Today another request! This time Eros! From a male friend could I read a paragraph of a love letter … which was a touching request. He and I don’t agree on much because he is full of youthful idealism, in contrast to my Beckettian acceptance of the awfulness of everything amen, so we often spar, however on this we agreed. The paragraphs were beautiful. Paced. Thought out. Painstakingly so. It was so moving. It was wonderful to see caution thrown to the wind over the more typical strategic cloaked murmurs.
I was rather lifted and moved by the romance of it all. “You’re such a sensualist”, he said critically, but I misheard it as “You’re such an essentialist.”
I like this accidental term essentialist.
***
On the ferry at the weekend it was rough and windy from Cortes to Quadra. I’d never been on a bumpy BC sailing before but I spent my childhood, being of the Sealink generation, back and forth on the vicious Irish sea. Sometimes it was sooo windy we’d have to pull ourselves along the rails outside on the boat and it wouldn’t be possible to get around the corners at the head of the ship. Your hair would be on end!
Between Nanaimo and Van on Sunday it was again windy, but nothing like as hard on the stomach as that Cortes ferry. I was pleading with my son to come out and run along the deck with me for the craic, but he was nervous at the prospect. Given that sea air and fighting the wind is such a rare enough experience and it’s worth tackling nerves and I offered a few games of pac man in the arcade afterwards. Compared to the old Sealink winds of the 1970’s this was merely a bit of a breeze but we’d a hoot pulling through it.
The smell of boats has changed so much. There was almost a diesel or metal industrial smell that pervaded in the 70’s which would dissolve when everyone inevitably started puking their ring up. I recall if the sailing was rough, people had those bags to their noses and vomit would be the pervasive smell. I must look up and see whether things are just as rough between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire and Fishguard.
Was just reading this excerpt of Paul Quarrington’s (RIP) memoir in today’s Globe. Read these few lines and they seem to articulate “a something” is the only way I can put it. A something that often stops me in my tracks or mid thought and puts me into a similar described state of panic.
I tried to be stoic, saying as how I had led a good life, and had lovely friends and loved ones. But then the sight of a very pretty girl reduced me to convulsive sobs. “I’m going to miss this so much,” I managed to get out, although my throat was so knotted with remorse that speech seemed hardly possible.
At last week’s memorial for Anna, for every extraordinary story and anecdote and remembrance shared, I would slump in between recalling that the life so vividly depicted in striking images on the wall and rousing words spoken on a humble community hall stage, that the very life I was learning so much about, had been irretrievably snuffed out. It made the whole thing all the more vicious. And another story or person would stand and my sense of the woman would be enriched further and it became more and more difficult. Yet I was glad to be there, despite the broader struggle it provoked. I also had some distance to take note of this in this situation whereas in other situations I haven’t had that.
I just watched a brief video segment of an interview with a poet, Leslie, 66, who died today. Her face was so extraordinarily beautiful, eyes so vivid and she spoke about losing her breath in Nepal. The above struck me. How can all this, all of this person, now be gone, a once and for all gone? And it can, of course it can and yet how to confront that. The only reassuring thing is that when it happens to an individual they do not “know” it once it is over. But perhaps it is in life leading up to that point we individually confront it. Or not.
The language we use around death does not suffice. We have so much language and yet we use such a select and repetitious series of words to express when someone dies.
This evening’s weather continues to wonder. It had almost a wintery hint to it, a November blur. Yesterday at the garden the beans have started to come up, but they’re not happy, they’re struggling. It’s the soil I think. I can’t quite fathom it, but i know an unhappy bean when I am looking at one. They look parched, and yet it had been raining down on them.
Last year they sprung out of the soil wide and green. This year it’s more a coughing, tickly, half cut yawn. Had a look at another gardener’s beans which are a little ahead of mine and same diagnosis.
The strawberry plants, however, look like they’ve gone on holiday to Sellafield. A kind woman gave me a new plant from a botanic (?) garden in Tofino. I have my original alpine strawberry which I grew from a seedling the size of my little finger. Now she’s a “big hair” strawberry plant. Bouffant.
The weather, ce soir, is close. I have that sky encroaching (barometric pressure) headache. It may also be caused by a glimpse at a perplexing series of headlines such as this one from tomorrow’s Irish Times:
Single parents to lose welfare payment when child turns 13
(and the costs after that child turns 13 go up, up, up! Bright stuff lads. Well done. )
Earlier this week there was a headline that said 1 in 25 in Ireland are in mortgage arrears, while their tax dollars go to fund NAMA.
Then this headline from cbc.ca/bc
Auto-erotic B.C ads too racy: minister
(refers to an abandoned ICBC TV ad campaign to educate young male drivers that cost 2 million, but was deemed too racy and has been dumped)
And finally from The Vancouver Sun.
B.C officials admit warnings over ‘little girl’ parties based on hearsay.
(story that broke earlier this week of grade 8 girls being targeted for sexual conquest competition by older high school teens)
Collectively these headlines suggest we don’t have a clue what we are doing. An attempt to educate in the middle headline is cut down, a need to educate is bungled, and in the first the mere possibility of educating will be effected.
Ball scratching etiquette
There is some room for improvement in etiquette at my favourite local pool. Today an older fella was laid out across the entirety of the steps to get into the pool, or splayed out, hand up his trunks, scratching his left testicle.
That BBC voice of Sorry we interrupt this programme … came to mind.
Tony Judt’s latest memoir piece in the New York Review of Books has a great description of American (university) libraries rising out of the land in places like the midwest in between billboards, strip malls and motels. I loved this co-habitation. Worth a read. Not available in its entirety online, but certainly available at yer local (or Central) library.
Did I mention someone asked me if I had grandchildren last week? I was aghast. Regardez mon visage ! Regardez moi bien dans les yeux! My son was beside me! i had to quickly recall that time someone on the bus asked if he was my younger brother….
Then yesterday at gymnastics, (where your back handspring and tumbles are the only marker of anything) I realized I could technically be the mother of many of them, who could have offspring, and then I returned to bouncing about and upside down ness and recalled some of my favourite women in the world are 70, so if I am up beside them this is a fine thing! Next time I will reply — yes. I left them in the car with their grand dad, Mick Jagger.
A pair of black glasses has been found in Campbell River!
How to figure out if they are mes lunettes though? I could ask Superstore if they’ll watch my literary weather forecast on youtube and match them. Or I could boat and drive it back to Campbell River to discover they’re not mine!
There’s a new greasy spoon/rubby caff I need to sample up there… should I continue my tradition of extravagance/expenditure for a plate of egg and chips. Last year I did a research trip to the same spot to visit a particular diner, that turned out to be a bust compared to what I’d remembered of it. The imagination is always better.
Eyesight, however, does not improve with imagination.
Had an exchange with my friend with whom I purchased the his and hers Betty’s specs all those years ago. He was astonished I still had them, noting that actually yes his original pair were still tucked away in the cupboard. I debated trying to go back to Betty when I hit Dublin. Then he updated me on the price of his last pair since he’s gone all Hugo Boss subsequently. I won’t be joining him chez Hugo! Betty had a bunch of original 50’s frames that her father had sold way back in the day. I actually still have those red curvy “extra set of eyebrows” 50’s specs someplace here. A bit of superglue where I snapped them and new lenses may work. Maybe I could bring them back to Betty. She does a fine eyetest, does Betty, even tho’ it’s in another timezone.
There’s also an optician up by Quebec and Broadway who does a great job, but the glasses you need to sell a to a fattened Angus cow to afford.