I was recently listening to the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby on a road trip with my daughter. Mostly because we only had two musical options in the car at that time, bad talk radio or the Beatles #1 hits CD that has been in the car for three years. I always think I can't bare to hear the songs one more time and then I get into it and before I know it we're listening to Long and Winding Road one more bloody time and I'm singing along. When Eleanor Rigby came on I was surprised my daughter didn't ask me to flip to the next song. She is hyper-sensitive to songs or movies that are too sad. Yesterday, I caught her singing the song to herself. Clearly, she'd taken the whole song in, the entire picture of loneliness. Father McKenzie, Eleanor, the dirt from the grave. All the lonely people. There are so many lonely people that if you even have one kindred spirit in your life, one soul to talk with, count yourself blessed. This is my preamble to talking about marriage, which Leonard Cohen described as (I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly) 'the hardest thing ever'. I don't want to sound ungrateful for my marriage or any of my relationships. I am thankful for all of them. But, what I will say is Leonard Cohen is a wise and respected human being and he makes a point. My parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. This is a milestone that few couples make these days. (Though there must be quite a few couples making it to 60 because that is the milestone you have to make to get a letter from the Queen, or this may be more a reflection on the Queen's staff keeping her workload to a minimum.) I know my parents could not have survived 50 years together without a sense of humour and of course a few tactical maneovres to get through the rough spots. Like chicken. A lesbian friend of mine was talking to her mom about a complicated relationship she was in. After listening, her mother replied that being with a man was easier. "Men are easy because you can just put them in front of the TV with a plate of chicken and they're happy." That is a marriage tactic that likely served her well. My husband's aunt and uncle are in their 90s and happily married. They recently returned from a cruise where two of the best features of vacation were the 'lovely beds'. The Auntie described to me how fluffy the pillows and duvet were. How clean the sheets, how comfortable the mattress. But they were single beds, so they slept separately. When the Aunt and Uncle returned home to their double bed in Wales, the first night back there was a silence. As they adjusted to their own bed (presumably not as cosy and comfortable), the Uncle quietly, dryly said into the darkness "Well, this is not going to work." "He still makes me laugh Elizabeth," is how she ended that story. See, flex that funny bone people, it will save your relationships. Also, (and I'm not saying this is part of my regular repertoire) I have to go make sure the cable bill is paid and thaw some chicken for dinner.
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One misty grey morning, many years ago, I was leading a kindergarten class through a forest looking for Banana Slugs. We were practicing being silent. If someone found a slug, they were to stop and silently "point with their slug tentacles" (holding their fingers above their heads to look like tentacles) at the slug until everyone else in the group was doing the same thing. We hadn't gone very far when the alpha boy at the front of the line spotted a slug. He immediately abandoned the silent bit (who can blame him?), but obediently raised his fingers above his head in a stellar slug impression and yelled back to his classmates "C'mon everybody put up your testicles!" Being four and five years of age no one corrected him on his improper appendage naming. The children all dutifully raised their fingers above their heads and peered at the slug. Though I did annunciate tentacles a bit more the next time I used it, I pretty much carried on as though nothing unusual had just happened. But it had, hadn't it? It was an excellent moment in time that I have never forgotten. There is much talk in environmental education of instilling a sense of wonder in children. There are many books about it. Being out in nature, being quiet, using our senses and just observing things around us helps us to be in the moment and notice things. It instills a connection to nature. It can also help one notice the funny. *I think it was Shakespeare who said "The sacred and the funny doth share the same sword" (*He did not, I just made that up.) Any job, especially those laced with earnest intentions, can unexpectedly lurch into unintended hilarity. As is often the case when we install things with extra meaning, we tend to whisper, we encourage quiet, making the hilarious that much funnier. I refer you to giggling in quiet places of worship when one is not supposed to be laughing. Over the years, as an educator, it has been the children and sometimes the animals, who have unwittingly pointed out the funny to me. (I am purposely here forcing out of my mind the kids who went to the dark side in the forest, threatened squirrels, cursed at teachers, pushed friends into blackberry bushes and so on). What I remember are the little darlings who unknowingly and in their pure earnestness put a smile in my heart if not my face when I had to pretend what they said was not funny. There was the inner city student at the urban park who replied "Safeway" when I asked if anyone could give another example of a food chain. (We had been talking about predators, prey, herbivores and carnivores.) A woman I was working with, asked the Christian school class she was teaching if they knew that people are also animals and a soft-spoken little boy replied "Yes, aren't we all lambs of God?" And on that note Dear Reader I send you off into the wilderness of your day to pause here and there, be quiet and look for the funny. It could be just around the corner. And if all else fails stick up your testicles. Canada is a vast and diverse country. But like most humans, I like to water down diversity and narrow distances into manageable (imaginable) sized pieces. That's why I am nominating the day I spent on horse back in Banff National Park as my most Canadian day ever! (Apologies and Warning to Vegetarians: do not read further. I repeat, Vegetarians Stop Reading NOW!) 1. I saddled up an official Banff National Park back-country warden horse. 2. I was in the company of a real live back-country warden. 3. As we rode our horses through the subalpine forest towards world-famous, picture-postcard-perfect Lake Louise, a cow moose walked almost directly in front of us (nobody died!) 4. When we arrived at the lake we remained hidden in the quiet forest, away from the tourists and ate our packed lunch. 5. Our lunch included moose meat sandwiches! 6. The aforementioned warden had hunted and prepared the moose meat himself. 7. The entire day I was wearing the warden's well-worn old cowboy boots (as I didn't own anything but hiking boots and Birkenstocks at the time). The closest I will get to this personal Canadian pinnacle tomorrow is time in a canoe on some kind of west coast waterbody. But, I'll take that. Happy Canada Day. When I think about bringing back the funny, I look back a lot. But the looking back is helping me notice the present. I've noticed it's a bit like the building up of hope or gratitude in yourself. It's a practice. I can't just expect funny to whollop me over the head, although sometimes it will. I have to pause and notice the the tiny funny moments.
Naturally, this makes me think of bone assemblages. Those tidy arrangements of animal bones that you might come across at an early human site in Africa. Why do I think of this? Because I doubt that our human ancestors, were worried about keeping gratitude journals or how to get ample time to pause and laugh. Also, I wrote a paper about bone assemblages when I was studying physical anthropology in university. You wouldn't immediately suspect it, but this is a funny topic if read out loud to a fellow student. The paper had something to do with ensuring that the archaeologist remembers to consider the incredible impact of scavenging animal behaviour on bone assemblages at early human sites. I think even then, I was bored by the topic and so was using a lot of conjunctions. I asked my friend d.m. to read the paper before I handed it in. She decided to do so out loud in her best scholarly sounding professorial voice. Hearing aloud the repetition of the phrase bone assemblage and my overuse of conjunctions like moreover and however, elevated the paper to a level of hilarity that we had never experienced (you had to be there.) So my point is (I do have one), your funny for the day is to do yourself a favour and watch this one minute clip of Miranda Hart. Your welcome. Yesterday morning in the usual scramble to get everyone out the door, and the dog walked, I was also asked to take a photo of the 11 year old holding my machete from Borneo. I had dig it out from where it is stored next to my great grandmother's dishes from Newfoundland and the fine linens from Wales. I took the photo, which, I am told, ended up where it was supposed to, in her class report about Indonesia. It added extra adventure to the morning. Which reminded me of mornings on the epic Canada or Bust journey with Vanessa. (Dear Reader please refer to the earlier blog entry of April 13, 2015 for the back story). Getting ourselves up and dressed and in the car always involved an adventurous search for our morning coffee. This was in the days before coffee culture. People, there was no Starbucks. I know. I'm not saying this as though Starbucks is the pinnacle of coffee for me personally, though I have been known to go there. I bring up Starbucks for what it is, a marker of what we live in now: A World of Coffee. Back in 1987 on the Bust trip we mostly drank truck stop coffee. Thin watery brews. Fresh. Stale. I'd like to say that my taste buds were affronted, but what did I know? The finest beans I knew had been brewed for the classy offerings at the Simon Fraser University cafeteria: Irish Cream, Hazelnut, Mocha Almond flavoured coffees. I didn't know anything beyond the Folgers commercials I'd been raised on. At this time, Vanessa's mother was working for Melita. The company that sells coffee makers. One night over dinner she told us a story we would never forget. She told us about meeting a guy that day in Vancouver who worked for a company called Starbucks. He told her that one day Starbucks would have a coffee shop on every corner. Oh how we laughed. So it was in that world Dear Reader that we departed on our cross-country journey. It was a world with out rich, fresh, ethically sourced coffee beans. But we made it. We must have because I later went to Borneo and was given a machete. For today, let us be thankful that it is the end of the week and all the assignments are in. Today I'd like to draw your attention to the bat illustration in the photo. No, this is not a prehistoric European cave art replica. Nor is it the work of a small child. It is in fact something I created more than TWENTY years ago, that has been heartedly used by school children since it first appeared. I drew the original, that this photocopy is descended from, in a frenzy one spring morning, minutes before a busload of grade three students were to arrive and use them. Remember, this was before Google. I did not have the option to sort through hundreds of suitable images, select one and print multiple copies. What I did was, look at a picture from one of the many books I used to research the program, and drew this bad boy freehand. I then ran to the photocopier, made copies and cut out each bat with scissors. In the original image, the bat retained its thumbnails for anatomical correctness. You cannot see them here because I can only surmise some interpreter got lazy and lobbed them off. More likely, they were in the same hurry I was on the bats' birthday and desperately needed to finish a new batch for an imminent busload of students. This bat is a prop for a school program about bats and their habitats (aptly named Ha-BAT-itat, [thanks Mike McIntosh]) that I was piloting that morning while working in Vancouver's Stanley Park. The program ended up a success and very popular with teachers. Excellent! Years later, I adapted the program for CRD Parks on Vancouver Island. By now, thousands of children have traipsed through old growth forests with these little hand-bats, on their fingers (there are supposed to be two finger holes cut out where that white oval is on the bat in the picture) making the wings flap and looking for holes and crevices in big west coast trees where bats might roost or hibernate. On the surface, it may seem simple, but as an activity, it's got it all; think, feel and do. The little hand-bat acts as a search image, to help them look differently at the trees around them as potential homes for bats. Among several applications, math skills are used as kids are invited to estimate the number of bats that can fit in each roost site. No matter how careful I am to collect them all up, it is not uncommon after a day of bat programs to find a little bat, with its wings folded in, tucked in a Douglas-fir bark crevice upside down. All good. Love it. The thing is, this bat illustration, that I hurriedly drew and then madly photocopied and cut out that morning, was supposed to be replaced that very day, with the better, permanent version. One that I or someone else would carefully and lovingly draw. It never happened. There was always something more important to do. Deliver programs. Clean up deer mouse droppings. Fundraise for our wages. Even when I brought them across the ocean to Victoria, I meant to fix 'em up, but no, they were adopted here too as complete little beings. Recently I used the bats with a group of kids again and all I can see is the uneven dots for eyes, the wonky ears, lack of nose or or mouth and the unrealistic girth of the bat's chest. Am I going to redo the bat now? Of course not, and rob the children of the joy of their imagination? It's what I intended all along. I'm sure of it. The dog I grew up with was not at all like the large hairy mutt I live with today and he lived a much different life too. Duke, or Duke Ellington III, as was his show name, was a white, miniature purebred poodle, that my family adopted when I was about seven. My parents found him through friends. He belonged to a single woman who loved him fiercely and showed him in dog shows, but could no longer keep him. She lived in Vancouver and would leave a window of her ground floor apartment open so he could go in and out as he pleased while she was away at work during the day. I remember that she cried when we took him home. We were not interested in Duke as a show dog, but benefitted from his excellent manners. He had a deep bark that made him sound more like a German shepherd than a small poodle and I think he believed he was bigger than he actually was. It being the 70s and early 80s we simply opened the front door and let him outside to walk himself through the neighbourhoods. We moved around a lot and I have vivid snapshot memories of Duke in some of the places we lived. He always came back after we let him out, except one time. When we first moved to Calgary, he went out and didn't come back. I don't know how long he was gone, but at least a week. We thought that was it. We'd never see him again. One morning my mom heard a scratch at the front door (his open-the-door cue) and there was a small black dog on the doorstep. Upon closer inspection she realized it was in fact a much filthier version of Duke, who was now a completely different colour, smelled badly and was thoroughly exhausted. Duke kept the mystery of that Calgary sojourn to himself. Though I suspect it involved unspayed female dogs and alley way garbage cans. Also in Calgary, the first time Duke went to a groomer there, my mom received a call shortly after she dropped him off. The groomer needed to know if Duke had been given a sedative, she was annoyed that that information hadn't been disclosed. He hadn't of course, he just enjoyed his grooming sessions and would simply lie down on the table, close his eyes and let the people begin to serve him. When we moved to New Brunswick, to save money, my dad drove our furniture and belongings across the country in a large moving truck. As you do. The rest of us flew there like normal people, but Dad and Duke took to the Trans Canada in a semi. The only problem for my father was when Duke would jump out of the cab at truck stops and pee on the tires of the large burly looking professional driver's trucks. They were probably just surprised to see an elegant white dog hop out of a truck, and not annoyed about the urine at all. One time we were visiting family in Nova Scotia and left Duke for a few days with my aunt and uncle. We hadn't gone very far down the highway, when an announcement came on the local radio station that a small white poodle answering to the name Duke was lost somewhere near Yarmouth and if found to please call Norman. My uncle. At this point in his life Duke was still not neutered. So he was roaming around impregnating the ladies. This came to end when we moved to Kamloops and my parents got an angry call from someone who lived several neighbourhoods away. She had a dog in heat and every time we opened the front door, Duke would race the 15 to 20 minutes it must have taken him to get there and then scratched the lacquer off her new front door. Being a responsible family, we did put an ID tag on our un-neutered dog so luckily she could contact us. That was the end of Duke's stud days. Years after he died an old dog, I still carefully positioned my feet to not step on Duke when getting up from the couch and could feel the exact weight of him in my arms. So it is with these animals we love. Although Bixby, my dog now, leads a more tethered life, before we adopted him I know he spent his early randy months on the beaches around Tofino on Vancouver Island, half starved and running wild. Bixby still asserts his independent spirit, so I won't forget he lives with us, but he is very much his own dog. Just like Duke was. If you need to transport a live fish or cricket somewhere by plastic bag, I can help you out. I can grab and tie the bag so fast that there is a bubble of air trapped at the top, thus giving you time to hurry home and add your fish to an aquarium or feed the crickets to your tarantula. I forgot that I knew how to do this because it's not something required in my current day to day. But I had to do this recently while working a rare nature house shift (oh how I've grown). The salamanders needed their crickets and the crickets had to wait under someone's desk for just a few more hours. Thus I saved them (temporarily) with my nifty plastic bag manoeuvre and also the office was saved from crickets running wild. Cricket containment and oxygen is not so funny, but that I have an ingrained body memory of doing this task is funny to me, because with it comes a flood of memories. Cast your mind back Dear Reader. It was the 1980s and the radio was thick with New Wave and Kenny Rogers duets. A heady time indeed. A time for me that was infused with the hopes and dreams that a first job in Canada's suburbs entails. Fittingly, I asked myself not, "How can I plan for my future and save this money for my education?" but "What will I buy at the mall next week with all the money I made at the mall last week?" Orange Julius - Check MIcrowave pizza from the counter next to the Orange Julius - Check Chocolate covered coffee beans from Debbie at the kitchen store - Check The new Bob & Doug album from Sam the Record Man - Check A Goody hairbrush from K-Mart - Check And of course oil for my Pinto that was getting me back and forth to the mall, because it was the burbs in the 80s and busses and biking were unheard of and frowned upon. That Pinto went through a lot of oil. These were not the salad days, but they were the formative years, I realized while recently bagging up those crickets. I didn't know then I wasn't just learning how to bag fish, I was learning how to live. And that is why I recommend Waldorf schools and homeschooling in the country for your children. Keep them away from the malls! How can you not love a book that comes with a little sticker on the front that says "Win a magical stay in an Irish Castle!" All right don't get all judgey. I loves my Can Lit and my chewy nourishing literature too. But sometimes, I need to read a Nora Roberts novel and pretend I'm in her version of Ireland. Some days a person just has to believe they could win a magical stay in an Irish castle, even when the book is from the library and the contest has long expired. Also, I've been to Ireland and was lost in Dublin with my cousin upon leaving the Guinness factory (unrelated events). So, it's not like I actually believe Ireland is a land of magical castles. What it is, is a land of magical dairy products. The first morning, at a coffee shop, there was only milk on offer for my coffee. I was about to ask for some cream, when Angela said, "Just try it with the milk. You don't need cream here, the milk is so thick." And she was very right. Magic. My cousin Angela lives in Ireland, but we're not Irish. Unless you count the time another cousin and I were mistaken for being Irish in a Halifax pub by some of the US Coast Guard. "I love the Irish!" I overheard the drunken officer say to one of his men, as he watched us dance our improvised jigs and reels to some classic Privateer's Wharf booming celtic tunes. It is an exquisitely beautiful, warm, sunny May day here and I for one will be enjoying it outside while reading my Nora Roberts amidst the smell of rioting Victoria blossoms and the sound of Violet Green Swallows fighting over nesting material. It's not an Irish castle, but it's magic. I recently took a beginner pottery class and created the bunny shown in Exhibit A. (See Exhibit A). I also made some bowls and dishes that I am actually, genuinely pleased with, but I'm not going to show you those. I want you to see this bunny, because the bunny has no soul. I slapped it together quickly in the first class. I was longing to get straight to the wheel and feel the clay slipping and spinning between my hands, something I had wanted to do for a long time. In exasperation, I created the bunny. This clay rabbit will soon find itself outside in a garden somewhere, but for now it's a reminder to myself of what happens when you do things half-assed. I rushed through, pushing it's little life together all the while imagining what I'd do when I got to the wheel. Poor creature to have such an uncaring, unfocussed Creator. The bunny reminds me of a story I wrote in a creative writing class in high school. The story was about a chocolate Easter bunny factory where one of the bunnies finds out that the conveyor belt, the bunnies, the factory, the whole thing is a great conspiracy kept hidden from the rabbits. They are all being created to be eaten by humans. There was a heated revolt and you know what happens to chocolate around heat. It wasn't pretty, but there was a nice story arc, and the deeper underlying existential implications are obvious. I went to high school in Langley BC, about an hours drive east of Vancouver. My family moved there when I was 13. I figured we would move again in a year or two, as had been my experience, so I pointedly told my new best friend not to get too attached as I would be leaving all too soon. We didn't move, and last fall she reminded me of this line. (See! Happy ending. We're still friends!) I ended up graduating high school in Langley. But my approach to the stickiness of time and goodbyes had been formed: Save yourself the heartache and hold back a bit of yourself because it's all going to come crashing to an end eventually. I don't advise this as a life approach at all. I'm just saying that has been one of my survival tactics. We've all got them. The problem of living half-heartedly is when you miss out on the painful stuff you also miss out on the good stuff. Life is bittersweet. I think this is what Joseph Campbell is talking about when he says "Say yes to the adventure." You have to say 'yes' to all of it, not just the sweetness. And even while you're dipping deeply into the darkness, life, if you let it, finds a way to remind you that there is also wonder and delight. As Leonard Cohen aptly says, "I've studied deeply in the philosophies and religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through." Speaking of Leonard, I was watching his brilliant "Live in London" concert DVD last week with my 11 year old. After a few songs she earnestly said, "It's too bad he's Jewish, he would make a really good Christmas album". After just a few songs in, what she heard told her that this man's voice could handle the only sacred songs she knows. On the surface, it's a funny line, in an 'out of the mouths of babes' kind of way, but I didn't laugh, because it was a, thoughtful, astute observation. To me, that's the best stuff, when language can cut to the heart of life like that. That's why kids are so wise and closer to the poets, not judging every thought that comes out of their minds. It's what Picasso meant by "Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up." Since this has become a blog of quotations, the Dalai Lama said: We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid or we can let them soften us, and make us kinder. You always have this choice. " With that in mind maybe I shouldn't be so hard on my half-assed, soulless bunny? Maybe soulless is a little strong? Nah. |
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