With another federal election upon us, I returned to something I wrote during the last election campaign, something I wrote out of frustration when I couldn’t find myself in the category so many politicians refer to as “the ordinary Canadian.” I felt like Rick Mercer on a rant. I don’t do rants nearly as well as Rick Mercer does, but this is what came out of my mind that day.

the ordinary canadian wears sweaters of all colours
the ordinary canadian gets through winter by looking forward to summer
the ordinary canadian sighs when autumn leaves dazzle
breathes deeply when spring jumps into the air
the ordinary canadian cares about nourishing the planet
the ordinary canadian loves to laugh is not afraid to cry
the ordinary canadian has work to do bills to pay
family to look after friends to visit
the ordinary canadian pays taxes in order to live an ordinary canadian life
the ordinary canadian gives money and time when she has money and time to give
the ordinary canadian walks cycles rides surfs to school job grocery store
post office doctor’s office ticket office
the ordinary canadian cheers for the underdog
the ordinary canadian taps claps snaps toes hands fingers
in time to the music of the world
the ordinary canadian reads writes songs poems plays books
the ordinary canadian creates consumes ordinary canadian stories on
pages stages small screens big screens
the ordinary canadian admires sculpts paints
valuable invaluable ordinary canadian works of art
the ordinary canadian is appalled by suffering torture violence
war poverty cruelty to animals the idea of children going to jail
the ordinary canadian strides across artificial boundaries
articulated by artificial boundary-makers
the ordinary canadian understands that culture is connected
to the economy is connected to the environment is connected to social justice
the ordinary canadian feels both despair and hope in the same moment
the ordinary canadian does not fit in a box

Life gets in the way of blogging. Or perhaps blogging gets in the way of life. Whatever it is, since I last posted on this website, I finished one book, began intensive work on two others, and forgot to pay attention to my online writing. I’m back now. But, to my dismay, the thing I want to talk about the most today is the weather. Perhaps the most common topic of comfortable conversation, I usually avoid chatting about the weather because it so often feels like a trite filler.

Yet, I see that this time last year I was lamenting about the fickleness of springtime in Alberta, so I contradict myself already. This year, as I look out my window, I see more snow in my yard than ever before. So much snow, in fact, that I fear it will still be here in September, that we will have spent our summer watching our snow drifts dwindle.

I did escape winter for a while. To the warmth of Cozumel. It wasn’t warm when we arrived. Cool, rainy, windy conditions greeted us. The seas were heavy. As we stood waiting in Playa del Carmen for the ferry that would take us across to Cozumel, we watched the roaring surf pound the pier. When our ferry arrived, we watched the crew struggle with it for at least twenty minutes before they were able to bring it close enough to the dock for passengers to disembark. I had to force my feet to make the walk up to that boat and cross that bucking gangplank. Thirty-six minutes later, after gratefully disembarking on the other side, as we stood waiting at the taxi stand, we were completely drenched by one huge wave that leapt over the breakwater.

The next day, blue skies returned to Cozumel and I developed a severe sun allergy. Confined to the shade for most of our holiday, I read a lot. I developed a routine. I spent mornings sitting on the shady balcony in my room, glancing up occasionally to watch cruise ships sail by in front of our small quiet hotel. In the afternoons, I took my writing pad down to the beach and planted myself in a shady lounge chair. I didn’t write much. I spent a lot of time watching other people swim or snorkel.

In the near distance, out on a point, I could see the deteriorating remains of what used to be a restaurant. Always attracted by decay, I covered myself with flowy garments from head to toe, grabbed my camera, and began to explore that ruined restaurant and the hotel it used to be part of. Almost flattened when Hurricane Wilma hit Cozumel back in 2005, they remain untouched today, abandoned completely after the ocean rose up on the east side of the island and roared right across it.

In Alberta, we often console ourselves during our long winters by saying “at least we don’t get hurricanes.” Today, stunned by the images of devastation in Japan, I add earthquakes and tsunamis to that list. I know they are geological phenomena and not really weather, but, like hurricanes, they are massive forces that shatter human notions that we have any control over anything. As I sit scratching at the remains of my sun allergy, I feel small and helpless. The weather. As I said, I don’t really like to talk about it.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Many people have asked me why I write. Well, a few people have asked me why I write. Okay, two people have asked me why I write. And I thank them for asking because it’s a good question, one I like a lot better than “what are you writing?” I don’t like to talk about what I’m writing at the moment because it’s still taking shape. Talking about it out loud might change that shape before I even know what it is. So I usually deflect that question with a vague answer like “I’m working on several projects right now.”

But thinking about why I write is fun. The first thing that comes to my mind is that I like to put words together. That’s what got me started writing back when I was about sixteen. It felt good to string some words together in a sentence and then start playing around with the different ways that sentence could read.

Now that I’m considerably older than sixteen, I find writing is much more than playing with words, although that’s still a lot of fun. Today, I write to figure things out. I write to discover what I think about my world. I write to find meaning in a world full of contradictions and confusion. I think a lot of writers will mention something like that when considering their reasons for writing. Writing is a way to explore the world we live in, whether we do it by writing poetry or telling the stories of our real lives or creating fictional characters and putting them in imagined situations.

Poetry starts differently than other types of writing. It starts with a sound or a shape or a rhythm, something that just won’t get out of my head until I record it somewhere and start rolling it out, like pastry. My poetry is where I put the fragments that don’t fit in my life-writing or my fiction.

For me, both fiction and non-fiction starts with people, people I need to know more about (myself included). I think non-fiction writing forms such as memoir have meaning when the story rises above self-indulgent navel-gazing and offers a glimpse into the social and cultural conditions that affect individual lives. Stories are still the most important connections people have with one another. We can’t really know each other unless we know each other’s stories.

Sometimes the people I need to know more about are out of my reach, but they stay with me anyway. Six years ago, my husband and I went to Europe. We traveled by train through France and Italy. It was a memorable trip filled with sightseeing. In our last week, we stayed in a seaside Italian town called Alassio. We were “museumed” out by this time and just wanted to relax.

Not far from the French border, Alassio has a beautiful beach. When people in Alassio go to the beach, they dress in their day clothes and carry their beachwear with them in smart colourful tote bags. Then they change in a little cabana and make their way to assigned lounge chairs lined up along the water’s edge. It’s all very orderly and civilized. George and I settled in to read and swim for the day. The sand was beautiful, fine-grained and meticulously clean; beach workers raked it constantly, burying any stones and shells they found.

I noticed a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties, escorting an elderly woman with scarred legs down to the water. Badly swollen, both her legs were an angry purple colour from the knees down. She was unsteady on her feet and leaned heavily on his arm. They stood together ankle-deep in the water for about twenty minutes, sometimes talking, sometimes not. Then he escorted her back to her chair. He knelt down to wrap surgical bandages around her legs, then he put a towel over her knees, and adjusted the umbrella so that she was in the shade. Then he stood up and walked to the other end of the beach where he sat down in his own chair. They sat separately like that for two hours, when went to her again, unwrapped the bandages on her legs, and walked her down to the water where they stayed for another twenty minutes. My husband and I went for lunch. When we came back, I watched the middle-aged man and the old woman with the bad legs go through the whole process again for a third time.

They have fascinated me ever since. For six years, I’ve kept my notes about them in a file. Who were they? I don’t know. I imagine them as mother and son. Why didn’t they sit together? I don’t know. I imagine that they were estranged for some reason, a deep-seated family rift they’ve never managed to heal. If they were estranged, why was he so attentive to her need to stand by the sea? I don’t know. I imagine that perhaps she didn’t have long to live, that maybe the impending end of her life was a new beginning for him.

So there they stay, still very much alive in my notes and my memory, waiting for me to write a story about them. I’ve grown very fond of these two people, so fond that I like having them as a story I might write someday. In the meantime, a line-up of other characters wait to get out of my head. That’s why I write. To get to know the people in my head, real or imagined.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

I fear that I’m the only person in Canada who thinks the lyrics to our national anthem should be changed. In today’s Globe and Mail, even Bruce Cockburn, he of “Last Night in the World,” and “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” and “Call it Democracy,” even Bruce, who I have listened to all my life from far away and very near (twice, right in front of the main stage at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival), even Bruce (may I call you Bruce, Bruce?) says it doesn’t matter much.

I want to remind Bruce that he might feel like that because that he is someone’s son: he is one of those who can “command” in that irksome line. If he were someone’s daughter, like me, he might feel differently. He might, like me, feel excluded from the “true patriot love” because “he” would be “she,” therefore not considered a patriot, not considered reliable enough to respond to her nation’s “command.”

More than a week has passed since the O Canada lyrics made the news. I now think of the Throne Speech’s inclusion of the pesky lyrics issue, which is obviously not an issue for many people given the feeble response it has evoked (are there any women’s groups left out there, or have they all gone the way of Status of Women funding?), as a red herring.

I don’t think the government ever really wanted to look at changing the lyrics. I think they placed it in the Throne Speech as a rallying point for their electorate. I think our Conservative government has used the lyrics issue to firm up their support. (After all, we never know when the next election might be.) And sure enough, according to the government, their support came through just fine. Not only did Canadians come through for the government, they did so in only two days. Forty-eight hours after the Throne Speech, the government had enough feedback to decide that the issue was settled, that no change to the lyrics of O Canada was necessary.

Meanwhile, those of us who may disagree (and I feel quite lonely in my little group of one here) had barely roused ourselves from our liberalesque reveries. That makes me sad. So sad that I did a little investigating on my own. Based on deep, highly intensive, thorough research – which I think matches the method-gathering technique used by the government on this issue (I spent a couple of days reading online messages and googling the internet) – I’ve made some discoveries about our national anthem.

These are my “wiki-esque” findings. Our anthem was written back in 1880 as patriotic song for French-Canadians. Needless to say, the lyrics were in French. The first time it was sung in public was in Quebec City. Fairly malleable throughout the years, the song has undergone numerous changes since 1880, not the least of which is its translation from French to English. (I should investigate the connotations of the French lyrics, and I might, but I’d need more than two days.)

Robert Stanley Weir wrote the English lyrics in 1908. It didn’t take me long to find Weir’s original words: they’re posted on You Tube. I think he might be pleased about that, but then I have no idea who he was (I might do that research, but then again, maybe not).

In many ways, Weir’s lyrics are similar to those we sing today. But “in all thy sons command” does not appear in Weir’s version. Instead, that line is “thou dost in us command.” I like that: “us” includes everybody. In fact, Weir’s first verse is completely gender neutral. It’s not until the third verse that the lyrics become sexist: “may stalwart sons and gentle maidens rise.” So, back in 1908, in those days before women could even vote, our national anthem at least mentions us. And even though I find it distasteful that we had to be “gentle maidens”, we are present, not relegated to complete invisibility behind all our commanding brothers as we are today.

People say they don’t want to learn new lyrics. I say let’s just learn a new line. People say the line doesn’t matter. I say that most of the people who say it doesn’t matter are sons, not daughters. And many “daughters” don’t want to upset the “sons” in their lives by supporting a lyric change, so they say nothing, which is unfortunately taken to mean that they agree with those who say it doesn’t matter. Silence is acceptance, remember? Feminism 101.

People say we shouldn’t mess with tradition. I say some tradition should be messed with. Not all tradition is honourable. In fact, many traditions preserve ideas and assumptions that are downright dishonourable. In keeping the lyrics to O Canada the same for the sake of tradition, we are upholding age-old traditions that promote restrictive sexist attitudes towards women.

And now one of my favourite singer-songwriters says it doesn’t matter.

Sigh. I’ll never be able to listen to Bruce Cockburn the same way again.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

My husband and I returned from a month in Mexico almost ten days ago, but I can still hear the ocean. Yes, I know how lucky I am to have spent all of February in Bucerias, a cheery town just north of Puerto Vallarta on the shores of Banderas Bay.

For George and I, our month away was an experiment. What would it be like to be away from home for a whole month? Would we be able to manage our lives from so far away? Used to time and space away from each other in our daily routines, how would we get along together all day every day for a month?

In the time leading up to our end of January departure, we envisioned how our February would go. George saw it as an almost endless expanse of days he would somehow have to fill without his usual access to business and social allies. Anticipating that he would need something special to do, he took a scuba-diving course before we left to prepare himself for getting open-water certification during our trip, perhaps seeing himself under the waters of Banderas Bay more days than not.

While George viewed our four weeks away as a huge number of days that needed to be filled, I saw the coming month as not enough time. How would I fit everything I wanted to do in just four weeks?

Before we left, I envisioned myself running and working out every morning, thus establishing a routine I had been unable to tie myself to in my regular environment. In Bucerias, I imagined that I would familiarize my body with this daily practice and bring a healthy new habit home with me. Then, after a morning of activities that might include swimming, snorkeling, hiking, exploring the surrounding areas, or golf, I’d spend every afternoon writing, perched on a chair on a balcony overlooking the ocean, allowing it to lift and inspire my fingers on my keyboard. I bought a fresh notebook to record the ideas that would occur to me every minute, every hour of every day. I planned to stay true to my writing process, quickly jotting down the gist of each idea on paper, so that nothing would be lost, so that I could take my notes to my computer each evening and shape them into whatever they might want to become, perhaps a series of poems or a collection of character-driven vignettes.

With these expectations, George and I boarded our flight south eagerly anticipating the coming month. Now that our February experiment is over, I have had a chance to analyze its results.

George made exactly six dives, achieving his open-water certification easily in the first week, then diving with our daughter Samantha twice during the second. Thanks to wireless connections, his business and social activities continued on largely uninterrupted. He actively participated in our sightseeing adventures and readily found other people than me to talk to. He developed excellent balcony and poolside lounging skills. He did just fine on our month-long trip.

As for me, I worked out in the little gym fairly regularly for the first two weeks and not at all in the last two. I ran almost every day for the first week, about every second day in the second, sporadically in the third and fourth. Some mornings, I’d start out intending to run, but the coffee shop across the street sometimes drew me in first, leading to a leisurely sit on my balcony that replaced my run because by the time I finished my latte the sun was far too high in the sky, the day was too hot, and the pool beckoned. The elusive practice of becoming a daily morning runner eludes me still.

As for my other expectations, I snorkeled (twice), explored the surrounding areas on several terrific excursions, and played three rounds of golf. Those things fit in with my initial plan.

Sadly, my fresh writing notebook has far more unfilled pages than filled ones. It’s not that I don’t have ideas; I do. The Magnificent Frigatebirds that soar high over the water fascinated me, as did the pelicans and the surfers and the lone fisherman who floats his nets out into the bay in a red washtub that he stores behind a palm tree on the beach. But these fragments still float in my head, not letting me know what I should do with them, not ready to begin the transformation from my senses to my notebook, from my notebook to my computer.

I think one of my problems was that the Puerto Vallarta area has many distractions, not the least of which is the sun. (And here I’ll switch to the present tense, because I know the sun’s presence in PV continues on even though I’m no longer there.)

The Banderas Bay sun launches each day by extinguishing the stars in a sky that is still dark thirty minutes before its rise. It puts the finishing touches on each day with a slow sink into the sea, illuminating both water and windows from La Cruz to Mismaloya. When clouds cover the sun, people look to where they came from hoping no more are following. But when the sun blazes unobscured for several days or even weeks in a row, people look for clouds, just a few, to provide a little relief.

Under the sun’s path, the ocean is prominent. The tide inexorably moves in, pushing beach walkers up to the last few feet of sand. Just as inexorably, the tide slides out, inviting all to stroll the wide beach expanse, whether human, canine, feline, even equine.

I have always wanted to have an extended stay right beside the ocean, to experience the ocean’s soothing lull night after night for more than just a week or two. I’ve always yearned to fall asleep to the rhythmic sounds of waves slipping in and out over the sand.

Perhaps the most startling thing I learned from our Bucerias experiment is that the ocean does not lull. During the first night we spent in our rented oceanfront condo, we slept with the balcony door wide open. Well, George slept. I lay on the bed waiting for the lulling part to happen.

The second night, we closed the door halfway. George fell asleep instantly. I, exhausted, slept for an hour, then lay awake again waiting for the ocean to lull. The third night, I firmly closed the patio door. I slept for two hours, discovering that the ocean’s presence easily penetrates glass. The next night, I closed the door and reached for the bright orange foamy earplugs I keep in my toiletries kit. I slept like a contented baby until the morning sun blinked the stars out one by one.

So, although I failed to turn myself into a daily runner and didn’t return from Mexico with a computer full of completed writing projects, I learned something important this trip. I learned that the ocean is loud. It doesn’t lull. It pounds. It crashes and roars. Even when its surface is seemingly calm, waves thunder onto the sand. At times during those first two nights, after a few moments when lulling seemed ready to break out in the next instant, I would almost fall asleep. Then, inevitably, the calm would shatter with a bang so loud it sounded as if something had suddenly exploded beside the pool or a sudden cataclysmic storm had materialized out of a clear sky (that happened too, but that’s another story).

During the day, with the doors to our condo wide open, the roar of the waves added to our exotic Mexican experience. I thought, daydreamed, read, chatted, and ate, each activity enhanced by the ocean’s ever-present sounds. At night, however, its surf felt relentless, a machine that had no off switch, a mesmerizing enormity at once hypnotic, fascinating, frightening, and loud. The sounds of the ocean are no lullaby.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be close to it again next year. I’ve already stocked up on earplugs.