July 3, 2007
ReReading BeGins
And so The ReReading Project Re-begins with The Portrait of a Lady, last read in August 2000 according to what I wrote on the title page. It was for an undergraduate English course. I was a burgeoning feminist then, and remember being entranced by Henrietta Stackpole who wouldn’t consider marriage: “Not til I’ve seen Europe”. Which became my mantra (not that anyone was dying to marry me anyway), and I did get to Europe (where I found a husband, so there you go). I’ve just glanced at the first page so far, but the first paragraph is far more meaningful now than it must have been back in 2000. Begins the book, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Yes yes yes!! I didn’t even like tea in 2000, I don’t think, but now I see that no other sentence has ever been so true.
July 2, 2007
My Canada Day Pancake Nightmare
(In lieu of having celebrated this Canada Day in any particular fashion, I bring you a flashback to Canada Day 2004.)
Soon after I volunteered to work at the International Friendship Festival in Himeji Japan, I began receiving strange phone calls. The callers would inform me that they had passed my number onto someone else, and then that someone would call later with a similar message. Finally, a Mrs. Ito reached me and informed me that I would be cooking pancakes at the Festival’s Canadian food booth. The Canadianness would be featured in that pancake accessory, I assumed, the old stand-by, maple syrup.
I tried explaining to Mrs. Ito that having me cook was a bad idea. I once messed up a recipe with three steps by doing them in the wrong order. I have a dangerous faith in ingredient substitution. My cooking is perfectly abominable in every single way. I did have other skills that could probably put me to better use. But Mrs. Ito wasn’t having any of it. She arranged to meet me the next day back at the International Centre.
When we met, her smile was larger than her face, but she pretended to not understand English when I tried to protest the pancakes. There was no turning back, no matter how hard I attempted retreat. Mrs. Ito instructed me that I would face a “cooking rehearsal” on July 1st, the following week. That I was to come bearing ingredients. I left her that day, confused and annoyed.
I found half a packet of pancake mix left over in the cupboard from Shrove Tuesday, and I bought a cheap bottle of Japanese pancake syrup the morning of my rehearsal. I even remembered egg and oil, which I thought was impressive. I did wonder if I should have been making the pancakes from scratch, but I felt so concurrently coerced and put-out that I decided that if Mrs. Ito didn’t like it, frankly, she could stuff it.
But I just had this feeling. A fear of a cooking rehearsal far too strong to be sensible. What could possibly go wrong— just me and Mrs. Ito in a little kitchen? However my apprehension was particularly nagging, so I asked my then-boyfriend Stuart to come with me, and because he feared I was having a nervous breakdown, he reluctantly consented.
Immediately upon arrival at the International Centre as scheduled, I seriously contemplated turning around and sprinting home, but we had already been spotted. We entered the kitchen where we were greeted by sixteen women seated waiting at a table, and they expressed their happiness at attending this wonderful Canadian lunch today. And I desired to be swallowed by the air.
I reluctantly took my “ingredients” from my backpack. “Mix?” they said, evidently a similar word in English and Japanese. Thirty two eyes examined the mix curiously. Much conversation ensued. Presumably about how half a packet of pancake mix would feed sixteen expectant lunchers. After a hasty conference among themselves, it was decided that everyone would have a tiny pancake. So there remained the issue of my inability to cook, but that was ok, mostly because Stuart did most of it. Chatter between the women continued throughout the cooking, and in spite of their big smiles, I didn’t get the impression they were singing my praises.
And the worst was still to come. It was time for the maple syrup, freshly tapped from a Japanese factory. I quickly tore off the label, and when Mrs. Ito asked if it was Canadian maple syrup, I lied and said yes. Clearly the International Friendship Festival Committee were not convinced.
It was the wrong colour, they thought. “Is it honey?” the women kept asking me. That it truly was maple syrup was some form of rightousness. I retained my resolve and the women stopped questioning me. However their own conversation continued in Japanese, smattered with exclaimations of the word “maple” and several audible question marks.
When dinner was served and we all sat down to eat our coin sized pancake. The pancakes were good, and the women were very friendly and someone had found some cookies to make the meal go further. I told them that today was Canada’s birthday, and their all applauded. And then I remembered a bag of Canadian Flag pins in my purse, like a treasure in my hold. I passed them out, and the mood softened a bit at that. The pins lent a certain authenticity to my act. Not only was I an authentic idiot, but a Canadian one too.
Conversation was awkward, mostly consisting of people pointing and laughing at Stuart and I. They talked to me a bit about the Friendship Festival, which I, miraculously, was still supposed to be attending. They asked if I could get some Canadian flags and various paraphernalia for the Canada booth and I told them I could find out if the embassy could provide us with something. Somebody translated into Japanese that I had many friends at the embassy who would supply us with Canadian things, and at that point I began to see how these sorts of misunderstandings get started.
June 14, 2007
Remember when the boys were all electric?
What a good lunch break I had today, dropping out of a brilliant game of catch to read in the grass until the boys were ready to go back in. Sunny with a breeze. Now reading So May Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor, which connects me to the England I’m missing furiously post-vacation*. The book is wonderful so far. I read McGregor’s first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things a million years ago, and though I enjoyed it and McGregor himself was doing something remarkable, the book wasn’t perfect. Whereas the sense I’m getting so far is that in his second novel, he’s finding his feet. Which is so exciting, and it’s wonderful to think of his career still ahead of him and books books to read. It will be nice to follow along, just as it has been so far.
And I was very happy to see that Madeleine Thien’s Certainty was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Pleased that Heather O’Neill’s much-deserving Lullabies for Little Criminals is on the list as well, but I’m rooting for Certainty. O’Neill’s had plenty of fun already, and Certainty is the very best book I’ve read this year.
*Ah, missing furiously. I listen to BBC Radio1 at work, and every since Monday have heard the songs we listened to as we drove across the North of England with the top down, and never in my life have I felt such nostalgia for a last week.
May 29, 2007
Summer on the Shelf
I mentioned before the psychological problems books can cause me– when I read Fight Club and became psychotic, and how prairie fiction puts the weight of the world on my shoulders. Here’s a new one, though I can’t blame it on the text. Remember a few weeks back when I said I was going to read Summer? I really had the best intentions, and even went and picked it off the shelf. So far so good, and I opened up the book. I was surprised by the dedication on the inside cover, by a friend who was once a best friend, and is now a friend no longer. I had forgotten the book had come from her, and to read her words and how sad they’ve come to be with time was positively devastating. I am not so much in the habit of losing friends, you see, and blantant proof of that loss was hard to take. And so I put the book back on the shelf where I suspect it will remain.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
April 23, 2007
Sassy
Banana Yoshimoto, according to the blurb on my 1994 copy of Kitchen, is “hotter than a steamin’ bowl of yaki soba” sez Sassy. Oh Sassy.
First, isn’t that vaguely offensive? Like saying, “James Joyce is more tuberlier than a potato”. Or “Virginia Woolf is more captivating than an Imperialist”. “Ali Smith is more down to earth than a turnip”. I could go on and on. Would a writer really want to be compared to a bowl of noodles?
I never really got Sassy. I was a bit too young, and way too uncool. References to orl sx and body piercing made me uncomfortable, and I was frightened of drugs and dyed hair (because we all know that one just leads to the other). I was so uncool in Sassy‘s heyday that I found out Kurt Cobain died just before symphonic band practice. We were at Britt’s house, and Jennie delivered the news. She thought his name was Kirk, and we weren’t sure that it wasn’t. I knew the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” because I’d read an article about it in my mom’s Chatelaine. And this was our youth. The very beginning of it, at least. Luckily I got more in touch, but by the time I did, Sassy was already dead.
April 2, 2007
Carry my desk
Thesis=Submitted. Which feels much less exciting than it is. I have this evening for a breath of fresh air before tomorrow when 75 undergraduate papers to-be-marked enter my life, and then after that I have to find a job. But in the meantime, this evening at least.
I am so grateful to my friends Jennie, Britt and Bronwyn, as well as my husb Stuart, each of whom read through the whole thing during the last two weeks and alerted me to copy errors so numerous I am ashamed of myself. They are acknowledged in my acknowledgments, of course. And the book itself is dedicated to Stuart, naturally, reading, “This story is for Stuart, who carried my desk home on his bicycle.” True story.
Once upon a time Stuart and I lived in a one-roomed box. This was not the first place we’d lived together, of course. Previously we’d spent six months sleeping on an inflatable mattress in a ramshackle house with holes in the roof. The box felt like luxury in comparison, and we were very happy there. Sunshine came through that window absolutely beautifully. And one day I set my sights upon a desk. A desk which we had no room for, but I needed a space to sit and write all the same. Such space doesn’t come easy when you live in a box. And so Stuart agreed, and we bought a little desk at Muji. A little desk that weighed a tonne, and we didn’t have a car. We lived about a half hour walk from the city centre, and my clever husband devised a method wherin the desk was balanced on the seat and handlebars of his bike, which worked perfectly unless we weren’t going straight. But it was certainly better than I could have done, and I admired his might all the home, walking my pink bicycle beside his blue one. And the desk just fit, under the ladder up to our sleeping loft. And it was there where I learned how to sit down and write, which is 75% of everything. And it was then when I realized that here was a boy who would do anything to support me, and that I was tremendously lucky.
March 25, 2007
The Robin Hood Archive
The project I mentioned in this post has nearly come to fruition, thanks to Stuart’s graphic design prowess.
March 16, 2007
Ephemera is forever
You’ve got to wonder about ephemera. How a word whose Greek root means “lasting only a day” could be used to classify the bits and pieces of printed matter we cherish as our keepsakes. And I mean letters, theatre programs, postcards, ticket stubs, brochures, greeting cards, and all such various things which stuff my drawers and cupboards. That these items we save forever could possibly bear an etymological link to the mayfly— any insect of the order ephemeroptera, of course, and noted for its life span of just a few hours— is yet another example of the English language’s perplexity.
But then I have to wonder also about ephemera on my own terms. Because my drawers and cupboards are truly stuffed, and chances are that I’ve got a few good years before me still. From time to time I grow concerned that my desire to keep everything will one day find me buried up to my eyes in printed matter.
In particular, I have a big box in my closet filled with cards of all sorts— birthdays, anniversary, Christmas, Valentines, engagement, bridal showers, wedding etc., as well as a fat stack of postcards I’ve acquired over the years. And I cull this box from time to time; whenever I find a card from a name I no longer recognize, I force myself to toss it in the recycling. But in spite of these efforts, the box’s contents continue to amass at an alarming rate. I rarely even look through this box, but I can hardly bear to part with anything inside it.
I do pity the poor somebody who is left to sort through my ephemera once it has outlived me. Sometimes I wonder if I should just toss the lot of it now to make it easy later, and whether perhaps these things were meant to be ephemeral after all. Did I miss the point, going through my life-so-far hoarding such an abundance of stuff? Maybe there is another word for ephemera, and that word is “crap”, and my suspicions will prove correct that none of it is of interest to anyone but me.
But then I was recently gratified to have it confirmed otherwise. To learn that ephemera can be forever.
When my grandfather passed away recently at the age of 94, of course all of us who will miss him were terribly sad, but there was some relief to be had. In an end to his suffering, and that he would no longer have to live without his wife— she had predeceased him in 1998 after 63 happy years together.
But for us there was further consolation, as the extended family went back to my Aunt and Uncle’s house to visit together following the funeral. And we spent a wonderful afternoon sorting through black and white photographs of familiar faces, and also a box of cards, notes and letters which have lasted much longer than only a day. Some of them were over 70 years old.
I never knew that my grandmother had collected postcards, just like I do. And some of the postcards she saved were truly works of art, with “This is a real photograph” stamped on the back as proof of authenticity. Many of the postcards we found were purchased as souvenirs and never sent, shut up in a box all these years so they still look brand new. Beautiful black and white images of British seaside towns, presumably collected by my grandfather while he served in the navy.
One postcard is labelled “A Rough Sea at Brighton”— a photo of waves crashing up against the long-gone but once-spectacular Palace Pier. The night shots are tinted in reds, yellows and blues for a carnival effect. Some of the postcards were sent through the mail with just a brief note. Usually my grandfather apologizing to his wife that it had been too long, but a letter was to follow. During the war he was away for six years.
The greeting cards in the box were equally fascinating, and not only for the notes they held in store, but as objects in themselves. As with the postcards, there seemed to be a superior quality compared with contemporary cards. They were either very elaborate, with fabric pieces, pop-ups, ribbons, bows and gorgeous art, or they were hilariously cheeky, and just so much more interesting than your average happy birthday.
But the messages inside were what won our hearts after all, whether it was the hastily scrawled signature of someone who hadn’t been remembered in years, or that my grandmother was called “Mom” in quotations in her baby shower cards because momhood was still weeks away then. A third birthday card for my aunt from her dad, or a message from my own dad to his mother pencilled in a shaky childish hand.
It was amusing to see the number of belated-occasion cards exchanged between my grandparents, with their humble notes of “Sorry, I forgot.” Though forgetfulness never undermined the sentiment these cards were expressing.
How amazing to find a card from my grandmother dated 1935 with “Happy Birthday to my Boyfriend” on the front. All the cards from the years they had to spend apart during the war, making clear that they were counting down the days. I especially adored the card my grandfather gave my grandmother for their third anniversary in 1939. He noted that if the rest of the years were as good as the first three had been, then he was a very lucky man.
And he was.
And then so too are we, for having all these treasures to remember him by.
