://www.geocities.com/rpcv.geo/other.html

Sad News

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:19:21 GMT

Judith Doloughan, author of this blog, my friend and cowriter of our book, "Fraterfamilias", died on June 5 after a long illness. She was 63. She left behind a number of projects which I will finish/revise/develop for her.

Our publisher, Virtual Tales, has included an obituary and tribute on their blog. This includes a discount on our book until June 28, if anyone is interested. Proceeds from the sale will go to charity:

http://virtualtales.blogspot.com/2007/06/author-judith-doloughan-dies-finishes.html

I will keep this blog up and maintain by answering any replies people make to posts and posting announcements when more of Judith's work comes out. Please keep her in your prayers.

Paula

Finally...

Mon, 14 May 2007 06:18:10 GMT

To save you all the chore of wondering what that means, I'll just lay it out. At last, our book, Fraterfamilias, was declared "finished" by the editor and it is now available as a complete novel instead of in chunks. This means that anyone interested in buying it can have it complete by going to the site here:

http://www.virtualtales.com/StoryProducts~g~7~tn~Fraterfamilias.html

It has been given to a reviewer who will take the next two weeks to read it, after which you'll be able to read the review. I'll include a link when it comes out. Don't forget that you can include your own review at other sites that sell the book, such as Mobipocket and Diesel eBooks:

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/BookDetails.asp?BookID=53953

http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/item/parent-9780978255077/Fraterfamilias-eBook.html

After all, having your own opinion is always so much fun. There is also a message board at Virtual Tales, which is available for anyone to post:

http://virtualtales.yuku.com/forums/59/t/FraterFamilias.html

Thanks to everyone who's already purchased the novel or has expressed pleasure in its reading.

Judith

It's been a while

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 02:26:25 GMT

I’m bored. Anyone who has lived in a bed for a year is going to be bored. Oh,I’ve written a book,it’s true. A year is plenty of time to write a book. Now I have to send it out to a publisher which is a numbing task. I’d forgotten about how numbing. If you’ve ever thought about it yourself, you can look forward to possibly four or five years. You read correctly. Four or five years.

If you have a name, it changes things. Your book sits in a slush pile waiting for someone to get around to reading it.That’s about four months. If they don’t like it, they will send it back. You send it out again and wait again. This process can be repeated several times. Perhaps you will make changes but quite often, their comment is simply that it isn’t what they’re looking for. Endings are frequently a problem. If you are embroiled in this process, try reworking your ending and resubmit.

That’s for novels, of course. Short stories are another matter. The market for short stories is very poor unless you are writing genre stories — science fiction, mystery, romance — since there are magazines dedicated to those styles. In that case, the turn-around time isn’t significantly different from that of the novel, although it is somewhat shorter and it is cheaper to send out. When you get it back, just send it out again and again and again. if the editor has suggestions, pay attention to them and be prompt about it. Usually, this means they will buy it if you make the suggested changes.

I still have some ideas about being a science fiction short story writer. That was my original idea ever since I first got hooked on science fiction. It was my first love since the age of thirteen. That year, I read Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles Now it’s outdated but it still has a magical quality. There are books that change your life and this was one such. I suppose there are movies that do the same thing, though it hasn’t happened to me.

Follow your Bliss. That is Joseph Campbell’s advice, Follow what turns your crank, what does it for you, what keeps you up at night and makes your day one of waiting to get back to whatever it is that drives you. If you’re lucky, what fills your days is what fills your heart.How do you decide what your bliss is? I have no idea. I know my bliss is writing and I’ve known it for years. Many people believe that writing is their bliss but it might not be so. If you thnk it is, try writing a blog page. When I first began to think about what became Solitude, it was something called Archive. I envisioned a culture in which it is believed that everyone should write his own life history, which life history was kept in an archive. I think that writing one’s life history is important but one should not expect to have that autobiography published. It becomes a personal record that quickly becomes a treasured record of a revered ancestor.

That’s the urge to write. Don’t expect to get published. That’s something different. Bliss is something else. It’s what makes you happy.

Digging for Worms and Other Things

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 17:55:04 GMT

The other day, I was thinking about things I did as a child. When I was ten, we lived on a new street that had only four houses on it. Now it’s a tract of houses put up for workers at Ford auto plant. So I’m told. We had two acres of land each; the rest of it was farm land still. Field tomatoes. I remember going over to speak to the lady who was picking them by hand and ended up helping her. She gave me a five quart basket of tomatoes which I gave to my mother who ignored it unttil they were going bad and then tossed them in the garbage. It was typical of my mother. I spent a lot of time in therapy thanks to her.

I used to escape from her by going to the end of our property and down into the gravel pit you could get to from there. There were fruit trees in the gravel pit, it had been abandoned for so long. Lots of plums and peaches and apples. I used to fill up on them and not bother to take any home. From the end of the lot, you could turn left and walk a long way through the fields which were inhabited by rabbits and groundhogs. The groundhog holes were the bane of the farmer’s existence and my uncle used to hunt them. I went with him on his hunts and when we got back home, I would skin them for my uncle who could shoot animals but nott skin tthem. I couldn’t shoot them but once they were dead, i had no trouble with skinning them.

I was older then, though. Back when I was ten, I could disappear for the whole day with no difficulties. I used to walk through the groundhog fields (hay was harvested) to where the woods began. There was a little stream that went through the woods and i spend endless hours watching the critters in the stream, the water striders and things that swam. If I’d known them what I knew later, I would have brought some samples of water home and looked at them under a microscope. Later, when i took biology in university, I did know about the underwater critters, one-celled wonders, vorticella that spin, for example.

I found two trees that were bifurcated and laid downed branches one to the other, covered them with leaves and made a lean-to out of them, with leaves to sit on. Later, I brought books to read in my fort. Needing to get away from my mother fuelled many trips to the woods.

Up at the top of the road was a reservoir. The house there was occupied by an English couple. Mr. Brown was hired to watch over the reservoir. It was a lovely house covered in ivy. They had a boy my age. I have forgotten his name at long last, after being able to remember it for the best part of fifty years now. We hung out together. About this time and earlier, we had friends named John and Jean Naylor. They had a son as well. Joe Naylor, although he told me that John was his step-father and his real name was Joe Brandwein. He went to Queens University later in life and I think he taught physics, although I may be wrong.

I had a crush on Joe from the time I was eight. I still had a crush when I was eighteen. It was a sad story. I got a phone call from him one day saying he was going to be in Londodn and could he look me up. I, of course, was thrilled. As the appointed time came, I was ready in my best dress, make-up on, the whole nine yards. He never came and I never heard from him again. It hurt for a very long time. Never do that, ever, you who read this. Go at the appointed time or call. Never just not show up.

Those were the good years. When I got older, I couldn’t just no show up. From the age of twelve when I had to show up after school to let the babysitter go home and cook the dinner, life get steadily worse.

I was wondering whether to write this or not but why not? It’s a fact. I got a family tree this week, the family tree of my grandmother’s family, the Fergusons. It shows them from the year 1830 when my great, great grandfather was born. It says he was a woodworker. My other great great grandfather was a toolmaker but there was no birth year. My grandmother was the eldest daughter of the ten children of Josh Ferguson and my family has five children, me, Robert, Leslie, Hilary and Alison in order of age. I am in regular contact with William Lindsay who is my grandmother’s nephew, whatever that makes me.

I have always loved Christmas, no matter the circumstances. I remember Christmases when I was little very fondly. We had a real, if small tree and it had little candle holders made of tin that clipped onto the branches and held little candles which we actually lit, for heaven’s sake! We’d be terrified of doing that now, even with artificial trees. How the times have changed. But we’d survived the war; we could survive lighting candles on the Christmas tree. i loved the ornaments which also survived from year to year. i remember a bird ornament with a long tail. There were other decorations that i remember, particularly a picture on stiff card of a sleigh with people in Victorian dress on it and the whole was sprinkled with sparkles. I loved it.

We had our presents put on the foot of the bed so that we two children could open them without disturbing the adults. i had asked Father Christmas for a cradle for my dolly and there it was! The doll always had knitted doll clothes. i have the doll still but the eyes need replacing. We always had handknitted sweaters (jumpers) and socks. Everyone knitted in those days and I have knitted loads of sweaters and a pile of socks for various people. It’s a very worthwhile skill. We children didn’t appreciate the fairisle sweaters and cardigans.

We were allowed a sip of sherry at Christmas dinner. We also had a whole roast chicken, this at a time when you could hardly have found one in a butcher’s shop. Ours, I think, came from Auntie Dolly’s little flock from the bottom of the garden in Sevenoaks. I loved the stuffing, as who does not? Mashed potatoes and lots of gravy. It’s not possible to have Christmas without gaining a couple of pounds. The Christmas that i was pregnant, i ate like a horse and then starved myself so that the net loss of one pound was duly noted by the doctor. He proclaimed me his prize patient that year and she was born in March. He said that his mothers never gained more than twenty pounds. He wasn’t kidding.

As an aside, i have finished my SF novel ‘Solitude’. I’m proofreading it now before I send it to a publisher. I have one in mind at the moment. But it’s long, which is a problem for publishers. Our other novel, Fraterfamilias, is in serial form, although we didn’t write it that way. The editing is being done at a snail’s pace and it’s annoying us. i’ve complained to the boss about it and he’s promising to try to speed things up. Not our fault. We finished it a couple of years ago.

I’m sure you’ll all like Solitude. A spaceship is forced to land on a planet that they name Solitude. It’s a desert planet and is inhabited by a gentle folk who are telepaths. They need food and water and first contact is the only option they have of getting what they need. The spaceship is from a planet called Omana and is a planet of humans who went there during the Great Migrations twenty thousand years earlier. Omana is under the yoke of a Patriarch who is the head of Gennacorp, the ruling Company. They are fighting a guerilla group for control of the Outer Planets. Anyway, it’s a good yarn. I hope the publisher likes it.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual back in the hospice. Take care and a very merry Christmas to you all.

Judith

Finding Peter Gzowski

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:15:46 GMT

I wrote this a few years ago now. I'd been watching the Olympic hockey game in 2002 in a bar. Peter Gzowski had died and his memory was right there in fromt of us. He would have liked that we won gold.

And I no longer live in Dartmouth, NS. I escaped and now live in Vancouver again. This place i love.

***********

Like so many others, I was not born in Canada. I was born in the picturesque, thousand-year-old town of Salisbury, in the southern English county of Wiltshire. It has a magnificent Gothic cathedral whose spire is -- was – falling down. Perhaps they have fixed it now. And is not far from Stonehenge. It used to be called New Sarum, so I’m told, and was built next to Old Sarum, which had been inhabited since the days of the builders of Stonehenge. It is old, if anything is.

But I have never really been there. I was not raised by my mother but was taken in at the ripe old age of ten days by foster parents, living in Sevenoaks in Kent. It was wartime and such things were not uncommon. Sevenoaks is in what was known as ‘bomb alley’, the route of the rocket bombs launched in Holland, with the anti-aircraft guns pounding away at all hours to try to knock them out of the skies before they fell on London. Apparently, it was all right if they fell on us.

Needless to say, I was a nervous child. I chewed the ends of my pigtails and sucked my handkerchief when no one was looking. Until I left England, at the age of eight, we lived on rationing. They say it was severe and I suppose that an allotment of one ounce of sugar per person per week counts as ‘severe’. It was the only system I had ever known and if I was deprived of the necessities of life, I was blissfully unaware of it, having, it seemed to me, everything I needed, a family, a brother, a dad who carried me on his shoulders and wonderful Christmases. How is that deprivation? No-one thought to explain to me either what a ration was or the need of it; it was a way of life and the only one I had ever known. I did at least know that everyone was required to have them; there were no special cases that I knew of. If I was deprived, so was everyone else and it was not noticeable. The grown-ups never spoke of such things within earshot of children and I am inclined now to think that there is merit in such a system.

Some time after the war, perhaps in 1948, we moved to Wythenshawe, a suburb of the great Industrial Revolution city of Manchester, with its ship canal that had been the aorta of Britain for the export of woollen goods from the ‘dark, Satanic mills’. What did I know of all that? To me, Manchester meant Manchester United football team, having a red and white muffler, filling in the football pools for Pop, since we two children had as much chance of being right as anyone, being within driving distance of the Blackpool Illuminations, walks along country lanes every Sunday after church, being forbidden to play in the rhododendron bushes because of the black, oily streaks that resulted from touching the dark leaves, Father Christmas at Lewis’s Department Store – and at several other big stores as well, of course, which was how I determined that, lovable as he was, Father Christmas was a fake -- and a field for playing Cowboys and Indians behind the ‘semi-detached’ house.

We lived with the sight of bombed buildings. I thought nothing of them; they were simply there, the way of things, as ‘normal’ as sharing one can of Spam between five people and thinking ourselves well off for a lump of coal for the fireplace instead of the usual peat. There were trips to the zoo, with its wonderful elephants. There were rides for the children in a wooden seat high on the elephant’s back. One of the best-cherished childhood delights was feeding Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts, one at a time, to the huge beasts, holding the treat carefully between childish fingers while the two-ton giant took it with exceeding delicacy by the prehensile ‘lips’ of the end of its trunk, its touch warm, soft and gentle. I have loved the great behemoths to this day. I actually remember nothing else about the zoo, but it is enough.

Discovering Peter Gzowski

I look out the window of my tenth-floor apartment in beautiful downtown Dartmouth and I hate the place.

It is not the first time in my life that the place I was living in has engendered that uncertain, vaguely distressing sense of not-belonging, but that is another story. I am a Vancouverite, although it took me nearly fifty years to know that about myself. And I have been just about everywhere on the northern half of the continent of North America, not to mention across it by air, train and car, and around it by water. Which makes me a little odd.

I have not seen it all, not by a long shot, but I have seen more of it than most, ‘been there done that’ more often than many and lived to tell about it. Peter Gzowski died last month and it struck me that I was one of a tiny minority of Canadians who never listened to “Morningside”, his long-running CBC morning radio show. That oversight is possibly due to the simple fact that I have not owned a radio in over twenty years, although I am not sure why that should be. Years ago, I put it on my mental list of things to buy before the next Ice Age and it is still there. For some reason, I know his voice for all that; he has seeped into my marrow anyway. I have tried to make amends to Peter’s memory by reading his books and finding out what that phenomenon was — is — all about. As far as I can see, and from what I heard on the programs on CBC television after his death, he was like a bootlace that kept us all together, tied the sides of this sixty-eight hundred-kilometre-wide boot — or hockey skate, or mukluk – together. I never knew him and I miss him anyway. We humans are funny like that.

I watched the memorial special that celebrated his achievements and they were all there. Peter Mansbridge kicked it off, the Bare Naked Ladies sang for us, Vicky Gabereau read some letters, Susan Aglukark sang “O, Canada” and Graham Greene was a face in the audience. I think I saw Dame Judy Dench; I hope I did. I like Dame Judy; I should like to think that she likes us.

”Us”. I have not always been able to say that. I have always lacked a sense of family but I realized something that night. My family was right there, in an auditorium at the University of Toronto, talking about one of our own. “Our own.” My, that sounds nice.

I was not born here. I was born in England and came here as a child, brought here with no say in the matter, brought into a strange place with strange sounds and strange children. I was lonely, lost and miserable and I hated it. It has taken fifty years for this land to work its brutal magic, wooing me not with promises but with challenges, not with comfortable softness but with harsh, forbidding and gorgeous reality. I resisted for half a century. The siren song of this country is patient and inexorable. It needs to be; it is tough love.

And now the circle is complete. Yesterday, February 24, 2002, when the Canadian men’s hockey team won the gold after a fifty-year odyssey of its own, when I counted out the last seconds of the third period along with everyone else in a Halifax bar, whooping and hollering like a five-star maniac, madly waving the little maple leaf flag I got at Canada Day celebrations last year, I could no longer pretend that I was not a Canadian. I conceded defeat. I was home.

On the national news, Ben Chin couldn’t keep a straight face, Ian Hanomansing showed us the revellers on Robson Street in Vancouver and, from Kandahar, Afghanistan, we saw Canadian soldiers leaping about for sheer joy. In Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, the jubilant crowds were splashed with red and white. And I was proud. Fifty years ago, in 1952, the Edmonton Mercurys won the last gold medal and a scrawny waif with big, blue, Irish eyes, pigtails and a lost look got off an immigrant ship. Today, the gold medal and I are both home. Yesterday, I saw the look on Wayne Gretzky’s face, the clear message that, wherever he is, he is ‘one of us’. I am ‘one of us’ and it is a good feeling.

Think I’m gonna to buy me a Roots hat.

Judith

Where Do Old Hurricanes Go?

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 03:47:53 GMT

I first wrote this with no audience in mind. Hurricane Juan struck Dartmouth/Halifax, Nova Scotia on September 27/28, 2003. It had been a beautiful summer and we weren't ready for it to end but it did, with a bang.

You'll have to keeep that in mind. I'm not going to go through and change the times or references. I don't live there any more, having come home the following March 1, right after White Juan, which is what people named the wworst blizzard in a century the following February. No more, no more.

****************************************

Friday ... [surfacing and spitting out debris]

Wow. Got smacked upside the head for that little piece of cheek!

Hurricane Juan made landfall two miles from my cosy little tower sometime after 11pm Sunday evening. I was on the phone to Paula at the time because I'd already lost internet connection. I got as far as holding the phone up to the window for her to hear the screaming of the wind so she could say, Yup, that's a hurricane... And that's about when I lost the connection. And the lights.

I think it's the noise, ya know? We are situated about two hundred FEET from the harbour. I was officially in the mandatory evacuation zone but the building was exempted. The storm surge pushed boulders over the boardwalk, chewed the boardwalk to ratshit, smashed right through my favourite coffee shop, washed out the rail bed, overturned some rail cars… all sorts of fun stuff. I took a stroll around there a couple of days later and found the edge of the surge —a thick line of seaweed and styrofoam and broken wood, and God knows what all along the railway track—and past it in some spots—about a hundred feet from our front door.

The most noticeable damage is the thousands of trees that got pushed over or just plain snapped off—all facing pretty much the same direction—hauled out by the roots. Everywhere you look, there are huge trees down, their root balls sometimes more than a head high (gives new meaning to the term 'balls up'!). There are too many of them down to get them all cleared away by the time winter sets in, even with the army in here helping, so they'll probably be there reminding us of the mess all winter. The buildings weren't too badly damaged; the buildings have to be fairly solidly constructed to withstand the winter storms off the North Atlantic, but there is an awful lot of aluminum siding and styrofoam insulation and roofing material in with the branches and tons of shredded leaves all over everywhere. Someone described it as looking as though someone shook oregano all over the place. Mostly there are snapped-off telephone poles here and there and the lines were down everywhere. The lovely park next door to us lost half its trees, big sixty-foot pines. I took a few piccies. The beautiful Public Gardens in downtown Halifax were devastated. {As it turned out, some seventy thousand trees came down all told

The big thing was getting the power back up. My little piece of the power grid is the same one that has the harbour control and hurricane centre on it, ergo we got priority and were up in almost exactly 24 hours. Until then, it meant I was trapped on the tenth floor because, without the elevators, even though my knees might have withstood climbing down ten flights of stairs in pitch dark, they would never have got me back up. And there was nothing open, of course. They wanted everybody to stay in because of all the live power lines down all over the place. Many people are still without power.

You have to admire the stoic attitudes of the locals, though. They interviewed some fishermen who watched their livelihoods disappear in the space of minutes and the usual reply was something like, Ayuh, muh boat sunk. Oh, and for those of you who don't think that getting out to vote is worth the bother, this is one for the books: The province of Prince Edward Island (PEI — think 'Anne of Green Gables') which was nearly as badly hit as we were, went ahead with its provincial election, with the polls opening six hours after the storm passed. The chief returning officer had to hack his way out of his driveway with a chain saw and they voted and counted by candlelight and kerosene lamp—and the turnout was 78%. Of course, we still mark one piece of paper with an X and stuff it in a box, which helps.

As for me, there wasn't a lot to see. I looked out the window but the air was too full of flying water, I suppose, and there were no lights, of course. A lot of lightning and noise. Something in the ventilation shaft of the building was banging like crazy. I think the only uncomfy moment was when I could feel the whole building sway. The winds were clocked at 93 mph with gusts up to 128 mph. That'll do it! Other than that, I saw no point in just sitting there in the dark. After the eye passed&mdash:a very eery experience— just curled up and slept like a baby. I had a bowl of cooked rice in the fridge and some cooked meat. That and some salmon and canned peas kept me quite happy. And enough cat food, of course. That would have been a disaster. Late Monday night, I heard laughing down the hall and went to join three other ladies who were getting pretty bored, as I was. They'd been experimenting with making toast with a butane lighter! (Didn't work but was good for amusement after the beer was all gone.)

It's been a very boring week but I got a lot of writing done. I ran up a horrible phone bill calling Paula every night for a good giggle and to read her the latest chunk. Thank God the net is back up!

The only downside for me is that the art show I was going to have some drawings in got -- um -- 'cancelled': the gallery was in the same building as my coffee shop and the storm surge threw boulders through the windows and washed the place out. They're still squeegeeing out the salt mud and debris. They had a little bobcat out to move the rocks back to the breakwater where they came from.

Using a hurricane as a reason for not returning somebody's email or not paying a bill seems so much like a shaggy dog story, too. Everybody is saying it's almost embarrassing, right up there with the old tiger that jumped out of the bushes and ate your homework... but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Judith

Sevenoaks and Chickens

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 02:41:11 GMT

I have always liked chickens. They take me back to my earliest years. The place I lived when I was the tiniest baby until I was about four was Sevenoaks in Kent south of London. I have no illusions that the place has changed beyond recognition in the sixty years since then. I’d rather not know how much.

We lived at number 20 Hillingdon Avenue in a row house. There were swings close by, going by how often I was photographed sitting on them and scowling. They houses were cinder block consctruction and there was a garden at the back. That was where the chickens were kept. I don’t know for certain but I’m guessing, its being wartime, that people were encouraged to raise as much of their own food as possible.

I don’t remember what was grown in the garden, just that we had chickens and i loved eggs. The eggs were a wonderful, creamy yellow goodness in a great package and if the chickens laid one and I found it, it was mine. I remember once being so excited that I was running up the garden path, tripped and fell and, inevitably, the egg broke. I was very upset, mostly because I thought I would be in trouble for breaking the egg than going without my breakfast.

A lot of people lived in that house. I realized that much later, of course. There was Grandad, a grand old man in his eighties who had earned his living as a hurdle maker. I have no idea what that was or the need for them and if anyone can tell me I’d be grateful. There are several photos of me and Grandad. I do remember that I loved him. He died shortly after the end of the war and we always went to put flowers on his grave. He was much loved.

Then there was Auntie Dolly and her husband Russell Knight and Auntie Dolly’s two teenaged daughters, Gillian and Aileen. Then there was my godmother, who was Dolly’s sister, her daughter, Joan. Just as the war ended, we also had Joan’s son, Michael (my foster brother) and Pop, Michael’s father who was demobbed in 1945. And then there was me. For a grand total of ten people. It was wartime and there was no building going on. People were living with relatives if they’d survived being bombed out.

Me. My mother was not married to my father, which happens a lot in wartime. My mother and my uncle, Laurie, turned up on the doorstep if 20 Hillingdon Avenue with me, wrapped in a blanket. I was ten days old. Nan took me in and became my godmother.

There were two train stations, Tub’s Hill and Bat and Ball. One of them, I think it’s Bat and Ball, still exists. Sevenoaks is — and has been for hundreds of years — the seat of Knoll House. It’s one of the great houses of England and is so old that the first renovations were done by the Tudors.

We often walked to the gate of Knoll House, either to go in and have a picnic on the grounds or to visit someone whose name I have forgotten. They lived in a coach house right beside the gate. I was intrigued because the doorway was down. You had to step down to get inside. I can see in my mind’s eye even now, the horses and the coaches, hear the sounds of the horses’ feet clop-clopping on the cobblestones. I don’t suppose it’s still cobbled but sixty years ago, they were still there. They hurt my small feet to walk on them.

There are red deer in the park, descended from the original herd which provided the gentry with hunting sport. They aren’t hunted now, of course. Back then, no doubt, there were plenty of rabbits running about the town. The blackberry vines were enough to guarantee that. At our house, the blackberries began just the other side of the chicken coop. The land fell right off back there and nobody was arguing with the blackberries about who owned it.
Waking up to the call of the rooster was good for me, I’m convinced. I still love the sound of the rooster.

Judith

Whar's it All About?

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:27:29 GMT

Something a little different today. This is an introduction to a book I've written on How to Write Fiction. I've tried to sell it but the answers were always that I didn't have a name they could market.

#####################

I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

– Stephen King; On Writing

To Write or Not to Write?

Why does one write? I can imagine a host of answers but the one that fits me, and I am the only one I can answer for, is that I must. It's what I am; it's what I was created to do. It's what gets me out of bed in the morning and keeps me up at night. Many people have written on the art of writing, both good writers and bad. The consensus is that it is a need, a drive, an urge that must be obeyed or we are unhappy. If you are uncertain whether you are a writer, think how you would feel if you were to give up the notion forever. That should do it.

And if you are a writer, you probably know what it is you want to write. Or think you do. You have probably tried your hand at something or other by now, perhaps a poem or a diary, or perhaps you enjoy writing letters, a noble and dying art. However the Muse stings your hide, be assured that it is the real thing, for anything which whispers in your ear in the middle of the night, disturbs your dreams or otherwise coaxes your thoughts ever back to itself has undeniable reality. And if you ignore it, it will not go away, for it is your inner self rapping for attention and it will not be denied; if you would be happy in your life, obey it.

Trust your inner consciousness to know what it wants and to be right in that; you're just along for the ride. The still, small voice is that call to be yourself, to be what you were created to be and not to be afraid of that, though there be dragons lying in wait. We have been taught to be timid, to mistrust our instincts and ignore the inner voice as false and fantastical. Everyone has something to say and writing is the instrument both of self discovery and of the expression of that awakened self. All art is the expression of that elusive internal self; all creation is an act of bravery. Those who create are the life blood of the race. If you are a writer, count yourself among the blessed and get on with it.

And while everyone has something to say, and perhaps everyone does have a book in him or her, it does not mean to say that everyone is capable of writing that book. If you approach your writing from the outset with the idea that your goal is to become rich and famous à la Stephen King, you are extremely likely to be disappointed. On the other hand, if you have decided that you shouldn't write a word because you have no hope of becoming rich and famous, you are cheating yourself of one of the finer things that you can do with your life, which is to leave behind you a personal record, an archive, however well or poorly written. Never discount the value of leaving behind something real of yourself. Just think how valuable anything written by your great-grandmother is, even though it talked only of how she spent her afternoons. The danger is in thinking only in the short term, one of the many illnesses of Western civilization. No matter how long you inhabit the planet, your writing will live after you and be valued for as long as it exists, even if only by your descendants. You will become a revered ancestor.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it… A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the year book of a school for exceptional children than writing novels.

– Ernest Hemingway

Never write for the market; write for yourself. If you believe in your story, that is what keeps you going. It is an act of faith to sit down at that computer without a map of where the story is going and that's when the creativity flows. It is common to pick up a book on writing which begins with tips on getting published, managing rejection and getting that salable idea, which is to put the cart before the horse. If your emphasis is on what is salable, what is marketable and what is not, then you are not a writer. A writer must write. Anything well-written is, in theory, salable. Concentrate first on learning to write well; the rest will follow.

The more I write to please myself, the more likelihood there is that I'll please other people in the process… The business of writing a novel becomes less of a source of anxiety and more a source of pleasure if we learn to concern ourselves with the writing process and less with the presumptive end product...

– Lawrence Block, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit

First you must decide that this is who you are, not just something you do for a lark. Do not dabble. Ever. If you expect a reader to take you seriously, you have to have respect for yourself and what you are trying to do. Once you have come to believe it— no mean feat — the rest will come. You will make time, you will find that special place into which the Muse will venture boldly and not like a frightened deer that must be coaxed, minute by tedious minute. And you will learn how to be alone, for that is the state of the writer. Learn to love it. Which is not to say that you should not be a weekend writer, only that, whatever you write, take yourself seriously. If you don't believe in what you're doing, no-one else will believe in it either because that disrespect for yourself will communicate itself to the reader. It is not possible to fake it.

And write every single day. Stephen King told an interviewer that he took Christmas Day off but then admitted that he fibbed about it; he didn't want to look pathetic! If you only produce fifty usable words, it still keeps the story in your mind, the characters and their voices in your head and this is very important. If you must leave it for a while, you will find that you must re-read everything to reclaim the feel of it. Leave it long enough and you will lose that feel for good. At the very least, all your plans for your character may well have been forgotten.

Talent is an issue, but it is not everything; the urge to tell the story is. The form of the story does not matter to begin with. It will let you know how it wants to be written. Discipline is a central issue. If you can't get yourself seated in that chair, for all your brave thoughts and New Year's resolutions to Do It, it will not happen. Someone said that genius was largely the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Believe it. Hemingway once wrote that getting caught up in the swamp of everyday life was merely a form of quitting.

Talent is very difficult to define in any art form. We know it exists; we know some people have it and others are devoid of it. Almost everyone has some talent for something. I may be a fine carpenter while understanding nothing of growing flowers. This is the easily recognized diversity of the human mind. When we speak of someone's being 'talented', it is often without thinking about what that means. It is not enough to be prolific to be talented, or voluble or charismatic with fans. Popularity is no gauge of real talent beyond the modest amount required to accomplish the task in acceptable fashion. Talent may be the ability to see things in ways no-one has ever seen them before; talent has a lot to do with understanding what works and what does not. Sculptors understand this best of all artists since it is essential to know exactly how much stone needs to be chiselled away — and no more. It is an indefinable quantity that shows only in the end product — or not.

Someone has said that great artists are all born with talent but that not one of them was born knowing how to do it. Good writing, like good painting or musical expression must be taught and is perfected only through practice. In her excellent book on learning to draw, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards emphasizes her fundamental belief that everyone can be taught to draw, and draw well, that it is a matter of learning the techniques. The idea is sound; the techniques of good writing can also be taught. Even if you never become a literary sensation, you can learn the techniques well enough that whatever you write will be acceptable to all who read it. Beyond that, it is up to you and how faithfully you pay heed to the still, small voice. Talent may be what makes you great; technique is what will get you published.

The other thing you must do is educate yourself. Learn everything you have time to learn. All those chintzy little courses you took in college because you needed three extra credits or that soul-destroying job you took to pay the rent could turn out to be a goldmine. The more you know, the more you will understand of the human condition and that is the only subject in town. That's the game, the whole ball of wax. There is nothing else to write about simply because nothing else exists.

A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not… They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from.

– Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

What is the best early training for a writer? An unhappy childhood.

– Ernest Hemingway

This above all else: Do not expect to get it right the first time. Or the second, or the sixth. It is done when it is done and not before. If you can get this etched into the grey matter, you will almost never suffer from writer's block or from the tyranny of the blank page. And when you are stuck for what happens next or what to say next and feel like chucking it because you are never, ever going to get it right, remember that writing is hard. Take a bath, go to a movie, make love, fill your face, whatever it takes to make you happy and trust that your subconscious is working on it because that's what it does. Writing is not something that only happens when you are sitting in front of the computer or staring at a sheet of foolscap, clicking your teeth with a pencil and wondering what to have for dinner. If a writer is what you truly are, it is happening all the time and you must keep a notebook handy because the best ideas tend to burst into the conscious mind when you are in the bath or sitting on the pot or standing in the check-out line, any time your mind is relaxed and distracted.

As a beginning writer, you are inevitably going to make errors. We all make them. In fact, we all make much the same ones. They're fixable. Once you see the problem — and after you've finished slapping yourself on the forehead for it — you won't do it again. Eventually, you won't be a beginning writer any more and you can snicker yourself silly when you recognize the same blunders in others. It's perversely satisfying.

Try not to think of yourself as a writer, however; learn to think of yourself first and foremost as a storyteller and this applies to the writing of fiction and non-fiction alike. It keeps things in perspective. Story is what it's all about, story first, foremost and all there is. We tell each other stories all the time, whether it be a conversation, a letter or a chat with the hairdresser. Story is how we bond to each other, make friends and keep them, create our own identities as members of the human race. All forms of communication involving language are story.

In his fine book on screenwriting, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee says that, rather than being a form of escape from reality, story is what leads us down the road in our search for reality.

Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living… Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life?… Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience. In the words of playwright Jean Anouilh, "Fiction gives life its form"… To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist's responsibility. Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

– Robert McKee

In a television interview, British author Terry Pratchett said that when we look into the unknown and are frightened by it, story tells us that we are not alone in our fear. Story talks about what it might be like out there and, in sharing that story with another human being, we are both comforted.

But the art of the story is in decline. If the content of the story is not thoughtful, careful and accurate, the wrong things are learned, inappropriate attitudes are fostered and the damage is often well nigh irreversible. So long as we see literature — and well-written non-fiction has a strong element of the literary — as having no more than entertainment value, there is no compelling reason for accuracy, either of fact or of thought, no reason to use it to call attention to social ills or avoid unrealistic, fantastical, even silly themes. If the trend continues unchallenged, it will be the death of literature, both printed and visual, and art will be seen as valueless other than as set decoration to existence, art meaning all creative endeavour.

Television and cinema are visual literature, since they begin with the written word, the script. That most of it is pulp and pap is the fault of those who see it as purely entertainment, a medium for marketplace exploitation aimed at the mythical youth demographic and the message of that medium has suffered severely for it. Aristotle must be rolling in his grave. Yet it is also the fault of those who indulge in it, gobble it up like so much junk food for the mind, uncritically, never demanding anything better. Our educational systems have let us down by not teaching us what consitutes good literature, by no longer teaching us the essentials of language and culture, by not implanting shit detectors in each and every one of us. Hardly anyone knows any more what good writing looks like.

The purpose of story is the shedding of light on truth.

For although an artist may, in his private life, lie to others, even to himself, when he creates he tells the truth; and in a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
– Robert McKee

Nevertheless, as Mr. McKee says in his book, watching every movie ever made will not train you to write a script. Reading every novel ever written does not qualify you to write one, either. And watching television does not qualify you for anything other than the Golden Couch Potato Award. I have seen stories that were written exactly as if the writer had watched a great deal of television but never opened a book. There is next to no character development, no attention at all to point of view, the text consists almost entirely of cliché dialogue and the action is badly-written exposition that wouldn't excite a nervous pigeon. Before you can do it, you have to learn how it's done. If you are not willing to put yourself through that process — and then practise — pu down now. As Stephen King suggests, go and wash the car, make youself useful, because you will never be a writer.

On the other side of the coin, if you have never read a novel, you haven't a hope of producing one. And no, short stories are not short novels and are absolutely as difficult to write well. They just don't take as much time. And short story writers and novelists are two different animals; if you are truly drawn to the one medium rather than the other, stay with your choice. If, like almost all writers, you started writing by trying to write a short story, it doesn't mean that you should not try something longer as well. We walk before we can run. If you find your short stories wanting to grow, then let them. Never try to limit what is happening in your head; that way lies disaster, no matter what you're attempting.

All literature, including the spoken word, is story. All the rules apply, whether what you write is a poem, a play, a short story or a novel, fiction or non-fiction. Who is it for? Every personal record ever written – past, present and future – paints the human picture in fine detail, for we must have bards to sing our songs, to tell our story and say how we passed this way. And to say that we are just like you, you who read our story a thousand years from now.

Literary talent is not enough. If you cannot tell a story, all those beautiful images and subtleties of dialogue that you spent months and months perfecting are not worth the paper they're written on. What we create for the world, what it demands of us, is story. Now and forever.

– Robert McKee

The image of the Roman arena distills the artistic process into one, vivid metaphor. The artist, the performer, the writer, anyone who does anything which thrusts him into the public eye, is out there on the sand, sword in hand, fighting for his continued existence, for the right to go on being what he was created to be in full view of everyone. But the crowd is a fickle suitor; it adores its darlings of the moment, screaming their praises and showering them with gifts but it is ever watchful for every flaw, ever vigilant for that crack in the armour that serves as proof that the hero is not a god but a human being, just like everyone else. But the crowd does not forgive; it will consider itself deceived and turn its thumbs down. Never write for the crowd. If you are determined to write, write for youself, write because you must. Write because it is who you are.

Respect. Respect your readers, respect your characters, both real and fictional, and respect yourself.

It is all about respect.
It is all about telling the truth.
It is all about love.

What Do You Want to Write About?

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

– Ernest Hemingway

What are you going to write? What you write and how you write it is determined to a large extent by your audience. Family, friends, a newspaper, a magazine, a book, the internet — it matters who is going to read it. You will write very differently on exactly the same subject for Aunt Martha from the way you would write for an anonymous member of the crowd and we have all experienced having to write for the teacher. Consider what you want to talk about and then give some thought to the form in which you wish to express the ideas, and consider them all. Perhaps Grandma's story is best done as a biography, if her whole life was unusual and of interest outside the family, or perhaps some particular story from her life is best told by itself. Should it be biographical narrative or could it be explored as a short story, a poem, or even something long? And consider that the story of any member of the family, including yourself, however it is written, will stand as a part of the family archive, something to be treasured by future generations. This is an immensely powerful reason for writing. It is completely valid to write for the sake of doing it without thought of finding a publisher. If you see it that way, then it is entirely possible that the freedom it gives you as you write, the peace of mind, will make your writing much truer, even much better and what better gift can you give your descendants than a record of a life?

The usual wisdom is to write what you know, which is to state the case with such simplicity as to border on the silly. That is usually interpreted to mean, What is your personal experience? Which is fine. The failure, for beginning writers, is to think that they have so little experience that there is nothing worth writing about. My friend and I both find this rather amusing: she was in Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer and I have lived and worked in the Canadian Arctic and we both find that to be ordinary, neither really believing that what was everyday life for us could possibly be of any interest to anyone else.

It serves to illustrate a point. We have all said that a good actor can have us laughing and crying just by reading the telephone directory. To repeat what so many others have said, it is not so much what you say as how you say it. What we all want – what we all crave – is a glimpse into the life of another human being, another journeyer on the lonely path, to reassure ourselves that we are not alone, that our experiences are not that different or weird or tragic, that others have survived the Hero's Journey and that belonging to the human race consists of more than being equipped with bipedal locomotion and opposable thumbs. We have all been there, done that, and it isn't so bad after all if we can have company on the road.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life – and one is as good as the other… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist — but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.

– Ernest Hemingway

What you write about is trivial compared to what your character, and ultimately your reader, can learn from it. Which is not to say that reading about doing the dishes or warming baby food isn't going to make your reader yawn. What your reader wants to know is how you felt about pacing the floor in the wee hours while your husband snored — or how you felt when he did it for you and even fetched you hot milk because you'd had a hard day. It's the common humanity that you bring to your writing which makes it readable, enjoyable, moving, instructive — which makes it literature. Make your writing part of the human experience and you cannot fail to have readers. This is done through characterization, through tone and sound, through subtext, through introspection, point of view — through writing on the back of your eyelids.

Much of it, language, spelling, vocabulary, sentence structure, logical progression of story line, happens in the left brain; you can learn to mobilize the right brain for the rest of it. Engage the senses, all six of them! What do you see, hear, smell? What is the texture of the night or the taste of the wind? What do you feel?

Where do you get your ideas?

Did you look at the sky this morning? Did you notice the people at the line-up in the bank? On the bus? Herding children through the mall? Did you listen to someone's tale of trying to find a parking space or the way to Pete's Frootique? Do you remember your honeymoon or having your first child? Do you listen to others? The point here is that everything is a story. The essence of the story is the wonder that life generates in all its aspects, light and dark, sacred and mundane. Learn to listen – to others, to yourself, to the rhythms of living — and you will never want for stories.

On a more practical level, the first source of story is your own life, your own experience. Fiction writers often use the 'what if?' approach, starting with a common occurrence and teasing it out to a conclusion. It works.

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is because there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.

– Ernest Hemingway

I must admit to not knowing what the process is. Sometimes it seems to be a matter of spontaneous mental combustion, although I am quite certain that it is not. How do you prod the process into life? A good start is to read. A writer must read. Voluminously. Anybody and everybody. Don't be afraid of material which makes you squirm. Some things are meant to make us uncomfortable. Schindler's List makes me desperately uncomfortable, as does A Tale of Two Cities. Be brave. There will be times when your own writing makes you uncomfortable but you must never shy away from where the story needs to go. That it makes you uncomfortable is a mark of your own humanity.

You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is – but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.

– Ernest Hemingway

Read whenever you have a free moment, on the bus, in the waiting room, in the park, everywhere. Turn off the television and reacquaint yourself with the printed page. Once you begin to write, you will read differently. You will read more critically, looking for content, technical mastery, turn of phrase and vocabulary, moving description and beauty of style. The subject matter becomes almost incidental.

My personal feeling is that story is character-generated and character-driven. Character first; story happens. Plot? What the heck is a plot? More of that later, as well. Michael Caine has said that he feels that, when he portrays a character, it is not so much copying behaviour as holding up a mirror for others to see themselves. This is what the great novelists do.

And before you complain that you wanted to write poetry, not a story, let me repeat, in case you missed it the first time around: All literature, including the spoken word, is story. You are a character in the story, especially the poem. No writer so divorces himself from his work that he is not in it himself. Even in fiction, the writer becomes the narrator, whether the story is written in the first person or not. In non-fiction, the writer is the central character. The whole purpose of most non-fiction is the expression of the personal experience and understanding of the author; it cannot be otherwise. The most successful non-fiction —which includes, of course, memoirs and autobiographies — is written very personally. The Diary of Anne Franck would be so very much less effective, even given the horrendous subject matter, if it had not been, centrally, a personal story. Reporting does not work. The highest non-fictional literature is the personal, inner journey, the soul journey, the Hero's Journey. It is at its best when approached as story.

What to put in or leave out? Everything, every word, every phrase, every paragraph, must advance the story in some way. If it does not fill out a character, add to the understanding of story or setting, to the ambience and mood, it does not belong there and must be left out.

And that's it.

Judith

School daze

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:33:10 GMT

Today is whatever it is and it is glorious, the cloud cover is pretty much complete but down on the ground, the trees are turning, all at that moment of perfection betweem still green with a few turning and all turned but not really fallen. There is one wonderful tree (I’m on the tenth floor, looking down on it) wich consists of branches that are thrusting upward, the red of flame, crimson and yellow gold. The beauty is indescribable, much beyond my meagre efforts to draw it verbally.

I look down on what must be condo heaven, some much higher than I am. Before they moved me to the room next door, I had a view of the Wall Centre. The building is oval! It’s an architectural marvel. I love buildings. Perhaps I could have been an architect. No, I could have been an architect. I didn’t. I have been doing a lot of thinking from this bed overlooking the penthouses of the West End. My friend and coauthor, Paula, and I could both have been some spectacular things. Paula at least has a PhD to her name. Yes, I was an engineer, but it was never my dream. I didn’t really have a dream.

Schools didn’t give us the stuff to know what we might want to do, have more to say in what possibilities lay beyond those doorways back into the world after high school. I went to high school in a very good school in London, Ontario, Sir Adam Beck Collegiate Institute, out on the edge of the boonies, as it was then in 1963. It was a very good school, in point of fact, and I got a very good education which included four years of Latin — we were expected to read Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars — Omnia gallia in tres partes divisa est. or, veni, vici, vinci as he himself so succinctly put it. A song about then used that tripartite phrase:
Veni, vici, vinci
As they used to say in Gaul,
I’ve been learnin’ my lessons,
And I’m having a ball.

I also took French, German and English and did well in them, with five years of French and three years of German. I’d taken grade 13 French in Grade 12 and, because I had to have, I think, nine papers tried in the same year, I took it again to qualify to graduate.

I’d taken German in grade 11, which was the year that began. But I found it so incredibly easy that the teacher approached me one day, saying how would I feel about taking the grade 12 exam in the summer and taking grade 13 German. I was still obliged to sit in the grade 11 class until the end of the year, bored to tears or not. Nowadays, I’m told, if they don’t have a class, the student simply leaves the school. If I’d been told I could skip the class, I would have been told to study in the library or the cafeteria. No leaving school for us and I think it wasn’t such a bad idea. We didn’t think it a hardship and we could get our homework done, usually at least three hours of it a night.

The English class consisted of no more and no less than the usual English class. The only real difference was that we didn’t have the internet for references for our essays.

All exams, except for the languages, were essay-type. We lost marks for grammar and spelling errors. I once got 95% on an English essay course. He had subtracted five percent for spelling that old gaffer the Jones’es and I still get it wrong, what,

Oh, did I forget math? I wasn’t very good at it, believe it or not. I didn’t understand why until I left high school and did it by correspondence for university entrance requirements. Then, I found not only did I like it, I was very good at it. Bad teaching goes a long way. I was tutoring math for extra income to boost my pension and I am a very good math teacher. I found it takes just patience and understanding. Tutoring one-on-one, where you can spot the problem, then go back to the beginning of it and rewind the spool to go forward again. Math is easy to tutor because there are usually quite quick results if the teacher is good enough to spot the problem. It’s diagnosis of the problem that makes the teacher good, not how to teach it. I really enjoyed it.

What else did Iake? History. All history was either of Canada — noted for being boring — and American. The last was in grade 12, American History. Mr. Milburn, our teacher, switched the order of American History subjects so that he could prepare us for watching the presidential election of the latter half of the twentieth century, that of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhouse Nixon, 1959-60. We learned how the government of the US was set up, how one third of the Senate retires every two years, forcing an election in the senate. I wanted to get that in so you can remember to watch closely next month when one third of the Senate Chamber retires. Lets see how many Democrats are elected this time.

And that’s all for today, boys and girls.

Love is Not Love...

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:53:55 GMT

I've written about friends before but this is a little special. Saturday last was my wake. And almost everybody who could be here was here. They came from across the country and with a country as wide as Canada, that's something to crow about. Margot came from Dartmouth; Andrew came from Halifax; Pam came from Vancouver Island; Janet came from Ontario. There were others who wanted to be here for it but couldn't.

************************************************

Twenty-seven years ago today, on September 4, 1979, I sat on a log on Dallas Road Beach in Victoria, BC, Graham beside me. It's a day I will never forget.

That morning, I had woken up at eight, after a bad night. I'd tossed and turned and dreamed and lain awake because the only thing in my mind was the man I had so recently been introduced to. I dreamed of myself in a white wedding dress and veil—and black rubber boots, feeding chickens. That's the only memory of that dream that I still carry with me. When I woke, on that cool, sunny day, still with those images in my mind, I wanted to see him but it was a Tuesday, the day after Labour Day, and he had to work.

As I lay there, after having fed breakfast to my daughter and then having gone back to bed, though I was awake, I thought I heard a knock at the door. It came again, not loud, though firm.

My daughter and I lived on the top floor of a house, while Brenda, the landlady, lived on the lower, street-level floor. There was an outer door to my apartment and a staircase. I went to my inside door and opened it, wondering who on earth wanted to see me at that time of day but I called down the stairs, Come in. It opened and there was Graham's face looking up to me.

Can I come in? he asked.

I was speechless. I stood there like a dummy until I found my voice. Sure. Come on up.

He came up the stairs and saw that I was still in my dressing gown over my nightie. He said nothing but the ball was in my court.

Would you like some tea?"

Yes, that would be nice.

I led him to the kitchen at the back of the apartment, put the kettle on and bade him sit at the table. I'll just go get dressed, I said.

By the time I was dressed, the kettle was boiling. I made tea and we exchanged some small talk over steaming cups.

Would you like to go out? he said. Drive around, maybe?</>

I said that I would. We left the apartment, got into his little Toyota, as he called it, and drove through Victoria. We ended up at Smitty's and I ordered a bowl of soup, since it was early lunch time. I toyed with the soup, not really hungry, wondering how I could possibly tell this man that I was in love with him. He told me that he had left work because, as chief engineer, he had that privilege and they didn't really need him because they were in a mini-refit. They weren't sailing around Vancouver island that week. Eventually, we got back into the Toyota and drove to Dallas Road Beach.

Dallas Road is a long, winding road that skirts the edge of Victoria as it follows the coastline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The scenery is gorgeous with the Cascade Range visible on the other side of the water, one patch always with snow. At various points, you can climb down to the beach, with its sand and pebbles and various sun-bleached logs, escapees from log booms or deadheads that came ashore.

We stopped at one of those places in James Bay, the original part of Victoria. I went ahead of him, picking my way down to the sand, then toward the logs. I felt his hand on my back.

Do you think I don't know? he said.

I turned to look at him. My feelings tumbled around in my head, not sure which way to land. Should I be happy (why not?), disappointed (in what?), happy (now you're getting it)... I just smiled, feeling almost embarrassed (Oh, Lord). We put an arm around each other, saying nothing, and walked to a large log and sat on it. He put his arms around me, I looked up and gave him a light peck on the cheek (It had been a long time!). We clung to each other, both lost ships in the night, holding onto each other to weather the storms of our lives.

We'd better do it, he said.

I knew immediately that he meant marriage. My heart leapt in my chest, my spine tingled and I gave him a much better kiss. I don't know how long we sat on that log, but the grey sky split open and a shaft of sunlight came on us. That was always his strongest memory of that day, that the sunlight opened up for us alone, two souls finally joined as one. And the two shall become one. [Jesus — the Gospel of Thomas.)

He was a very religious man, in the sense that he saw God everywhere, lived as good a life as he could. No fundamentalist he, nor I. I've always wanted to see that as God, too. Perhaps it was. Eventually, we got up, walked up to the street again and walked, my hand clutched to his chest.

I'll never forget the look on his face as we walked. He shone, a smile on his lips, his eyes open and looking ahead, his body upright, chest out. He was a man again. His previous wife had left him for a boyfriend and all Graham's money. He was a big man, very strong. He wore a full beard and had a full head of brown, curly hair. He was very handsome to my eyes. And now he was complete as a man as he had never been before.

All through the brief time we had together, I never wavered in my love for him nor he in his for me. It was the kind of love that knows no limits; it took me wherever he wished to go without question. There was never a time when I had to wonder whether I loved him or not. I suggest that a woman who asks herself this is not in love; a woman who does not wish with her whole heart to go wherever he needs to go, be what he wishes to be is not in love. A man who does not wish to support his wife in her goals, so long as those goals do not compromise the marriage, is not in love. If I had wanted to move back to the coast, he would have come. I knew that. I also knew that he loved the Arctic and I would never have asked him to give it up for me.

He changed my life. I gave him years of happiness that he could not have hoped for as he had been living. i think of him every day, though he has been gone from this Earth for seventeen years. He waits for me.

Judith

Fraterfamilias

Forever Summer

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:53:00 GMT

We all dream of an endless summer, those of us who live in the cold places, the icy spaces of the Earth. Most people live in the tropics, where there are only two seasons, the dry season and the rainy season. They must surely dream of a cool place where the sun doesn't burn away the crops. I can't speak for them.

Those of us blessed with winter appreciate the summer, the warm time when we can go out without jacket and socks and heavy shoes or without carrying an umbrella. We feel the sun, the warmth on our skins and worship the summer with bright dresses and white pants. Flowers. Birdsong. Deep blue sky. Children.

When I was a child,
I spake as a child,
But now I have put away childish things...

I see my childhood as very distant. It's when you look back over all those years that you know you have lived a lifetime. I was a child in the nineteen forties. That was the age of black and white, of the remnants of VIctorian England, the age of war. When I think back, I see grayness and fear, a time of deprivation and strict rules. My grandparents and my godmother were children under Queen Victoria. The changes they had seen over their lifetimes were monumental, the breakout into the modern world. I think my generation was perhaps the first to see the last threads of that to die out. When we became hippies and tossed off the grip of rules and convention, what we were really throwing off was the yoke of the Victorians and their prudishness, their Calvinist dichotomous view of life and the world. Their grip was long-lasting. It took a grassroots movement to strain against it. Now the Calvinists have shoved themselves to the foreground once more.

Back then, back when we hippies were still babies and small children, we were reined in by all around us. Daily life was strictly regimented, church on Sunday, out for a walk afterward, dinner at five, to bed at seven. But we had The Children's Hour. In England, at least.

Between the dark and the daylight,
When the sun is beginning to lower,
Comes a time in the day's occupation,
That is known as the Chilren's Hour.

(I still appreciate many aspects of the Victorian education, which included the required memorization of poetry.)

The Children's Hour for me and my foster brother, Michael, included our favourite occupation, being read to. The idea of the early children's books was not that the child should read them but that they were read to the children. This mean that a higher level of literature was read and loved at a very early age, as early as four. The original Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young and Now Ee Are Six were very early favourites, read over and over again until we could read along with Nan. She would sit up on the big bed, with one of us on either side of her so that we could see the pictures and the text. It had a great deal to do, I think, with our ability to read at an age earlier than that of children now. The next was the much beloved adventures of Ratty and Moley and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall in Wind In The Willows. The Just So Stories of Mr. Kipling was another favourite.

When we were older, the books were more complex. The Children of the New Forest was one. I found it a little boring, to be honest. The Water Babies was another one, which was intriguing. I'm trying to think back and I remember the Enid Blyton books of children's adventures in the North Country of England. The stories were no longer of fantasies but of real life. I think that I would have liked J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

We were given books to read by ourselves then and I loved Fudge In Toffee Town. It was the adventures of a little candy man. The planet he lived on was entirely made of sugar, including the people. The enemies were the humbugs who were, of course, made of humbugs and had wings and flew in troops. I particularly liked Klaud Klank, the professor's robot which was always on the verge of collapsing. The stories were in a foremat common in England of six cartooned drawings to a page with the accompanying text directly under the appropriate cartoon. Edward Bear was another favourite series done in that format and a relative made sure we had a copy every Christmas with our names on the cover in gold. We were right chuffed about it. Yup. Reading was important at a very early age. I started school at four, in the winter/spring of 1949, I think.

The summer I wsa nine was my first taste of a hot North American summer complete with humidity. The apartment we were living at in London, Ontario, was the top floor of a house at 22 1/2 Bruce St. We had a telephone whose number was 43044. We had no proper refrigerator but the ice man made it up our outdoor steps every so often to put a huge block of ice into the top of our ice box. It was better than nothing. Our milk was still brought by horse-drawn van. The horse knew the route. The milkman would step onto the van and put the one-quart bottles into his wire basket ready for the next house. The horse stopped and he stepped off.

The bottles were, of course, glass and had a bulge at the top into which the cream rose. You owned a special spoon with a ninety-degree bend in it that fitted into the bottom of the bulge and allowed you to pour off the cream. We children loved the horse, of course, and always carried a treat for it, a carrot, a sugar cube... The gardeners took care of the poop.

I remember being outside the house that summer when a big, black, American car stopped. Inside were a black family up from Detroit. The person in the passenger seat called me over. He asked me why it was so hot and while I was wondering how the hell to answer that question, he said that they were up from Detroit into Canada and they were looking for cooler weather. They'd heard that Canada was always cold and snowy, and please, could I tell them where the snow was? I was flabbergasted. And a nine-year-old isn't often flabbergasted. I pointed roughly north and said it was probably a couple of thousand miles that way. He thanked me politely and the car left. Now I know I was wrong. It was more like four thousand miles, if there were any snow at all. The Arctic gets hot in summer.

I remember swimming in the public pools, a new adventure for me. They still had polio epidemics back then and we were taking a risk, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Back then, we weren't afraid of taking risks. It was that year that they came out with the Salk vaccine for polio and I remember them coming to the school and giving us the sugar cubes with pink stuff on them.

That was also the year that the Queen was crowned and we were given commemorative medallions. I still have mine.

And I promise not to leave it so long next time.

Judith

Fraterfamilias

To Believe or Not to Believe...

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:49:35 GMT

I don't know what scares me more, the mess in the Middle East or the homegrown Evangelist loonies. Our fundamentalists versus theirs. They can kill each other off, for all I care at this moment, though I'd rather just see them both stop. Right now, this moment. Religion. The preachings of the prophets change when it becomes the preachings of those who say they understand what they said. And if you want to believe, then believe through them or not at all.

I dislike being told what I should believe. I'm quite used to educating myself on what will be good for my soul and what won't. You all do realize, I'm sure, that if you were to strip away all the theology of the Church, and follow only the teachings of Jesus, those precepts are all you will need to live a good life, loving both God and man, don't you?

I suppose that's a heretical statement but I would disagree. I'm not sure what the theological definition of heresy is but I do know that this is not it. Would the Church argue with me? Yes, it would. What I believe is, to Catholic eyes, heretical. I'm also supposed to believe in the Virgin birth, even though there are many mythologies that have that theme. Nor is the slain prophet a new idea, though it shows up mostly in agricultural mythology, the blood of the victim a symbol of his nourishing the crops, a fertility god. We can all understand that.

Jesus isn't a fertility god, but borrowing from pagan cults is nothing new in Christianity. I think it's fairly well established that Jesus spent part of his early life with the Essenes, men living a monastic, aesthetic existence. He reached Enlightenment, as did the Buddha. He was our Buddha, called by God to live a good life, to teach others what it meant to live that good life also, to pass down from that moment on a teaching that would move souls to follow him, to seek enlightenment as well, down through all ages of those who heard the teachings. I don't think he was divine. And that's the first Heresy. That would get me burned at the stake in the 13th century, would bring down the wrath of the Inquisition on my head and upon the heads of all those who listened to me. But that's how the first Christians saw him. Until the Council of Nicaea in, I think, 325 CE said he was God — and Man. Tricky that. Out of that came the notion of the Holy Trinity. Now, don't you suppose, since that's this huge theological revelation, that Jesus would have talked about it? No, no... it took Man tu see through to that kin of revealed TruthCredo in unum Deum...etc., I believe in one God, etc. I believe. It lays it all out, what you must believe before the Church will allow you to take communion. I say unto you, wherever two shall be gathered in my name, there also am I. It only takes two, not the whole edifice of the Church behind you both figuratively and literally. Think about that.

He did not say he was divine. Peter is the one who believed that Jesus was divine. Jesus was most specific on that point. "It is you who say that I am." I won't get into His Death and Resurrection, though I will say that I believe in the Ressurection and I do believe that he appeared to the Apostles and the women after His Death. He preached love and forgiveness, tolerance and kindness. It's in the Sermon on the Mount. Every time he spoke, he taught the same things.

"Thou shalt love the lord, they God, with all that might and with all they strength and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Gotta love that King James Version.

That's the Golden Rule. What else do you need? That's love and tolerance of others and love of God. That's all there is. He expanded on that theme in the Sermon on the Mount, exhorting believers to feed the hungry, house the poor, tend the sick, clothe the naked. And my favourite: When you would commune with God do not stand on the streetcorner and tear your garments, put ashes on your head so that the whole world will know how pious you are. For I say to you, they have their reward. But when you would pray to your God, go into your room and shut the door. Pray in secret for the Lord hears in secret and will reward you in secret. These are the wishes of the Lord.

We've all seen the Evangelists on the streetcorners. They might not be wearing sackcloth and ashes any more but they are trying to impress you with their piety, their knowledge. They will say they have the truth but they have nothing. They will have their reward but that's not the way to God. They have no Truth.

Truth is Eternal.

Judith

Fraterfamilias

A Smattering of Time

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:28:32 GMT

How time is flying by. It can't of course, and the 'flying by' thing is a conceptualization. It is only our perception of time. No one doubts that time exists, least of all the physicists. Most physics equations have time in it somewhere, if not universally. Those i studied did.

Sounds like a science fiction title, doesn't it? A smattering of time. It was just a smattering of time before she was an adult and had lost entirely that cheerful baby-ness about her. It's just a smattering of time 'twixt cradle and grave. Is Damgud Thing. I don't want to grow old — any much older than now, I mean. Once you start falling apart, life is dimished, or, I should say, one's enjoyment of life diminishes.

I can no longer sit on a beach, feel the sand between my toes, chase sculpins in tide pools, watch the tiny anemones with their waving fronds combing the water for sustenance. Beaches are wonderful places and there's not as human being on the face of this planet who doesn't like them. I miss the heaving sea beneath my feet, that little thrill when the plane hurtles down the runway and lifts off and the sight of an iceberg aground, Bylot Island cloaked in snow, it's mountains lit by a full moon. I miss roller coaster rides and sailing, And I miss my husband's touch, perhaps that most of all.

Is life so awful without these things in it? No, it isn't. Don't misunderstand me; I enjoy my life even now. A large part of me wants to go on, see new things, do new things, write more books. But I am very limited in what I can do and I suppose that wears me down. I lie in bed seven days a week, aware that there's a world out there that I struggle to stay a part of. For the most part, i manage. In my mind, i am still very much a part of that world. As a writer, I see it in my mind, I create worlds and characters to inhabit that world, interact in that world, have their being there for me to see and record.

I have a rich internal life and I wouldn't have that if I had not spent my early life building that up. I am balanced and grounded. I began, as an adult, being anything but those things. I was depressed, and fearful. I cried a lot and had a lot of therapy. I recognized that I needed help and I went to find it. At my very lowest, I couldn't speak and passed my days in silence. It was not an easy thing to overcome but I did it. I thank the Canadian medical system for making it so and giving my life back to me. I could never have afforded to pay for their care and treatment.

Reading. Not self-help books. Those can be thrown in the poubelle [trash caan] and the lid slammed tight shut. No, I meant spiritual reading. I read Alan Watts first. He made so much sense. I read The Cloud of Unknowing. No one knows who wrote that but it is a very fine treatise on spirituality. I read the old saints: Thomas à Kempis; St. Francis of Assisi; Julian of Norwich. For some reason, the thirteenth century saw a flowering of spiritual thought that is still relevant and always will be because the soul is eternal — it has its existence outside of time.

We think outside of time. What is the stuff of thought? Neurons and synapses and specialized cells are involved but how? No one really knows. But it happens. We just think. Even a baby thinks. Babies think all the time, building up synapses, enlarging those portions of their brains that are in use. They have found that the temporal lobes are the seat of religious and spiritual thought. It is in the temporal lobe that we perceive spiritual events. What is a spiritual event? Seeing things that aren't there is a petty explanation. I have had several of what I call spiritual events.

There have been attempts lately to debunk the idea that Near Death Experiences (NDE), claiming that they are merely brainstsorms in the temporal lobes brought on by extreme stress. I think they have the thing backwards. I think that the tempral lobes are receeptors of spiritual, religious events. As well as other things. Claiming that the event originates in the temporal lobes is rather like saying that a conversation originates in the ear! That's what happens when scientists go to it. If they can't measure it, it's not real. It is to roll on the floor laughing my...off.

When I first left home, I was eighteen years old. It was 1962, Kennedy was in the White House, Martin Luther King Jr. was already making a difference and the future looked wonderful. I was naïve; I knew nothing of the dangers out there. Nobody had ever spoken to me of them and I'd led a very sheltered existence. I hadn't really had a boyfriend and I knew nothing at all about sex. Back in those days the theory was that if you didn't know about it, you wouldn't indulge in it. In practical terms, it meant that you didn't recognize the signs and signals of what was coming. You were left completely vulnerable.

The only experience of sex I'd had was being raped by the nextdoor neighbour one night. I was staying overnight and they were at a party. I was asleep on the sofa and I won't tell you any more. But I still knew nothing. I had no idea what had happened to me. I'd never heard the word sex, let alone rape. It took my first shrink to explain it to me. All I knew was that I felt unclean, confused and very unhappy. But I was getting away from all that the day I left on a bus from Washington D.C. to Niagara Falls. I was going to stay on a friend's sofa and go back to get my last year of high school, which was grade thirteen in Ontario then. My mother saw me off.

We got as far as Rochester, N.Y. where the bus pulled in and we were told that we'd be leaving again at six-thirty in the morning. It was well before midnight. We filed into the bus depot, luggage and all. I'd been talking to the soldier in the seat next to me. He had finished boot camp in St. Augustine, Florida, and was going home to see his family before being shipped to Viet Nam. I have always wondered if he survived. I parked myself beside him on a bench and settled in for a very long night. Everyone curled up on the benches and went to sleep. I was much too nervous to do that. I got up and looked around, read all the brochures and was about to go and sit down when the black porter came up to me and said that there was a gentleman outside who would be willing to pay me for my time. I had no idea what he meant. I had visions of sitting having coffee with a complete stranger to while away the night and I didn't like the picture, so I said, very politely. No, thank-you. I'm fine by myself.

I had no idea how attractive I was. I was my full height of five foot six and weighed around only a hundred and five pounds. That was because, although I was always hungry, I was not allowed to make myself a snack. I was not long-legged but I was graceful. Although I'd been plagued with acne throughout my teen years, that had subsided and I had beautiful skin, which I retain to this day. But, all that aside, I still didn't know what was happening. While I was sitting there, quietly reading my book, the porter came to me again. This time he said, I didn't mark your baggage. If you'll just take your bags over there... He pointed to the end of a counter with a door leading to wherever it was that he disappeared to the first time.

I didn't have time to think about it. Instantly, I was not in charge of my body or mind. I felt as if I were sitting in the back of my skull, looking out through two holes where my eyes usually were. At the same time, I was overwhelmed with feelings of strength and calm. And a voice, that was my voice but not my voice, speaking in a steady, balanced manner, saying, You did not mark anyone else's bags. You will not mark mine.

Instantly I was returned to my normal self while he turned on his heel and stomped off somewhere. I woke up the soldier and told him what had happened. He did understand. He stayed awake with me for the rest of the night. When we returned to our bus in the morning, the porter brushed past me and whispered White trash!, a comment that didn't make much sense. He was only ticked off because he'd probably been promised a cut if he got me out of there and I disappeared into the night. Because I know now that that is what would have happened.

I have always wondered what had happened. I think it was an angel, come to protect me from a path that was not mine, not a path I was to take, unlike so many countless other poor girls. My heart goes out to them. A Franciscan monk later told me that I was a Protected One. I think that this is what he meant. The thing is that I hadn't really noticed that he hadn't marked anybody else's bags and my normal mode of operation was meek compliance. Yeah, that definitely wasn't me.

I learned. And I kept on learning. The purpose of this life is the education of the soul with the help and encouragement of God Himself. It's never too early to start.

Judith

Fraterfamilias

T'ain't My Life, Charlie.

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:01:59 GMT

I was saving up to talk about something that really bugged me, only, now I can't remember what it was.

Ever have days like that? I have them all the time, lately. They call 'em Seniors' Moments. It is to laugh, yeah, verily. None of my relatives has admittied to reading these, though I suspect my brother does. And nobody will tell me if he/she has read my novel. I'm ticked. Does everyone have too much to do to sit and read these days? The answer is always, Well, I've been terribly busy lately... Too busy. Oh, and now I remember what it is that annoys me. Baby buggies.

I don't mean a baby's perambulator, that polished, black, even gilded Rolls Royce of pampered children pushed by the nanny, oh, no. I mean all those evil metal frames with steel wheels that slam into your heels when you're standing in line at the check-out counter, that clog the aisles in the library and run over your toes in the supermarket.

I didn't have a baby buggy. I had a pram. After I graduated out of pram size, it was Michael's turn to have the pram and I walked. That's right. I walked. Or I was carried. I loved being carried. There was no such thing as a stroller. Nobody had one. They didn't exist. Children have two feet. There aren't any other models. Feet. Two of them. They have learned to walk by about the age of ten months to, say a year and a half (or longer, depending on the indolence of the baby in getting his butt off the floor, and they love nothing more than to walk everywhere, around the house, on the furniture, out any open door, down the front path, his little arms held up like the flaps of a plane (we can all picture that in our minds) and into a full run toward the traffic. There is nothing like a baby's ability to find something dangerous to do. Oh, yes. Parenthood is not for the faint of heart.

The perambulator got relegated full time to the attic when the car became common. No, the second car. Dad now takes the car — the little one — to work, as he always did, but there is the other car that mum uses. Nobody walks to the corner store; everyone now rides in comfort to the mall. There's no room in the family car for the pram. Instead, the folding chair with wheels fills the bill, and baby is put in that. It's convenient.

Too much is done these days in the name of convenience. It may be convenient for mum, but it deprives the baby of time walking, time when he'd be wearing his little self out. That's only one reason, however. The real purpose is control. We used to walk every day into the village with a basket over one arm and baby on the other one. Baby held mum's hand, felt safe; mum walked at baby's pace, maybe held as much of a conversation as one can with a baby. We went into a grocer's shop, the proprietor of which we knew by name and who knew us; we picked over a few items which he brought to us. A pound of suger, please, Mr. Pratt. Right you are, Mrs. D.

After the grocer's there was the butcher's shop. I've saved you a couple of lamb's kidneys for your breakfast tomorrow, Mrs. D. and I've some really nice chops. We inspect the chops. They're an inch thick and juicy, lots of meat in the tee. A good one. Oh, they are nice, Mr. Thompson. I'll have two, if you don't mind. What about the little one then? He doesn't much like pork. Do you have a chicken breast? He walks to the back of the shop and cuts a chicken breast in half, de-bones it and brings it back. How does that look, then? It's a small one. Just rigght. Little too much fat there, though. I can take that off in a jiffy. He does the deed and we pay and walk out of the door. It looks like rain. We want some embroidery threads from the wool shop. There we find a good sweater pattern for a man's spring sweater, light-weight, with some Fair Isle highlights. We buy it. Mrs. Riley, who runs the shop ever since her husband was killed in a car crash, poor soul, reminds me that my order should come in next week. I thank her, tell her I'll be round to buy wool for the sweater and a new Skatchel needle we've been saving for. The set is nearly complete now. She asks after the little one, gives him a bit of toffee that we promptly confiscate for later. Done with our shopping, we wander home, the baby pausing to look at things. We espy a snail and pick it up to show him. He's enthralled but we don't allow him to do any damage to it, telling him that it's alive and we have to be nice to living things. We put it back where it was and wave good-bye to Mister Snail. Maybe we'll see him tomorrow. A short walk and we're home. Who needs a stroller?

That's not an impossible idyll. That is how it was when I grew up and that's how much we've lost. If you have to go to the mall, then at least let baby walk with you, you walking at his pace. Don't go with your friends, go with him; don't go to meet friends; show him what's there, share your day with him, tell him what looks good, tell him what isn't a good thing, what to avoid and why. Teach him about his world because the mall is his world, too. Yep. He has to grow up being able to see through all the advertising gimmicks, what to shy away from. He'll thank you for it later, even if that thanks is in the way he shops, the way he knows how to go out there and not be taken for a schmuck, because they're waiting out there. That's the bald-faced truth. Leave the stroller at home. Hell, don't buy one in the first place. The stroller is one of the primary reasons for obesity in children. They not only don't climb trees any more, they don't walk. The stroller is all about the convenience of the mother. Throw it out. Hell, toss it off a cliff. If you have to have one, put the groceries in it and carry the child.

When I said it was about 'control', I meant it. I watched a woman pushing a six-year-old in a stroller that was too small for the poor kid to ride in in comfort. The child was crying. The mother was pushing it up a hill, complaining about how she was late and to shut up, kid. I began watching other women with children in strollers. There was a pattern. Child in stroller; mother pushing it round the mall, her purse, her coat (because the mall is always too hot to wear your coat) and the stuff she's bought in the stroller along with the child. Baby fusses. He's bored, hungry, tired, smelly, all of the above but mummy has to shut baby up because this is the mall and crying children aren't exactly de rigeur at the mall this year. Everyone looks around, wondering where the howling brat is and mummy's hissing at baby for embarrassing her in public. What's wrong with this picture?

Don't take children to the mall unless it is absolutely necessary. Include your child in your day. He's not an adult but he's real, he's there, he's a human being. If you're focussed on seeing your friends, on being part of their day, then it isn't going to work. The child has rights and the biggest one of those is to have a mummy who regards him as important in her day. Don't live life at breakneck speed; don't throw your life away running too fast to stay in one place. Let your child walk, hand in hand, with you, at his pace. It's his day, too.

Another thing that annoys me unmercifully is bad manners, bad manners in children, bad manners in adults. Some other time.

Judith

By the way, I have written a novel, a science fiction-cum-mystery/crime novel with my co-author, Paula Stiles:

Fraterfamilias

It's a darned good read. It's for sale as a serial at Virtual Tales. They send you two episodes a week for ten weeks. After that, if you want to carry on, sign on for another ten episodes. There is a Review here.

Hot Day In July

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:30 GMT

There's a song that starts like that. It talks of a protest that turned into a riot in Detroit during the hot days of July. I remember those riots. I also remember the heat and how it could drive you crazy, with no place to get away from it, hot and heavy, the air so thick you could chop it with an axe, the only movement the curtains make, a slight lifting from a touch of a breeze, no more than that, and not enough to promise a wind, the sounds of cicadas' electric singing, the sound of heat. I won't forget.

Battles make for great songs. But as Hawkeye Pierce noted, no good songs came out of that war. The war in Viet Nam spawned only protest songs, although they were great songs, and the latest wars have borne nothing at all, that I know of. I watched a documentary last night, mostly because there was nothing else on. It was a British documentary, and not a new one, called The Power of Nightmares. It talked about how a certain faction in the US, the Neocons, had to create nightmares in order to keep the military-industrial complex going, feeding the population with disinformation, feeding it nightmares to make it fearful and keep the fear going. The USSR was never a menace. The Red Devil was a concept that those behind the powerful created out of nothing. The US has never been in danger of attack, Hence the overkill reaction to 9/11, the golden opportunity to do what they had always wanted to do: make war on the Middle East.

Canada has not and never will be in danger of attack from anyone but the Americans. Everyone is in danger of attack from them because of the power of nightmare. The US populace is so afraid of attack now that they will believe anything they are told. All it takes is someone to claim that we are making enriched uranium for weapons and they'll be on us in a flash. I'm absolutely sure that the Pentagon has plans already worked out and filed away for future use on just how to take Canada. And what can we do about that? Nothing. What should we be doing about that? Nothing. They will believe what they are told: they elected Bush after all. Twice —well, once. The first time doesn't count.

Just be as we are, a good country that cares about others. That's why the Harper election bothers me. He's a Neocon in his thinking. But their ideal doesn't work because it cares nothing for minorities, for those without a voice, those who are ill or old or immigrants or First Nations. We haven't had the best record with them ourselves but at least they listened and they reacted positively when we yelled loudly enough. Not the best but we fumbled our own way along the path. We did manage to get gay marriage through, and eased legislation about marijuana and the Kewlowna Accord for the First Nations was a great step forward, for all Harper has scrapped it. We also signed the Kyoto Accord on pollution though we haven't implemented it much. But Harper is a Neocon. Give him a majority and he will show his true colours.

He's an Albertan and Alberta is a whole province of Neocons. Every single riding in Alberta voted Conservative. He's not a conservative, he's a Neocon, an ultraconservative and he hasn't stopped to care a whit about how he got power, only that he get it. He hornswoggled poor old Joe Clark into merging his Alliance party with what was left of the Conservatives and then kept the Conservative name. But he's not a conservative — he's Alliance and always was. This is the rise of Canada's prairie stubble-jumping, Bible-thumping right wing. Who needs a Ralph Klein in Ottawa? Alberta has done well but it is overflowing with its own oil. It has other riches as well and is the cattle country, the Texas of Canada. We don't need another Texas.

Here, we just look to the Pacific Rim as our natural stomping ground. We bask in the sunlight of July with temperatures to match but very little humidity and usually an on-shore breeze, tropical fruit for sale at any time of year, fresh greens at Christmas time, tamarinds and star fruit, a bounty always there for the asking, no matter the season.

I won't go out today, though I had thought to. Too much work to do, always another day to go out now that the summer weather is here. Gas Town is stuffed with tourists. Makes it difficult to take my chair through to get to town. I'm still a little depressed by that documentary. I shouldn't be. It has nothing to do with me, other than the possibility of having a Neocon in power here, which might affect my life very directly, since I rely on a pension for income. I will just have to keep my head down and keep on writing, amusing myself, among friends. What else is there? We all search for a way to amuse ourselves, to keep the brain happy, for however long we have here. I seem to have drawn a shorter stick, though many have drawn much shorter than I.

I went for that dinner on Wednesday last, took a taxi, found Jo, had a bang-up nosh on the expense account, talked ourselves silly and got home late. That counts as a good day, no? Lobster spring rolls, anyone? Pass the cocktail menu. How the upper class lives normally. Hm.

I think we overreact to the news. I turn it off if it's about the Middle East. Nothing i can do about it, no matter the politics behind the throne. I can vote. I vote against Harper whenever I can, which didn't do me a lot of good last time, but it did help to put back into the opposing forces a woman who has done a good job for us through a number of parliament sittings. And that's all you can ever do. One vote. Get out and use it. I've never missed an election and I don't intend to now.

Don't buy the newspaper, except for the Funnies and the Crossword Puzzle of the day, and don't watch the news. Don't worry. You'll still hear about anything bit that comes along and that's all that counts. They depress us with stories of how terribly wrong everything is going and we all feel as if we should be there helping or something. Better not to know because there's nothing you can do about it anyway. Don't watch the news and they can't frighten you. They want you to fear — anything they tell you. Don't watch and you won't be fearful. Go out and plant that garden, sit on the porch and sew a square for a quilt. Write a story or a letter. Everyone likes to get a letter. Do something positive for you and for others. And never let yourself be afraid of nightmares.

Judith

Virtual Tales

Hot Town, Summer in the City

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 21:05:17 GMT

Back of my neck... I knew I'd forget it!

Saw something distressing in the paper this past week. If you have moments of forgetfulness, you do have mild Altzheimer's. Most people have seniors' moments but it never gets worse than that. We live with it, make jokes about it and that's all there is but I was happier before I knew that little factoid.

Why do reporters feel that they just have to tell us these things? Don't they have better things to do? Spelling, anyone? Clichés? How about a few basic grammar lessons or maybe a drill on the difference between lie and lay? The newspapers these days could use a good proofreader. When I was eighteen, I landed a little job at the British Embassy in Washington. The very first thing my boss, the labour attaché said was that everthing that went out had to be letter perfect because: After all, this is the British Embassy. The same applies to newspapers. Maybe it's just a British thing, but I doubt it. I would be horrified if the BBC tripped over its own grammatical toes, or the London Times — may it rest in peace — or the Manchester Guardian. Even people who don't read books do read newspapers. If it appears in print, it must be right. Well...no. It used to be so but, it seems, not any more. Or in books. I make typos when I write here, which isn't a good thing. At the moment, I can blame it on my bad eyes but when my new glasses arrive (I finally bit the bullet and had an eye exam), there will be no more excuses.

My as-yet-unpublished book on writing spends time on that subject, exhorting the wannabe writer to learn his craft and that includes grammar and spelling — and never, ever relying on the spell-checker function in a word processor. For one thing, those spell checkers are American English and for another they show you alternative spellings. And they now and then just plain get them wrong or just won't have the word you're stuck on. I don't work in Word, although I have it on my computer. My computer is a Mac and I often need to send things to other people, most of whom have PCs. (People are so silly.) That means that when I send it off, I have to convert it either to an rtf. file, a PDF file or a Word file. If I don't know what they have, I use an rtf. conversion. If it's a document that has to arrive unchanged, I use PDF. That always works. For those of you who don't know what a PDF file is, it's not corruptible but it can't be changed either. It can be read by any computer that has Adobe. And they all do. Take your pick.

Tomorrow.

I fell asleep. If I was boring myself into oblivion, think what I was doing to you!

Got a call from Jo this morning, at 10:15. By the time I found the phone, she'd rung off. She's in town, staying at the [trumpets, please] Pacific Palisades on an expense account. Says I have to see the suite because it is ridiculously huge, a complete suite as big as a one-bedroom apartment. I am within chair distance of it so I can see myself trolling on over there. Magnificent. Her boss is paying the shot and he made the reservations so he's charging the company she works for. Sounds peachy. I must ask her if she flew business class from Australia. Must be nice! She said on the phone from the airport (yes, she called as soon as she'd got through customs) that it was like coming home. She was here working at the BC Cancer Centre for six months a few years back. Made her way all across Canada to Halifax to visit at the very end of a cold snap that had the temperatures hitting record lows at –35º and –40º Celsius. For those of you who are still thinking in Fahrenheit, they're the same at –40º. You do the math, as they say. I had to bundle her up properly with a sweater, hat, mitts and a scarf as well as a jacket (I think) that actually kept cold out. At least she missed the blizzard in February that had the city stopped cold (no pun intended) for about four days, nothing arriving, nothing getting out. Snow is a bummer, But our Jo survived the cold, had a good time and we promised to meet again. And here we are. I've been looking forward to this for months.

The Italians won the cup. How can you tell? Go down Commercial Drive. They're still dancing in the street! Going to watch Bleak House with Pam this afternoon. We're both enjoying it immensely but it has to be watched in bits. Keeping the characters straight is a chore. After Bleak House, I have Martin Chuzzlewit to amuse us with.

Keeping this short today. Lots to do. Another batch of galleys has appeared in my inbox and I'm going to read those this afternoon. It's time-consuming. Has anybody bought the serial yet? Let me know if you have, what you think of it, how it's going... It's below at Virtual Tales.

Judith

Virtual Tales

Better Late Than Never -- said Alice

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:46:45 GMT

Some years back I saw a movie called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. It was exactly that. Ivan D. is a prisoner in the Gulag. It's winter and Ivan wears everything he owns, which isn't much, to stay warm, an impossible task in the depths of a Siberian winter. It was shot in black and white to augment the starkness of the Gulag. I don't remember much about it, about the details; I do remember that it was a fine film, a testament to the courage of a nobody who only wishes to stay alive.

Don't we all want just to stay alive? I do. I would love to have the twenty years back, the twenty years I expected to have at a time when the life expectancy for women who look after themselves is eight-four. But I'm not going to get them back and there is no sense crying over spilt milk. I'm enjoying what I do have and, face it in twenty years I could be full of arthritis or osteoporosis, I could have Alzheimers and be dribbling into my soup. Take what you're given and don't look at its teeth.

It's been a week. And here I thought I'd be writing entries at least three times a week. But reality strikes and the reality is that once I get started I just keep going and going and going like a certain pink rabbit we'd all love to strangle. I start on one topic and end up miles away. But that's not such a bad thing. Bunny pie anyone?

I woke up this morning — well no, I woke up this afternoon but not by much. And that's not really true either. They wake me up, briefly, around nine in the morning to take my pills and my methodone. No, I'm not a heroin addict; methodone is one of the better pain relievers and I take it as background medication. In theory, at least, I am on sufficient doses of methodone that I can go all day without any other pain meds. If the pain gets through anyway, they give me 64 mg of delaudid (I have no idea how to spell that but that's what it sounds like). That's eight little white pills. That usually does the trick. If not, I can ask for more an hour later. If I ask for a breakthrough several times in the space of a day, we know it's time to increase the methodone. I also have a patch with 75 mg. of Fentanyl and three times a day I take three yellow capsules each containing three hundred mg. of Gabapentin which is supposed to take care of the nerve pain. That's why I don't get up too early. And I don't get up early because I don't go to sleep until around one in the morning or later. It's quiet and that's when I write.

I'd rather write when I wake up and in the afternoon but I often have visitors then. It's iffy at best that I would have an uninterrupted afternoon but I get possessive of my hours. Shortly after waking up and after brushing my teeth, someone brings me lunch. I eat what I can, maybe ask for something else. I finish it up with a nice cup of tea. I always have something to drink beside me because methodone and other painkillers dry the mouth out. I go through literally gallons of orange juice. Since I was ill in April, I've had a catheter in so that I don't need to get out of bed because I can't do it by myself. That means daily battles with the bedpan but I'm getting used to it. People have come to visit while I've been sitting on it and never been the wiser. I have the blankets up. How are they to know? I don't tell them. A long visit, though, is another matter. People are pretty good about it. They find something to amuse themselves elsewhere while they wait for me to be cleaned up.

Cleaned up. That's another thing you have to get used to when you can't walk or leave your bed without assistance. The nurses and the care-aids are going to be the ones washing you and cleaning you. There's not much use for modesty there. Showers are fun. There's a chair, made mostly of PVC piping, on wheels. You get into it and they push you into the big bathroom. I could have a tub-bath if I wanted to but I'd rather have a shower. They leave me to wash myself while they remake my bed, change the sheets, etc. I can reach everything I need and the shower has a hand-held head as well as the usual one. I need the hand-held one. Once I'm done and the room is clean and tidy, they fetch me, help dry me off, give me a fresh gown (the one and only pink one is saved for me) and put me back in bed, which is a production. I have to stand — on my good foot — held by one person while another dries the backs of my legs. After that, I swivel on my foot and then sit down on my bed. If I'm lucky, the whole production hasn't aggravated my hip and leg. If it has, once I'm back in bed and the bed is raised to the proper position, any pain usually goes away.

A hospital bed is the comfy kind. I raise the lower half so that my knees are flexed. Then I raise the head so that i'm in a position to write, read, watch the boob toob, all of the above. I have my own little flat-screen tv, my own DVD-player, my own VCR and, of course, my laptop computer. I half shelves to one side of the bed (mine) and most of the stuff I have is there, within reach. Things on the top shelf require riding the bed to its top position. While it upsets the nurses when I do it — at the top, I'm six feet off the ground! — I'm careful and it's the only way I can reach those things without calling someone to come and do it for me. They're busy enough. It's a matter of hanging onto my independence as long as I can.

That's the name of the game. Independence — and freedom. Freedom. My electric wheelchair gives me that. Now that the good weather has come, I will be out in that a lot more. I have an eye appointment on Wednesday. I'm going by myself in my chair. I always take my cell phone so that if I get into difficulties, I can call for help. It's all the way downtown. I may take a taxi back or just ride.

More methodone when I get home, supper in the evening. then bedbath. I have a little supply of liquor — some Guinness and a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry. I might indulge in that.

It's not such a bad life, really. I have lots of visitors, friends and relatives who keep in touch by email. I have plenty of writing time, even though I seem to sleep through much of it. I have been proofreading galleys this past week and I have a way to go yet. Don't have to cook or grocery-shop; they keep me pain-free and I'm surrounded by loving people. I can handle it.

As a note to those who read this, our book, Fraterfamilias, may now be purchased from Virtual Tales. They've been dragging their feet but the purchasing software is finally in place. If you sign ujp before July 4, you get the first ten episodes for free. Save yourself four bucks, American, and sign up now. Just a toot on our own horn there. And I should be finished Solitude very soon.

Judith

Reading and Thinking and Writing

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:01:17 GMT

Hey, hey! It's summer! Tomorrow is St. Jean Baptiste Day in Québec. It's also the 21st anniversary of the Air India disaster. It's come of age. They've put up a memorial at Peggy's Cove with the names of the dead. And hardly anyone is in the pokey because of it. It's not right. But that's enough of that.

I had a telephone call just now from an old friend. She's in Ontario, at home, but she works at sea. We were talking about how having one month off at a time sounds like a lot but you can't do anything — you can't take courses, you can't join a choir because these activities, to name but two, require that you be at home for more than a month at a time. They want your body in a chair every Sunday or every Monday or every third Thursday evening... Like that. Pity those who go to sea for a living. Every day of the year, the seagoing trades are out there, Christmas, Easter, birthdays and anniversaries. And they're not sitting on the aft deck with a drink, watching the scenery.

Been through the Panama Canal twice, second time was a working passage from Pacific to the Caribbean. There's something nutty in the idea of sending an icebreaker, designed to operate in zero degree (Celsius) water through the tropics. Thought up by some suit in Ottawa — guaranteed! We were going from Victoria, BC, to Québec City in December. In December, the sea water temperature off Nicaragua is eighty-three degrees (Fahrenheit). The aft (helicopter) deck was awash with deck drew, including the Captain, enjoying the ride through the tropics, stretched out on deck chairs (pass the tan lotion, will ya buddy?), glasses with little umbrellas in them, having a great time. Down in the engine room, however, the alarms were tripping every few minutes because something else had overheated. Fortunately, there is always backup-up machinery to take care of such emergencies. I'd never had to use them before but through the tropics, I was glad of them. Back-up sea water pumps, for example. We eventually had both of them on line to keep the engine cooling going. Not much could be done about the drive motors, which were electrical. They had minimal sea water cooling and ran on the red line all the way through. It was a hundred and six degrees down there. There is rivalry between the deck crew and the engine room crew. This is an example of why.

The memories are good, though. When you go through at night, which we did, the edges of the canal are lined with lights just below the surface. That's necessary for the guidance of the ships but it's a sight, a fairyland of lights and fern fronds, and tiny fish. Even when we were through the locks and away under our own steam, it was quietly, slowly, just slipping through the water without a bow wave. It was hot and sticky and the jungle was right there.

Sir Francis Drake had been where we now moved, though I didn't know it at the time. The Spanish mule trains carrying the gold of the Incas passed that way and Drake waited for them. He climbed a tree to see them coming and what he saw was the Carribean on one side and the Pacific on the other and he swore to himself that he would sail that ocean one day. The book I'm reading says that he did. Not only the Pacific, he sailed as far north as the Queen Charlottes and the Alaska Coast, probably the Columbia Glacier. The area that is now occupied by Victoria and Vancouver, he named Nova Albion.

Drake? Wasn't he that privateer guy? Yup, that privateer guy made it all the way up here. But what about the adventuring? What about the privateering? He was just a pirate. He was that, in our eyes, and more.

In August of the year 1568, eight seaworn English ships sailed through the Yucatán Channel bound for the Straits of Florida and thence home to England. They had been trading British goods in ships that had seen much better days. Their captain-general, John Hawkins, was well pleased with the results of their voyage and was anxious to be home. Serving under Hawkins as a captain was Francis Drake. He was twenty-five years old and already well experienced, having been apprenticed at twelve or thirteen. About eight o'clock in the morning, after prayers, the wind stiffened and they reduced sail. As the storm grew, Hawkins ordered his ships to turn and run before the wind. For a day and a half, they were driven northward until they found themselves off the west coast of Florida. In the pounding seas, the flagship's seams began to open. When the men were sent below to plug the leaks, there were fish swimming in the bilges. They searched in vain for a sheltered anchorage. When the wind subsided, they had barely begun to take stock when another even more violent storm struck, this one driving them southwest. When the storm finally abated four days later, they had been driven to a place called San Juan de Ulúa, fifteen miles from Vera Cruz. It was the principal port of Mexico. This was farther south than any English ship had gone before.

Although England and Spain were not at war, King Philip of Spain had made it quite clear that he would not tolerate Hawkins to trade in what the Spanish saw as their stomping ground, issuing an embargo against all foreign shipping. Hawkins had habitually ignored the embargo, making many trips to the Spanish colonies and providing whatever they needed right up to and including slave labour. (There were many escaped slaves in the area, referred to as cimarones.) Hawkins fully understood the danger they were in. The next morning, thirteen Spanish ships arrived, a merchant fleet from Seville, carrying the new Viceroy of New Spain, and two warships. To deny the Spaniards access to their own harbour would have been an act of war. He let them in. After three days of negotiations, the Viceroy agreed to allow Hawkins to make repairs and then depart, having already and in secret, ordered soldiers down from Vera Cruz to attack the English. When Hawkins sent a mewssenger to protest that they wished only to provision, repair their ships and go home. The Viceroy, Enriquez, had the poor man clapped in irons, which only proves once again that messengers have a rough deal. A large merchantman blocked the entrance to the harbour and the fight began.

Inevitably, being outnumbered and outclassed, Hawkins lost. After six hours of fighting, the Spanish fleet lay heavily damaged and the two warships were sunk. With a Spanish fireship drifting toward them, Hawkins transferred to another of the English ships that were still seaworthy and, with Francis Drake in the other, ran for it. Drake led the way out of the harbour and Hawkins followed. Some time in the night, they became separated. In the morning, Hawkins was appalled to see that some two hundred men had managed to cling to the vessel and spent the night, exhausted and wounded, before rescue came. For two weeks, they forraged what they could. One hundred men elected to be put ashore and to make their way as best they could. '

Aiming for the French Huguenot colony in FLorida, thirty of these men banded together and made the fifteen hundred mile trek around the Gulf of Mexico. They were unable to find the colony, however. It had been wiped out by the Spanish three years earlier. (The colony was at St. Augustine in northern Florida and the fort that the Spanish built there still stands.) They turned north, following Indian trails from one tribal territory to another. Some elected to stay with their Indian hosts. Their party having dimished as more and more stayed with the Indians, one year after the battle, three of them, having trekked three thousand miles, were picked up by a French ship on the coast of present day New Brunswick. From there, they returned to England.

However, most of the men from Hawkins' crews were captured and suffered cruel tortures by the Inquisition, a handy excuse for killing Protestant Englishmen. Of the men who had embarked with Hawkins, fewer than one hundred ever saw England again. Only the boys were spared. They were sent to monasteries.

All this gets me to what I meant to talk about — Drake as a privateer. After the massacre at San Juan de Ulúa, William Hawkins urged by letters at court that his captains be issued commissions of reprisal authorizing them to seize Spanish shipping to recover the losses suffered by his brother. These Letters of marque gave legitimacy to what would otherwise be acts of piracy. The bearer of such a letter was known as a privateer. While England was still recovering economically, Elizabeth needed something to enrich the royal Treasury. She was also furious about the battle and the treachery involved. The rumour had arrived in London well before Hawkins did. In November, five Spanish ships carrying £85,000 to pay King Phillip's army in the Netherlands was forced into Plymouth harbour. The treasure was seized and sent straight to the Tower of London. Incidentally, that sum doubled the English treasury.

Was Drake a privateer? Certainly. He carried Letters of Marque. Was he a pirate, serving only himself and his men? No, not that, — but the stories of his travels make for darned good reading.

And for the tale I retold up there, including chunks of the original language, read The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake by Sam Bawlf. Yeah, that name was familiar to me, too. He was an MLA in BC. Now living on Saltspring. Must be nice.

Judith

Virtual Tales

Strike While the Mood is Hot

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 02:54:09 GMT

Only it's not. I wish I could say I've been slacking off but I haven't. I'm headed into the home stretch with my novel, Solitude, and that takes up most of my time. The end is in sight — I just wish I knew how it turns out. I have always gone on faith before, but I've always known the ending before. The beginning is always known to me and the end. I start at the beginning and aim myself toward the ending, which might be as meandering as a drunkard's walk, which always comes back to the lamppost. It's worked for three novels so far but...

This is a very different story for me. It grew out of an idea that I had for a story set in the not-so-distant future. I'd like to say I'll be writing that some day but it's unlikely. I'm giving the ideas to Paula and letting her write it. It is to be called Archive. That will be set in about 2130 CE. It would let me extrapolate from current trends and play with possibilities for the planet then, such as the results of a hundred years of global warming. Whether man-made or Nature's normal cycle, global warming is still real. What will happen to genetically-altered food — or humans? I had the idea that everyone would be encouraged to write out his or her own life story to be archived for future generations, a sacred trust to descendents. I envisioned an order of monks who had taken it on themselves to archive these stories and a government that wasn't happy about it because it was becoming a populist, grass roots movement.

Solitude is really the sequel to Archive. It is set some twenty-thousand years hence. Gives me a lot to play with. My idea was that twenty-thousand years ahead humans will have evolved a little in specific ways which are determined by environment. On Earth, when global warming had run its course and overpopulation, together with reduced available land, meant continual, violent unrest, the Elite built huge ships in space, mining the moon for the metal. These were migrant ships. The Elite, when the time came, left Mother Earth to find new homes on suitable planets. THey had finally developed superlight travel and the control of gravity. They found planets to colonize; some thrived, some didn't. And twenty thousand years later... I'll let you guess on that one.

But I'm stuck. Well, not really. My brain cells will work on it. I just leave them to my right brain and think of something else to do — like writing in my journal!

We've been told that the payment software is installed but they're now testing it. They've lost six weeks of momentum, but it's happening. As is an arrangement with a respected Canadian publisher of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Blue Moon Press. It's likely that our book, Fraterfamilias will reach print status through this Press. Since we've already finished the book, we might be the first one, as well. Virtual Tales is going to put some of the novels put out by Blue Moon into serial form. This way, we will have two markets for our story. It's a nice ideaa.

Will I sell Solitude to Virtual Tales? I don't know. I might offer it to Blue Moon Press, which might just be the same thing.

Then there's Alec. Alec is my character in a book that as yet has no name. Paula has suggested just calling it Alec, but I don't really like it as a title. I know, I know. There are other novels whose title consisted of one-word names. Emma leaps to mind.

I like Alec. He's been through the school of hard knocks, as they used to say. I'm not going to dwell on his background. I started writing Alec (for want of a better title) while I was writing a book on how to write. I'd spent a lot of time teaching myself about point of view, developing a theory of it, if you like. The most effective point of view is the first person. It creates a closeness, a rapport between the reader and the character as no other mode of POV can. The great drawback of it is the restriction to that one character's ideas, beliefs, understanding of what's happening to him.

The mystery novel is the sole exception to not using the first person viewpoint. Here it is necessary since the story is not about the gumshoe, detective, private dick who is figuring things out. Here the story, the mystery stands outside the main character/detective character. In a mytery, the reader discovers the clues, makes the connections to solve the mystery along with that central character. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is a fine example of what I mean.

In Alec, in order to get a rounded view of Alec and not just his own view of himself, which is out of whack by a country mile, I gave several major characters their own shot at first person. The other characters thus blessed are his older brother, Jimmy, his sister-in-law, Janet, his girlfriend, Ruth, and his best friend, an older man who is a Viet Nam vet, Gil Moore. Their narratives not only advance the story but contribute their understanding of where Alec is coming from. Jimmy, of course, has the childhood background to contribute as well as a present day understanding of his brother, why he is stuck, why he does what he does. Janet sees quite a different picture of her brother-in-law from what her husband does. Ruth has to look out for herself in her dealings with Alec and Gil contributes what Alec won't tell anyone else, namely his experiences as a Brit soldier in Northern Ireland at the age of eighteen. Vets only talk to other vets.

I have something like ninety-five thousand words and I have to finish it. That's the main reason I'm trying to rush through to an ending with Solitude. With a little bit of luck...

Judith

VIrtual Tales: Fraterfamilias

My Pix

No Man Is An Island

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 03:28:33 GMT

No man is an island,
No man stands alone,
Each man's joy is joy to me,
Each man's love is my own...

How often have we lamented the poor and getting poorer turnout at elections? The young tell us that their vote doesn't count anyway. Of course their vote counts. There is no way a scrutineer can say, "Oh, this is a young person's ballot, so I'm not going to count it. Each vote counts the same. My vote is of equal value to, say, Paul Martin's vote. How did we come to this state?

Years ago, my choirmaster told us a story. We'd been rehearsing for Easter, I think, preparing to do some difficult chorale work for Easter Sunday. He told us that, if we were worried about when to come in or were nervous about coming in at all, then we could just take a few breaths before hand, then skip the actual beginning note and listen to the others and come in a note or two later. He told us that this advice was once given to a large choir facing a very important performance. That choirmaster brought his hand down for the first note and was faced with, of course, silence. It's an object lesson.

I am one, I am I, I am one small part of a whole. But I matter. When I die, the whole is less. When a child is born, it is stregthened. I have never missed an election but I come from a generation where such things were regarded as a civic duty. The West is unique, perhaps, in its pursuit of the freedoms and rights of the individual. Occasionally, I think we have gone too far, we have given children too much freedom too early. Freedom belongs to those who understand its obligations and responsibilities. A twenty-something person who still lives at home without paying rent does not deserve his or her freedom. But that kind of freedom, to go and come as we wish, is trivial compared to freedom of thought. That is the most precious thing there is. Our treasure.

Freedom of thought allows us to make decisions about our daily lives without having to consult others or a book. I don't consult the Bible or the Koran before I go shopping to decide whether or not it is improper. I am not a fundamentalist thinker. I have always thought, made decisions based on conclusions, themselves based on the best information I have at the time. I have made wrong decisions but I have also shouldered the responsibility and changed direction according to the new information. This is what adults do — in the West.

I have Free Will. I fear fundamentalist thinking of any stripe for fundamentalists are not content to practice their rigidity of thought among themselves but built into it is the desire to proselytize, to push their beliefs on others. Mormons are fundamentalists but while they may be a pain in the butt on street corners, they aren't fanatics about it. Fundamentalists of other stripes are very much determined to do just that. And we should fear them. We should root out the hate-mongering. They use our tolerance to push their intolerance on us and that is not how it must be. Canada turned down a request last year or the year before to permit sharia law in the country. I hope it is firm in its resolve the next time they try.

We must be free to think our own thoughts because that is the only way to understand a thing and accept it whole-heartedly because we have seen it for ourselves as a good thing, not something to which we must submit. I'm not a submitter. I refuse to be controlled.

But why, then, do so many people embrace the destruction of their own free will? Because they're afraid of freedom, of true freedom. They can't make sensible decisions; decisoins frighten them and they rush for comfort to something which will tell them how to act, how to think, what to say, what to believe. Intelligence is part of it. For some reason, rural areas are more willingly embrace narrow ways of thought. Rural areas become conservative in their thinking. Liberal thinking belongs to people who think for themselves, who don't want and don't need others to tell them how it is. And that frightens conservative people. They want rules to curb us free-thinkers because they don't understand why we don't and don't want to see things their way. I could be wrong, but judging by the results of the last election, I don't think so.

I think I'm glad I won't be around much longer. It's going to get very nasty. Already, the fundamentalism and the constant warring and hatreds among the have-nots are a symptom of over-population. We passed the ideal mark a long way back, whatever it was. I once asked my ecology professor what he thought was the ideal number of humans on the planet and he said it was probably around one and a half million. We were keeping an unreasonably large population alive because of the mechanization of crop growing and shipping, etc. At one and a half million, the forces of population control could still work properly to keep us at that number. I think that was something like thirty years ago now that I asked him. Since I was very young then and he was not, I can assume that he has preceded me into the great unknown...or is occupying a room in an old people's home, poor fellow.

This didn't go where I thought it would go. That's probably because I see around me so many forces lined up against me, all determined to take my freedom of choice and will away. Right up front are the adertisers who use psychologists to tell them how to control my choices as to what shampoo to use or what boots to use or what car to drive. People send me things in the mail asking me for money, telling me why their bank is better for me than my own; I tear them up and toss them unread. I do that because I don't want my brain cells sullied by their propaganda. That's a strategy. I no longer get much mail, of course, but the people who run my own credit card company are always sending me blank cheques in the mail and a cover letter to invite me to write cheques not on what money I have but on money they have, on which they will charge me nineteen percent per annum. I tear those up, too. That's a nasty scheme if ever their was one. All of it is geared to take money away from me, money I then can't use on other things, such as a dinner out or a movie, and which I can't put away for my old age or for my heirs. They are just another brand of thief and I am heartily sick of thieves in silk suits.

But ultimately, we are all alone. As I said in another entry somewhere, my friends can keep me company to the gates of Heaven, but I must go through them alone. And that's when I find out whether my free thinking has done me good service or whether I will have to try again. And I don't particularly want to try again.

Judith

My Pix

Fraterfamilias

A Rainy Day in June

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 22:21:19 GMT

It rained last night right into this morning and the sky is still overcast, although it seems to be brightening.

Got out yesterday to have my taxes done (late). The government has to pay me this time, which is a nice change. No doubt they'll find some reason to lessen the amount, which at the moment is something like four thousand dollars. Yep, you read that right. I didn't realize that I could claim a disability allowance which is a fair chunk of change. I like it. But can you imagine a government that gives you a measly $8,000 a year to live on — which you can't — and then taxes you on it? Skinflints!

Don't get me started on government or I won't get anything else done today. I've just been reading a book by Carmen Bin Laden. She was the Swiss wife of one of the Bin Laden brothers. She talks in this book about her life in Saudi Arabia, about the ridiculous reality of living within sharia law, the constraints of wearing the abaya, of not being allowed to speak to any man freely save her husband. No man could speak to or look at her, not even her own male servants such as her driver, who took her wherever she needed to go because she was not allowed to drive and must always sit in the back seat. It's depressing and frightening.

Saudi Arabia adopted the Wahabi version of Islam back in the thirties because it gave the Saud family, the only ruling family that has ever had a country named after it, absolute power over the many. It is extreme in its views; the views of the Taliban are Wahabi, views that forced women to wear the veil, forbade them to leave their homes and forbade girls from learning to read and write. The Saudis use much of their vast wealth to force Wahabism on the lesser Islamic countries. The restrictions are unbearable for women who have the resourcces to escape. What can it be like for the women who are poor? I don't even want to think about it. Many of the restrictions stem not from any severe interpretation of Islam but from tribalism. The clan is all important. The Bedouin who roamed Arabia well into the twentieth century counted their wealth in women and camels, both objects. Woman as possession. When a woman is killed for disobeying her family or, as was the case for a daughter of one of the many princes. She attempted to leave Saudi Arabia to be with her lover and escape her arranged marraige to an older man, her own grandfather ordered her murder. She was shot six times in a parking lot. That was not Islam. That was tribal law.

The practice of clitoridectomy (the mutilation of the female genitalia) was and is still widespread. What Carmen found difficult to understand was the placid acceptance of this by the women. "Why does this bother you?" Carmen's mother-in-law said to her. "An Egyptian woman comes, it is just a little cut and it's over." It is done with the complicity of the women. Carmen talks about her wake-up call when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and a more fanatic religiosity was pushed onto the populace. Rather than rail against the loss of their freedoms, the women themselves became fanatically religious, complicit in their own subjugation. This has been upheld recently in the Iranian elections in which the women were allowed to participate. They voted for the most conservative of the clerical candidates. This is out of fear. "See how I'm doing what you want me to do? Please don't hurt me."

I need to stop thinking about this because it's depressing me. I regard any support of Saudi Arabia's kings or princes as improper until they have come into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, and women are free to walk out of their husband's houses without the veil. If Canada were to do business with such countries — and it does, I'm sure — it is a betrayal of its own women. We're always so quick to shout about human rights issues, but nobody ever considers women's rights a human rights issue. It is. If half the population of a country is enslaved by its cultural rules, that culture should be denounced and harried until it complies. I'm not expressing this as well as I might, perhaps, but I'm sickened by this fundamentalist crap. It's totally male, of coure. It's an example of what happens whene the female is taken out of the equation. Women are the civilizing influence, injecting compassion and gentleness into the equation. Without its women, a country debases itself.

But we're not equal yet, are we? The blatant sexism raises its ugly head in subtle ways but it is definitely there and strong. First we have to be considered as true equals in our own society. Once that happens, the men will see us as partners, companions, worthy of their protection and love. Only then can they truly stand up and say to others, "What you are doing is wrong." In the meantime, we can work for equality. It's not going to be easy, especially when a younger generation of women is growing up behaving and dressing like bimbos. Recently, on the death of Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and other books on feminism, a columnist mused that the young are free and they have chosen to be sluts. We're going backwards.

Judith

Water

Sun, 28 May 2006 02:21:36 GMT

I saw the film Water yesterday. Amazing film. We are so lucky in Canada to have so much fresh water. Did you know that we have 27% of the world's total supply? Thought you didn't.

Have you ever wondered about what it means to have a hot shower? I wrote this back in 2001 when I had been thinking about it, for some obscure reason. I think about a lot of things.

October 2, 2001

A hot shower is the most incredible luxury.

On the BBC news yesterday, two young boys were digging a little hole in the parched ground of Tajikistan. In the background was a dust devil. There has been no rain there for two years and the surface of the ground, the means of sustenance for a nation, is blowing away. The barrenness is stunning. The boys were digging the hole to find rats' nests, from which they were going to steal the grains of wheat the rhodents had stored there. A few grains of wheat.

A sad, weather-worn man had sold the metal roof of his house to buy food to feed his family. With winter coming, there will be no shelter. The food lasted one and a half months and it is now gone. Now Tajikistan is turning away refugees from Afghanistan, refugees fleeing from the possible retribution of the rich nations for the collapse of the World Trade Towers three weeks ago. They are turning them back, not because they want to, but because they must.

I make myself tea, read a book, download my e-mail, walk to the public library in the pleasant afternoon sun. There are green trees slowly turning into the reds and golds of autumn. The sky is cool blue. There is frost in the early morning, warm sun during the day and dew in the evening. There is water and there is food. I have comfortable clothes and a warm bed. And I have a shower.

When I was a child, I knew nothing about showers. Every Friday, water was boiled, carried upstairs and dumped into the bathtub in the unheated bathroom, a little cold water was added from the tap and the two of us children sat in it, all four inches or so, while we were bathed, played with the soap, blew bubbles at each other, had fun, until we were too cold to continue. We were dressed in our night clothes and warmed in front of the fire. We loved the bath, hated the cold. Once a week was enough. It was the same for everyone we knew and no-one thought to complain, because there was nothing to complain about. It was the way it was.

When things are made better for the next generation, the next generation has no experience of what
it is like without these things and the greater value of the innovation is lost.

Much of the world does not have enough clean drinking water. We let it flow down the drain. That is our good fortune and we do not do it at the expense of others. Our water sources renew themselves adequately in our temperate climate. There is no reason to feel shame that we are fortunate while others are not. If there is shame, if there is error, it lies in not knowing the value of what we have, not in using it freely.

A hot shower requires adequate social and economic infrastructure; it requires a clean source of fresh water, planning, construction, underground piping, pumping stations, personnel to keep them in order, hot water heaters, electricity or gas, plumbing, a willingness on behalf of the public to provide these things for the common good, legislation to protect the interests of the common good, and a social and cultural ethic which is other-centred.

All for a hot shower. A hot shower is a wonderful thing.

***********

I get some of my deepest thoughts standing in a hot shower. I have no idea why that is, but it's true. This below came to me when I was in a hot shower. I wrote it wet, draped in towels — me, not the computer. Some of my friends have already seen it.

***********

Home

Do not drift through life. Do not let the river carry you, for you will be only so much flotsam, caught in the eddies, tangled on tree roots, becoming part of the soil of the banks, no longer able to reach journey's end.

Do not go with the flow; be the flow. Do not be carried by the river; be the river. Be the water, experience its currents, meander down its pathways, swirl around its obstacles, rushing swiftly while hurtling down from the mountains of your youth, swelling with growth and rain, rolling in the stately passage of your age but travelling always to the sea, pulled by the gravity of death and the longing to rejoin the ocean of our origins, the great whole of humanity that has passed this way before and gone home again to God.

Think not of yourself as not pushing the river but as being the river which cannot be pushed, which will arrive at each bend and turn, each eddy and pool, at its appointed time and not before.

Home is not the riverbanks, not the still pools at river's edge, not the stagnant floodplain, for there is no stopping place, no resting place, until we are home.

Home is Death, home is the sea. We are always on the way Home.

*******

Just a short one today but I didn't want to let another day pass without posting something. Take care always. Have faith and be kind. Kindness costs nothing.

Judith

My Pix

Virtual Tales

Homeless

Wed, 24 May 2006 01:45:14 GMT

I wrote this at the end of September, 2004. It's a true story and my purpose in writing it was to get it out there so that others in the normal world would know what it is like to be on the outside looking in. I've been poor for a signifcant portion of my life for one reason or another. Once a female is into her fifties, the life options in front of her dwindle. She is too old for a job and too young for a pension. A single woman, that is, single for whatever reason, even by choice. In August of 2004, I found myself homeless through no fault of my own. I couldn't work, I was in pain from what would later prove to be a return of my cancer and my pension from a miserly government was insufficient to live on.

It's just called 'Homeless'.

Homeless

By Judith Doloughan

It’s 2:30 p.m. and I’ve been phoning around all day. I’m way over on my cell phone minutes but that’s the least of my problems right now. A woman answers the phone; yes, they can take me--thank GOD!--but they can only keep the bed until 4:30. Can I get there before then? I’d better get there or I’ll be spending the night on the street. I tell her I’ll be there. Somehow.

I drag my two suitcases and my backpack to the bus stop and wait. I’m sixty years old, for God’s sake! Too old to be doing this. But I don’t regret it--yet. I had to leave and there was no other way. For a female at sixty, there aren’t that many choices left if you don’t have a husband and you don’t have a family. It’s a risk staying single and I lost the bet. I’ve been out of the job market since they found cancer five years ago and now I’m stuck in that no-woman’s land, too young for a pension and too old for a job. I’m not alone in that, at least, but it’s small comfort right now.

The bus comes and I haul my stuff on board. I drag off my backpack and jam myself into the seat up front where there’s room for the baggage. I get off at the right stop but I’ve forgotten about the hill. I should have got off sooner.

The worker at the shelter is expecting me. I answer her questions for admission and try to look my usual, calm self as she dons a pair of latex gloves and goes through everything I’ve brought. Looking for drugs, I suppose, or booze. She doesn’t say, just that it’s ‘for your own protection, dear’. I feel like smacking her. She hands me a sheet of the house rules: the clients must leave the house between 9:30 and 11:00 each morning, when they may return for lunch; rooms are locked until after check-in at 5:00 p.m.; all clients must be present for check-in or beds will not be kept for them; all clients must fill in an extension application form... I read them, tell her I’ve understood them all, even though I’m not entirely clear on some things. I’m still reeling from the idea that I won’t have access to my belongings or my bed. There’s no dignity to the process and I’m assured that it is for my own safety and to guard against theft. She explains that the residents may be on drugs or be mentally ill and asks me if I’m okay with that. I’m not, but would it make any difference? I need the bed. I tell her it’s fine. I fill in the request for an extension.
That done, we haul everything up to the storage locker. She explains that people on drugs will steal everything that isn’t nailed down and that it isn’t personal. I already have that figured out. She shows me the bed I’ll be occupying. It’s one of two in the room, which contains only the two beds and nothing else. It’s cold in there. I’ve kept out my backpack with my laptop in it. She warns me that that will be a prime target and mentions that it should be stored in the office when it’s not with me. I suppose it makes me look affluent. Who said it was paid for?

The first night, I realize I’ve forgotten my sleeping meds and I’m awake until four in the morning. When I do sleep, the nightmares are pure surrealism of the Monty Python school. By the time they wake everyone at 7:30, I’m dragging my tush. This is not going to be a good day. I drink too much coffee, collect my laptop and money from the office and leave, anxious to be anywhere else. The air is cool, too cool for what I’m wearing but I don’t own a jacket. I find a leather one at St. Vinnie’s thrift shop for twenty-five bucks. I can’t see anything wrong with it except that it’s green but beggars can’t be choosers and it fits. I buy it, along with two scarves for another three dollars, pay up and leave, proud of my new jacket. I catch myself in a store window and it looks great. Maybe it isn’t going to be such a bad day after all.

I find a café, get out my list of numbers to call in Vancouver and it isn’t long before I’m frustrated and depressed all over again. The emergency shelters all ask me if I’m on welfare. I’m not and I don’t qualify. Sorry, they can’t help me. I make calls looking into subsidized housing for seniors. How long have I been in British Columbia, they ask me. I got here in 1964, I tell them, remembering the long train ride from Toronto only a week after the Good Friday Quake that wrecked Anchorage, Alaska. Then they ask me if I’ve been continuously in the province for the last twelve months. I haven’t. How long were you out of the province? I was out of the province for five years because they found cancer and I had to recover first, after which I didn’t have the money, I tell them. Ah, well, then, I’m not a resident and, sorry, they can’t help me. I lived here for thrity-five years altogether, I say; isn’t there some provision for returning residents? No, sorry. By this time she is getting irritated with me but it’s not half as irritated as I’m becoming with her. I hang up before I blow a fuse.

One contact gives me a number to call. With renewed hope, I call it, only to find that it is the number for the Ministry of Human Resources, welfare application office. Did I realize there was a three-week waiting period? I’m not looking for welfare, I say, and I don’t know why I was given the number. Well, what are you looking for, then? I don’t know any more, I say, and I’m just calling a number I was given. She launches into a harangue and I try to tell her it’s a mistake, but she isn’t listening. I hang up. I go back to the house for lunch. There are several women in various states of disarray outside. These are the ‘drop-ins’, women who sleep elsewhere and come for a meal at lunch time. They are the reason, I’m told, that the rooms are kept locked during the day. They remind me of seagulls, swooping on the food, devouring what they can, taking some for later or for others. The coffee lasts five minues before the pot is empty and there is no more forthcoming.

Some of them sack out on the sofas in the lounge or on the floor for the afternoon. I find I can’t eat lunch and leave again.

I luck out and find a cyber-café-cum-pool-hall on Johnson Street that is surprisingly cosy. I plug myself in and download my email; the waitress brings me a mug of tea. No new messages. I go on Instant Messenger and burn up the hour talking to a friend, crying on her shoulder. She gives me virtual hugs and I sign off. It’s cost me six bucks. The money won’t last long at this rate.
I make it back to the house to sign in and dinner is macaroni and cheese. The monthly budget of the house is running low and donations have been scarce. I’m startled by Mary, a skinny native woman, in a world of her own, who flits through the place, in constant motion, muttering to herself, banging things, picking up the phone, singing into it and slamming it back down. I’m told that she was raped after being hit over the head several times with a baseball bat, after which her personality changed forever. They do that, the other women tell me, because then the victim can’t identify the rapist. She didn’t used to be like this, they tell me; she was always neat and clean. She leaves the house before bedtime. Two other women show up in the kitchen/dining room late in the evening in full make-up, skimpy skirts and spike heels. They talk about available street corners and compare notes on the previous evening. One says she made a hundred and forty dollars in three dates there the week before. The other woman congratulates her. Yet another woman, who was with us on planet Earth not three hours ago, is now floating out there on Pluto--high on smack, someone tells me. I bolt for my bed, feeling an utter coward.

This night, my new roommate is a quiet soul whose heavy drug use has rendered her delusional. She tells me in all seriousness how she is descended from the French and Greek royal houses and that her dead husband leaves her messages. She asks me if I saw the fireworks the night before. When I tell her that I did, she grins and tells me that that was her husband telling her that it was all going to work out soon; she’d seen a woman with a T-Shirt that had ‘United’ written across it––it was a message. I see no reason to disillusion her. She tells me she feels safe with me and that she knows her stuff is safe as well and I’m flattered. She’s no danger to herself or anyone around her. I sleep well.

It becomes a routine: out in the morning, library during the week, roaming the street on Sunday when the library is closed; making phone calls with negative results; seeing poverty advocates who don’t know what the answer is any more than I do... I begin to get it: there is no central information number to call or office to visit to send you down the right path; nobody knows the system, not even the government workers; nobody is willing to push the envelope to find a way to help; the government has created several dozen pigeon holes and if you don’t fit into any of those, the answer is just, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you.’ They exist to identify your pigeon hole and send you to whatever government agency is in charge of it. There is no ‘miscellaneous’ category for the human flotsam and jetsam out here, those who fall between the pigeon holes and through the cracks. One advocate I speak to tells me, ‘Oh, you’re a cracker, are you? We get lots of those.’ She also tells me that some fifteen thousand people in British Columbia are waiting for housing. She gives me some numbers to call and names to throw out. It’s the same old story. Sorry...

At the end of a week, I’m told that the extension has been granted until the end of the month only, since I can apply for subsidized housing. I’m floored. I’ve just been told that I don’t qualify for it after all, and if I did, the waiting lists are about a year or more, certainly nothing next week. Can’t these people talk to each other? The worker tells me that they don’t make the decisions here in the house, that the decisions are made by a faceless someone in the Ministry who doesn’t know the case and just fits people into pigeon holes. Sorry, but she can’t help me.

I stomp out to my pool hall, plug in my computer and rant to my friend on IM. If I make enough noise, perhaps I won’t notice how scared I’m getting.

This afternoon, Cathy tells everyone that one of the drop-ins had head lice and not to sit on the chairs in the lounge until they’ve been washed down. She’s a nice lady, a well-worn fortysomething, tidy and decently dressed; she spends the evenings by herself, reading. She got herself off the game and off drugs and now usually spends the evenings reading. This evening I hear her on the phone to the bus depot. ‘How much is a book of tickets, then?’ she asks the person on the other end of the line. Someone tells me Cathy has found a job with a cleaning service but not the money to get to it and the staff don’t have a slush fund to use for tickets. She’s not getting anywhere with the phone call but her frustration has her close to tears. I reach into my backpack and pull out my bus pass. I take it to her, tell her she can have it and she gives me a hug, tears in her eyes. She comes to my room later to thank me for being so kind, tells me it’s made everything right after all. I’m embarrassed. It was hardly that generous, I tell myself; after all, I wasn’t going to be using it and at least somebody now was.

The next afternoon, the girl at the pool hall tells me I can use the internet for free, since I’m homeless. I take it as a karmic reward for the bus pass. Sometimes the gods are kind and it does work out. I go to the URL of an on-line publisher and send them a query for a book I’ve written. I don’t expect to hear anything. Two days later, they get back to me, asking for the manuscript. I spend two days formatting the thing and send it, giving them a post office box number as a return address. I haven’t made any more calls, or darkened anybody else’s door, but at least something is in the works.

I visit an old friend on Sunday and he asks me if I’m getting the Guaranteed Income Supplement. I say no, that I thought one had to be sixty-five. He tells me he’s looked on the government web site and it talks about the GIS for persons sixty to sixty-four, that I surely qualify, since my yearly income was well under some magic number last year. Elated, the next day I call the number on the web site. Am I married or living common law? No. Am I a widow? No. Then you don’t qualify. I’m stunned. ‘What about provision for single or divorced people?’ I ask, my frustration levels already back into the red zone. No, if you’re single or divorced, you don’t qualify. I choke. ‘You have to be kidding me,’ I say. No, he says, it’s geared to your spouse’s income. That’s absurd! I reply, about ready to chew the phone. Sorry...

I go on IM and tell my friend. That’s discriminatory! she splutters in bold italics, that’s saying that women should still be married or at least shacked up with somebody, that the decision to stay single is, obviously, still unacceptable to this red neck, reactionary, male-dominated government. I start composing a letter to my MP in my head until I remember that I’m homeless and, therefore, don’t reside in any specific riding. I no longer have an MP or an MLA who represents me. Another little wrinkle to homelessness. Maybe the NDP Party critic for seniors or for women’s affairs

When I get back to the house, Mary, the woman who was hit over the head, has messed herself and the whole house stinks. The staff hussle her into the shower and take the clothes that she’s been wearing non-stop for two weeks or more. They throw the clothes away because the washing machine needs to be repaired and floods the laundry room. I’m inured now. The women discuss how she should be in a residence or nursing home, since she obviously can’t look after herself. Somebody else says that Cathy has found a place to stay and I’m glad for her. I’m becoming one of them. After all, I am homeless, just like them. The reason doesn’t matter. It’s starting to sink in. Laura brings me coffee and tells me how hard it is to live with all three kinds of hepatitis. Now I understand why the dishes are all put in the sterilizer before use and the staff uses latex gloves when handling plates and food. I have to assume that some of the women are HIV positive but I find it doesn’t really worry me.

I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and while I’m sitting there, I notice a hypodermic needle sitting on top of the baseboards. When I’m done, I tell the night staff. They come with the latex gloves and a plastic bag. In the morning, I see a worker with a screwdriver, taking off the cover of an air vent. Just finding someone’s stairway to heaven, she tells me, smiling.

I have no idea where this is going to end. I do know it’s not going to be over for a while and that is disturbing. Downstairs, Mary is still shrieking. My crazy roommate has gone out for a walk, wearing sunglasses––it’s nine p.m. I’m feeling defeated. I’m a cancer survivor but I’m not sure I’m going to survive this government.

Tonight, Mary keeps us all awake. My roommate goes into a tail spin and stomps out the room door shrieking for Mary to shut the hell up. I pull a pillow over my head. In the morning, I look into hostels and find that even they are way outside my price range, although perhaps one night...

I talk to one of the workers, tell her that I’m worried about going to Vancouver without a place to hang my hat. She tells me to talk to the daytime staff in the morning. In the morning, I tell them I still have nowhere to go and it’s my last day. The girl tells me she will make three calls only for me to places which turned me down only three weeks before. She’s successful on the first call and I’m relieved. I still have to be out of the house until eleven, rather than stay and pack. Absolutely nobody is willing to bend the rules for anyone on anything.

Feeling more confident, on this, the next-to-last day of the month, I drag my belongings onto another bus and head for the ferry and out into the great known. I’m a Vancouverite at heart and I’ve been dying of homesickness for a city that just might want me back. All I can do is hope for the best. My IM friend calls it jumping off the diving board and hoping there’s water in the pool, but it’s not that. This time, they’re throwing me off the diving board. I hope I can remember how to swim on the way down.

END

I did get to Vancouver and the women's shelter here was much better. I was in the shelter for nearly three months before I found a suitable place to live and a job. Still in pain, I went to teh cancer centre, finally, and they diagnosed a repeat performance of the cancer. I managed to live a normal life for only a few months.

Although I xouldn't exactly call living in a hospice 'normal', it is at least comfortable and I'm no longer in pain. And thanks be to God for that.

Judith

My Pix

Virtual Tales