Home ground-ed

     Even enthusiastic travellers sometimes ask themselves, what am I doing here? The 10 PM inferno of a subway platform in New York where a seemingly cooperative woman does not distinguish between questions regarding directions, but nods yes to them all. This particular inferno is modelled on a steam laundry.
     Phoenix supplies the pressing part of the operation, ironing asphalt-surfaced parking lots, and so many of them. Heat flares up between car and grocery store, between church door and the white hearse waiting at the curb.

      Of course there were also pre-Raphaelite clouds above saguaro cactus, and an almost teal-coloured full moon sky suddenly rolling red as a haboob, or dust wall, approached. In the morning, the comical sight of lawn chairs in the pool.
     And still a memory of the Hudson flowing cool and a bit choppy beyond the restored walkway that Hurricane Sandy flooded in 2012; the charm of folk art in neighbourhood parks; the talks... on the bus, with two women, about shoes; at the theatre, with a neighbour, about what to see next; at another theatre, with a man who has forgotten the Greek mythology he learned in college, but which it would have helped to know to understand the play.
      Yet, flying northwest from Denver, the sky is clear enough to see the ground change from flat brown rounds and rectangles, many shades of brown, yellow, tired green; then the climbing pinched, squeezed, moulded ranges and the forcing- through blue of rivers that look wide even from 36,000 feet. The mountains rise closer to the belly of the plane and there is snow. Finally, a valley again and a long tidal flat and the Lions across Burrard Inlet that roar: ALMOST!

     Bare feet on the cool kitchen floor, familiar surfaces. Home.

Cameos from a summer's hot end in NY

It starts out reasonably, weather-wise, a perfect blue sky, breezy late August day. St. Peter's Church, mid-town, the last free Thursday concert of the summer, and oh what a finale. The Amina Figarova Sextet, with the tireless, talented Amina, a modest drummer, a flute player whose every breath produces a trill of perfect notes, the trumpeter whose solos are so inventive the audience is not sure when he is finished and clap before he has completed his arc, which produces a grimace of frustration on his face and laughter in his fellow musicians. Good company in Nathan and Le Cora, the former a teacher between jobs and the latter a singer herself. An hour and a half of brilliant jazz, not only free but fabulous.

Standing at the corner of Avenue A and 9th Street, waiting to cross, a woman comes up to the light standard and pulls off some old tape, rubs it smooth, sprays it with silver paint. She is part of a brigade of neighbourhood volunteers that keep Tompkins Square looking good. The next day students from NYU are giving a day of service, working on the other side of the park, weeding flower beds, painting backdrops in the handball court. Sunday morning, while the bells chime at St. Brigid's, a young woman works a worn broom under benches to dislodge litter.

Lincoln Centre, the plaza is full, every chair occupied, some of them since 5:30, maybe earlier, people munching on sandwiches they brought for the evening, or spooning gelato that is sold from a cart parked behind the Philharmonic building, all waiting for the HD presentation of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin to begin at 7:45. The night is torrid, any ruffling of the atmosphere rare as if rationed by a stingy wind God. A beautiful, tastefully but casually dressed, smooth-skinned 86 year old in the chair behind recalls her early days in New York, her playwright husband, the fun they had. Widowed for nearly 20 years, her life is busy with her four children and five grandchildren and events like this one, which she chose because Tchaikovsky is so good with melodies, she says.

The young man sitting next to her, and the striking young woman on his left side, are recent graduates from a City University music programme. He will teach music, and she, a soprano, will continue her studies at Julliard. Perhaps one day, in a colour blind casting of Eugene Onegin, she will step onto the Met stage as Tatiana.

Steaming Sunday afternoon on East 10th. A mid-height man, slight build, neatly dressed, skin the colour of nutmeg, stands as if his feet are literally stuck to the sidewalk in front of a residential building next to a branch library. He is weaving, not violently, but slowly like he is doing T'ai-Chi, which he is not. Arms at his side, head rolling a bit. A delivery boy stops loading a truck to glance over; is he okay? Will he fall? Suspense hangs in the sticky air until someone disposing garbage in the big black bin attracts the man's attention and he waltzes a few steps off. Across the street, a couple in spandex, her with midriff bare, practice handstands.

During an air-conditioned break in The Bean, on First Avenue, a slight man with a thick Polish accent asks, do you know what this music is? He is referring to the rock/pop blasting from the speakers. This is not Mozart, this is not Alleluia, he says, this is Satan, chaos, emotion, destruction. His grey hair is slicked back, making a neat deck that falls to just above his collar. He is clean shaven, but the glasses he wears remind me of Trotsky.

Back into the heat, where people with sacks and rolling carts line up for their portions of potatoes, bananas, small plastic boxes of salad the Bowery Mission is handing out.  Deeper into the park, under the big shade trees, servers ladle hot soup out of industrial-size vats. Just beyond them, and behind a fence, children dodge in and out of jets of water.

Last stop of the day,  a consignment store around the corner, where a sweating, bald headed six-footer tries on sun glasses with white frames and performs along with Elvis, whose voice syrups out from the radio. "On a cold and grey Chicago morning... " but this is New York in late summer, and it is anything but cold.

Chris became surprisingly introspective...

"Chris became surprisingly introspective. 'I did examine myself,' he said. 'Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.'"

These words came from Christoper Knight, the man known as the Hermit of North Pond, in Maine, as quoted in a GQ article by Michael Finkel. Christopher Knight lived for 27 years by himself in the Maine woods, in a well camouflaged tent that was not discovered until he was arrested. He claimed never to have lit a fire and to have survived off food and supplies he stole from cabins and camps, where he was eventually found. The whole story is fascinating, a man who could live so long without human interaction, and how it affected his sense of self.

Plato, having asserted that no man can be entirely self-sufficient, determined though an arcane (to me) mathematical formula in (Laws), that the ideal size for a city would be 5040 people who would be ruled by guardians educated to guide the citizenry wisely. 

Aristotle was looser in his estimate of the lower limit, saying (in Politics) that a city need only be large enough to be self-sufficient and that a city must not be too large to have order and strict rule of law. He felt it important that people have the ability to know one another... to select officials without personally knowing them he describes as 'haphazard'. The ideal upper limit "...the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view."

Now we have New York City, where not only are there eight and half million people in the five boroughs, but an estimated 800 languages spoken. Even standing atop the highest of the many high buildings, it is impossible to take in the population in a single view. Impossible to talk to everyone even if you could speak all those languages, and anyone who personally knows the Mayor and city officials is probably rich or involved in politics, maybe both. In this vast city it's doubtful that anyone feels free in the way Christopher Knight felt free as a hermit. And, though people constantly do it, so much so that a comedienne set-up a "selfie-prohibited zone" in Central Park, self-definition is not as easy as taking out a phone and snapping a picture of yourself. People are identified by how they look, the clothes they wear, what they do, where they live, what they eat, where they shop, how they speak. Yesterday on the number 6 line heading downtown,  a man with perfectly symmetrical corkscrew curls, maybe two inches long, beautifully arranged all over his head, checked out his "do" in the window glass while his daughter, with the exact same style, idled on the one available seat.

There are probably urban hermits living in some old buildings or hiding out in Central Park. One cranky and clever loner finagled a multi-million dollar settlement out of a developer for finally agreeing to move out of the Mayflower Hotel so that it could be torn down to make way for a luxury condo building. Folks such as him live as alone as Christopher Knight did, but their isolation is not geographical, and in this electronic age they may not reach the kind of eccentric peace he found free of mirrors, cameras, application forms, social media; free of the glances we consciously or unconsciously respond to, or the glances that don't come, that we also respond to. Despite all the people to "perform" for, with everyone searching for reflections in their phones or the number of friends or followers or "hits" they have, the only watchers may be those who review surveillance camera footage.







.

Love Scenes

In a perfectly wrought short story, the elements are integrated to create artistic unity: the writer has chosen nothing randomly. Place can say as much about character as how she looks, what he says.

There is a scene in the Merchant-Ivory film "Mr and Mrs Bridge," in which the title characters, played by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, express their love for one another in the vault of a bank. Mr. B, as played by beautiful blue-eyed Paul, is so conservative it seemed to me a brilliant choice on the part of author Evan S. Connell, from whose novel the script was adapted, and Ruth Prawar Jabala, who won an Oscar for best screenplay, to soften this uptight man in a safe place piled with money.

In fact, that sequence inspired a love scene in my novel Flashing Yellow, where a middle-aged couple come together in the storeroom of the hardware store where the woman works. Above them is a shelf of goods waiting to be returned to the manufacturer. The only soft place to lie down is a plastic-wrapped bolt of insulation material.

This time it's a temple, both real and imagined, and the couple is younger, perhaps thirty. Actually the temple is on the third floor and the kitchen on the main floor Across from the lotus pond, there is a porch where she sat with her laptop open, checking email. Maybe contemplating a single line message from a friend, So how's it going? Innocent as that. She doesn't know what to say. The Master she and her partner follow is away in Asia, and instead of following they are more or less leading, holding the place together until he comes back to the remote rocky land from which the building rises high enough to offer a view of the sea. Seldom many people here, the majority from the Master's own Asian country, but a few anglos, like these two, both tall, both dressed in black, him with loose pants that flare, her in a flowing skirt and draping shawl. Clothes that play with the air around them when they move, brushing it, whipping it, collecting the scents of herbs that grow wild among the yellowing grass, gathering burrs. He sounds the wooden clackers that begin the meditation session, she remains in the kitchen to cook the traditional post-meditation lunch, to which the handful of meditators descend when she rings the large bell. She dismisses the compliments on the meal she has prepared from whatever food has been donated, but his apparently humorous comment about her cooking skills sets her off. While the diminutive guests from across the great water chopstick into their mouths food she cooked and keep their eyes on their metal bowls on the long table in the dining room, the young couple meets in the kitchen, which is dark.

Lightning flashes in her big eyes when he reaches for her; he shrinks more deeply into his black clothes.  Furious whispering precedes her skirt swinging exit. Chopsticks murmur against the bottom of the metal bowls.

The insistence of their young bodies, the stress of wanting to detach if they are to live the Zen ideal. Yet denial produces frustration which, in her, leads to anger, which is why she came here in the first place, to deal with that cloud that bursts from her instinctively, though she doesn't wish it to. Desire on top of desire, can she ever really free herself from it?  He has shaved his head; he has become the Master's acolyte and learned the rituals. Something has to give. Is this the end, the beginning of a new phase?

Everyone awaits the Master's return.

Takakkaw...a conversation in moonlight

There was a ribbon of moonlight on the water, rippled evenly as if it were a wide grosgrain ribbon instead of the perfectly shiny satin kind. That's what reminded the two old L.A. friends of a sign they had read at Canada's third highest waterfall: "a ribbon frozen silver until the sun returns and releases it," a description of Takakkaw Falls in winter. As they pronounced it, I imagined Takakkaa, with as many a's as k's. Such a word! Cree, and meaning magnificent, which it was, they said. But the word! It stayed with them so that miles west, in the moonlight, just as they had in their car driving away from Yoho Park where Takakkaw cascades, they tried it with various inflections, different accents on the syllables: Tak-a-kkaw? (beseechingly) Ta- kakkaw. (with finality).

The word riffing got somebody else in the group, a writer, wondering how the first humans to use language decided on the meanings of words. They would have to start by naming things; agreeing on the same sound or combination of sounds for the same object, he speculated. It took a long time, said one of the woman visitors, who is a free-lance cultural anthropologist from New Mexico.

We imagined communication by eyes; desires, needs conveyed by means of facial expression or outright action. Instead of asking for the shell you need to scrape a hide, just take it, which would have led to trouble. Works on the origins of language would make fascinating reading, but where to start? Theories have been controversial, speculatory, based on fossil records and other circumstantial evidence. Maybe 1.8 million years ago homo erectus began the ceaseless talking so common to us now; maybe an earlier version of mankind did. No one knows for sure. 

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries.

— Charles Darwin, 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

Another entire field is devoted to language diversification, and is again, necessarily, without direct evidence, theoretical. But Indonesia alone has 500 different languages, and it should be safe to assume that the differentiation arose from some need; some difference in perceiving things. One way in which language is used is to orient oneself to one's surroundings. Interesting that humans like the Guguu Yimithirr, an aboriginal group in north Queensland, Australia, describe their immediate place in relation to the cardinal directions, north, south, east, west, i.e., the bed to the north, the street to the south, or a global perspective, whereas in English our description in ego-centred, i.e., behind me, to my left, to your right.

The moon rose higher and the group dispersed, and I climbed up the hill, northeast, home to continue reading Karen Joy Fowler's novel, We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, about "sisters" who are human and chimpanzee. Near the end of the novel, the narrator quotes the "father" of another human-family raised chimp who lamented that the people who considered his a failed experiment, because his "daughter" Vikki never spoke, ignored that the ability to speak was the only notable difference between the chimp and human children. Hmm.

Later I found the following from a New York Times Science page: “ 'In principle, a chimp could produce all the sounds a human produces, but they don’t do so because there has been no evolutionary pressure in this direction,' Dr. Zuberbühler said. 'There is nothing to talk about for a chimp because he has no interest in talking about it.' At some point in human evolution, on the other hand, people developed the desire to share thoughts, Dr. Zuberbühler notes. Luckily for them, all the underlying systems of perceiving and producing sounds were already in place as part of the primate heritage, and natural selection had only to find a way of connecting these systems with thought."

Elsewhere in the article other scientists disagree, they feel that apes have plenty to say. The debate is already ages old and continues, but what stopped me is that, according to at least some people, human language stemmed from a desire to share thoughts; not just pass the salt, please, but opinions, speculation, i.e., what do you think of this, of the beginning of language, for example?  Takakkaw!

This Girl Has No Secrets

Her Dad described her as a girl who has no secrets, because this 37 year old metastatic breast cancer patient has posted news about her condition on Facebook for pretty much the whole eight years during which the disease has plotted its intimidating course.

Intimidating is not a word Brigid would use. Battle cancer? This girl - well, woman - who was born tiny and has stayed tiny, around five feet tall (unless wearing the stilettos she favoured) and maybe 98 pounds at her lifelong heaviest, this sparkling spirit does not give up, and the Facebook posts don't tell the whole story. Last weekend, for example, when she relayed the news about the difficulty doctors were having to remove the fluid from her lungs, she mentioned that the first try, which she had dreaded, had not been so bad, but unfortunately not successful either. Her mother later filled in the news that Brigid had texted her at the grocery store to ask if they could meet up."Are you busy?" the text began.... Turns out that Brigid had driven herself to the emergency room when breathing became difficult. The hospital insisted that she have someone with her, but after eight years, Brigid does not like to ask, and all the usual suspects were out doing something else. Not that everyone would not have dropped what they were doing immediately. In addition to a loving husband and parents, and a nearby uncle, she has hundreds of FB friends who comment on her posts, send cards, flowers. The results of each new scan are greeted with words of encouragement, love, hope, or just the "that sucks" that some of her cousins write.

She has been the literal poster girl for the Susan G. Komen activities in her town. Local news broadcasters have interviewed her for a story about breast cancer in young women, in her case, first found when she was under 30. We know when her dogs have a new hair cut, and when her 18 year old cat dies. When her husband is away she sends I love u messages. She posts pictures of herself receiving chemotherapy, beaming from her recliner; group shots with some of her nurses; diagrams of the various conditions she is dealing with. She received the cancer diagnosis on her Dad's birthday, meaning that special day is bitter sweet, but they celebrate anyway, her with photo collages of them together, from her big eyed babyhood to her curly- haired childhood; him with a big bouquet of flowers to celebrate her cancerversary.

So it's no secret that she is in hospital, having endured another surgery, and now with a tube to drain the fluid that accumulates and oxygen to aid breathing. But there are no pictures, not yet. Instead of the stylish woman with the big earrings and the big smile, and a head wrap that matches her outfit, we have words from her husband, who is posting daily news on her behalf. One of the many things she has shown us is that there isn't a single battle when it comes to cancer, but days and weeks of small and large skirmishes, all of which leave some kind of scar. She's a veteran, still campaigning. Dear Brigid.

Spirits of another sort...

Another summer, another Bard on the Beach in Vancouver. The 25th! In 1990, A Midsummer Night's Dream opened the first Shakespeare festival in this dream of a city, when it is at its summer best, so Dream was an appropriate choice for the silver anniversary season, and in what I think may be a bow to the audiences of Shakespeare's time, a real crowd pleaser in the most burlesque way.

Not only in Dream, but in other Shakespeare plays - comedies and bits of comic relief in the tragedies - certain scenes go on so long it seems that Will wanted to give actors the opportunity to milk them for all they're worth. Why not? The audience paid to be entertained; there wasn't much else, not like today when you can whip out your Ipad and watch a movie at the beach while you're waiting for the fireworks to begin. Nevertheless, with all the other choices, Bard sells out practically every performance during its annual summer run, and Dream is still one of the most popular of the four shows offered.

This year, director Dean Paul Gibson remounted a production of Dream that he first conceived in 2006. According to his show notes, the idea was to wrap this "fusion of fantasy in a collision of style and humour, augmented with desire and the need for harmony." The collision of style came through the music and dance for the most part. Etta James' great rendition of "At Last" when Titania awakes and, under the spell that the Fairy King, Oberon, has ordered cast, she falls in love with Bottom, as a donkey. Of course "Why do fools fall in love?"  ends that scene, and there are other musical jokes, such as Lawrence Welk's old  "bubble music" theme song, when the beautifully garbed true couples, all brought back to their senses by another spell, approach the stage to sit through a seemingly endless performance by the workmen, including Bottom, who put on the play within the play. Credit for the clever music choices goes to sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe.

Fabulous hair styles and imaginative costumes, and Puck, played by Kyle Rideout, in a platinum Mohawk, white tights, silver high-tops, and a multicoloured tu-tu he uses to accent his bawdy, athletic, bi-sexual wringing of every possible bit of humour out of his many scenes. He's a fairy, yes, and a genuine spirit of another sort as he struts, leaps, twerks, grinds, wiggles. The audience found him hilarious and of course he got the loudest cheers, what would have been Bravos in Europe, at the end.

Were the actors exaggerating the humour to please the audience at the expense of the Bard's meter and brilliant lines, asked a young friend, a student of theatre? For some of us, yes. I ended up liking Ian Butcher as Oberon because he managed to retain a certain dignity while creating the spells that worked such theatrical chaos: "I with the morning's love have oft made sport...even til the eastern gate, all fiery red opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, turns into yellow gold his salt green streams...". And admiring Claire Hesselgrave as Helena, for the credibility of the lines she spoke in despair, outrage and love. Despite her wild hair and sexy costume, she  maintained the sort of clarity necessary to convey words and phrases that have become part of of our common vocabulary.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."

Reading anything good this summer?

I am. In fact some days I feel like I did in the years of my most constant reading, when a pile of books and magazines that had yet to be cracked produced the pleasurable satisfaction of knowing I had something good in the fridge for dinner. The opposite also applied.

The book I just finished, Seven Types of Ambiguity, by the Australian writer Elliot Perlman, was the perfect fix for my book addiction. I have always been a reader, but something about the spread out days of summer gives me permission to spend hours in my reading chair between two windows, one of them open, or on an outside chair, beneath a big straw hat, losing myself in a story someone has invented. I don't find light reading a necessity. Not for me. I have a good appetite and Perlman satisfied it with his ambitious and insightful novel about  seven characters who come together in what Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat's Cradle, called a karass. The story progresses through the points of view of seven different characters. Very skilled handling of structure, and I like the way he deals with important social issues through individual lives. It's something I aim to do in my own stories. The plot revolves around a big misunderstanding which snakes out to other misunderstandings. A satisfying end. A few reservations about the trueness of point of view in a couple of sections, but overall a Bravo! for this novel that held me through a week or so.

My books often come to me by way of friends, unless I am really drifting and looking for a title to attract me, or a review, or something on one of the many prize lists. Other times I am on a mission. When I was writing Presto! I re-read books by Dreiser, James Farrell, Sinclair Lewis and, most importantly to me, John Dos Passos as a way of immersing myself in the historical period I wanted to recreate. Lately my curiosity has been focussed on Quebec and so the first books of summer were the later novels of Anne Hébert, like A Suit of Light and Am I Disturbing You?, and then a re-read of her popular Kamouraska, which I first read decades ago. I had forgotten what a cutting edge stylist she is. There is a breathless, driven quality to her work, which isn't at all what I expected.

But the same friend who gave me Seven Types of Ambiguity, David Zieroth, a poet and longtime friend, with whom it has always been a great pleasure to talk about books, also gave me a handsome compact volume, Spain, Body and Soul by H.M. van den Brink. This Dutch novelist writes about the time he spent in Spain, alone and with his family, and recreates a lot of experiences through food. He even includes recipes. It's thoughtful, evocative and a mouth-watering read, but books that include recipes and yet declare that they are not cook books... I wonder. The recipes seem like padding. I didn't need the recipes as much as the writer seemed to. I have two more books from David and last night started Anne Enright's The Gathering, which promises to be another winner. I love the way my friend chooses books. He haunts used bookstores, browses for long periods of time, and when a title attracts him, he opens the book and reads page 32 to check out the writing. Readers like David are an obscure writer's hope: as long as you have a compelling title, and the writing on page 32 impresses him (and so probably also me), you've snagged a couple of readers, no matter the season.

Any recommendations?

Editing: the long and the short of it

For a lifelong scribe like me, a big experience is almost always accompanied by the desire to write about it. It's a way of incorporating it, literally bringing it deeper into myself by thinking, distilling, describing. Having started as a journalist, I first thought of newspapers as an outlet for an account of my trip to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But what would the angle be? The functioning of the ship as it works out the bugs that come with being new, so a quasi-business angle? The scenery and the communities I visited, so more a travel piece? Know your audience is the common advice to writers, but newspaper feature stories have a general readership. I would need to write about all those things, condense them into a journalistic narrative that would show that yes, the ship was behind schedule, which meant we had to explore some of the picturesque villages in the dark and the people in the communities were forced to wait unpredictable lengths of time to board their way out to "civilization". Those things were true, yes, but it was also true that the boat was comfortable, beautiful in an industrial sort of way, the food exceptional, the scenery something not often seen, because it so far out there, the Gulf. So far out to everyone but the people who live there.

My first run came in at almost 3000 words and even that left out details about the ship personnel I had talked to and the ship itself, plus some character cameos, and 3000 words would be too many for a newspaper feature, even the few that publish long-form journalism these days. My first solution was to divide it into two parts: part one, an overview; part two, the characters on the boat and their social realities. People are what make a trip for me. I couldn't leave them all out. I sent the draft article to a couple of friends who had asked about the voyage, and both urged me to publish; one suggested a well-known publication whose submission guidelines I researched only to find that the longest acceptable feature was only 1500 words. Would such extensive cuts cause fatal bleeding? Could my piece survive at half length?

Folks who don't sit at their desks every day dealing with words might not understand why I found the process thrilling. A good workout. What a lesson! I discovered ways of making sentences more economical,  that I had more or less introduced the same idea more than once, even if on the surface they didn't appear like the same ideas. I jettisoned qualifiers, words like however and perhaps, and personal observations that applied, but that a reader could do without. I actually felt as if I had won a prize when I clicked on word count in the tools menu and saw 1494. Blessed concision. Almost poetry! As a teacher I used to tell my students that feelings like this are what a writer gets instead of money.

I have written long and short form journalism, magazine features, documentary film scripts, and a non-fiction book, but in the last number of years I have been thinking long, as novelists do, since I write mostly novels now.  Though I coined the motto, "all the news that fits," when I was editor of a weekly newspaper, cutting to fit is something I haven't regularly practiced for a long time. It has been fun to relearn basic principles, but... there is more to say. With publishing going the way it is; with more writers seeking fewer publishers of all kinds,  I have no idea if the well-known publication whose guidelines inspired me to slash my piece will accept it. If not, I am going back to longer forms. Instead of cutting, I am going to expand. I am going to write more about the ship and the individuals I met, more background, more anecdotes. I am going to tell it how it was, for me, because good stories are never simple. It might even end up as a novel.

It's the Water...

"It's the water that unites us," the woman said, glancing out the window as if she could see the people on the land she was referring to, the north, south and west shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. To the east there was only more water, the open Atlantic and then, Europe.

On the other side of the continent now, Pacific, peaceful in character and intent, says the dictionary, under pacific. Utterly tranquil the evening of a hot July day, with low sunbeams spotlighting what the neighbours call a rasta boat. Peaceful in intent, but a cold slap when skin meets water. Soon silky, better. The surface patterns break light; can't see a thing beneath, not here, at this depth; but there are things, living beings like seals, fish, jellyfish that wash on shore at a certain time of year, crabs.  Other shelled creatures, all invisible from this top layer where sudden chilly currents flood my arms so that they feel almost separate, wings; then, just as suddenly, warm again, as if a body has passed through, like when you choose a seat someone has left. Could be it was something large. There have been dolphins in this part of Howe Sound, orcas further out, beyond the gap between two islands, in the open straight for sure. Recently closer, along the ferry route. Elusive. If you look for them, you never see them, but they have been here, even grey whales spouting in front of a beach yoga class.

Swimming alone, fingers together to make paddles pushing back in arcs as if I were fashioning snow angels on my stomach, legs kicking out. Mountains close enough to reach but not by swimming, not that close.  Only eyes reach the stony tops and forested slopes whose foundations rest in the sea. Sun bursting broken through foliage, then emerging whole for an instant as the dock comes closer on the return. When a boat has sped by, or the offshore wind picks up, the water responds with wavy displacement. From eye level, opaque hills with white crests immediately break into crazy designs of dark and darker, shiny, a dog's wet coat, or a duck's, but not those at all, just water, swelling. Stop, bob; let the water hold, slip into ear, splash into eye. Taste of salt.

The standard greeting, as neighbour meets neighbour on the dock: how's the water? And all kinds of theories. Best time to swim is when the tide is flooding in over warmed rocks. Better when the air is colder. Not warm until July, even August.  In fact, the temperature varies little. Always colder at the bottom, milder at the surface, but seldom higher than 15 degrees celsius. A few degrees more perhaps as summer peaks, but never as balmy as Hawaii or Bali.  Yet, on the whole, the North Pacific is warmer than the South Pacific, and that is because there is more coastline in the North. Also, because cold water from Antarctica enters the South Pacific, whereas most of the cold outflow from the Arctic Ocean moves into the Atlantic on the transpolar drift.

Walking home, stopping to look back: the surface is rippled, fretted. There are no hills at all.
Tides, upwellings, currents swirling from one side of the planet to another, it's the water that unites us.

Serendipity and Geopoetics

Blanc Sablon harbour

Funny how things happen. Just as I was planning to research geopoetics as defined by Kenneth White, whose name I came across serendipitously at a museum in La Rochelle, France,  I dropped into my local art gallery to buy a card and found an exhibition by Hiroshi Shimazaki, who works from a similar principle. Says Shimazaki, "Geography and painting share a common concern: the study of the relationship between people and environment."

White, a poet and essayist, says: "If, around 1978, I began to talk of geopoetics it was for two reasons. On the one hand,  it was becoming more and more obvious that the earth (the biosphere) was in danger and that ways both deep and efficient would have to be worked out to protect it. On the other hand, I had always been persuaded that the richest poetics came from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world."

Meantime I am trying to condense my thoughts about the interaction between the people and the

environment of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I am trying to read the lines of that far flung place. My immediate and specific purpose is to write a feature article for whatever journals will run it. I am a communicator. I like to tell people about things. But the experience was so rich that it is hard to cram all the description, information, impressions into a piece short enough for today's attention span.

Random ideas float in like the tide that rolls all the way up to Quebec City from the wide Atlantic. The Gulf of St. Lawrence was the North American entry point for so many explorers, colonists, immigrants. The first Europeans somehow found the narrow entry to the Straight of Belle Isle and tacked up river. Traces remain, especially when formally preserved as they are at Grosse Isle, the principal stop for ships carrying immigrants to Montreal. Here the passengers would be checked to determine if they were healthy, for one thing, and it was as far into the new land as many of them were able to get. The lines of a grassy stretch of that world are lumpy with the remains of those who died of cholera or some other disease ship conditions generated.

More than half a century after the last ship stopped at Grosse Isle, are the icebergs that float in the Gulf or stand stationary in the harbour, fragments from the polar ice cap melting quickly now? Evidence of global warming, so also evidence of man's dramatic and destructive interaction with the environment? Near the edge of terra firma the land and seascapes are so expansive, I wonder, was it courage, blind greed or just plain hubris that made people think they could dominate. Plunging into the biosphere compels one to not only read the lines, but read between the lines, too.

The Middle of Nowhere is Somewhere to Somebody Else

photo by Karen Turiff

On the first day of summer I saw an iceberg glowing  true ice blue in the Gulf of St. Lawrence near La Tabatière, Quebec. In the Montagnais language, the name of the village means sorcerer, so-called because hunters, fishers and sealers used to consult witches before making their forays into the bush, the vast, unpredictable estuary, onto the ice floes. The middle of watery nowhere. Misty, rocky, frequented by whales that are hard to see unless they leap out of the water, which they didn't while I was watching, though I did see the back and the tail of a rorqual, and the spume of another small whale. In this grey, sometimes swelling, sometimes choppy expanse  it is hard to see anything but the fascinating shapes of icebergs that, in certain light, resemble clouds fallen from the sky; it is important to look without expectation, to see what there is to see.

Natashquan

First stop the morning of June 21, Harrington Harbour, a village built on the broad flat rocks of the Canadian shield, where houses and a store or two, the post office, the school, the church, are joined by boardwalks that make moving around on foot or four-wheeler easier in a no-road, no-car town. Several ports later, at Blanc Sablon, Tony, the former mayor of this fishing village of 1000 or so, meets the boat at 3 AM with a schoolbus to take us on a sunrise tour. The schedule we keep is determined by how long it takes to unload and load the cargo it is the Bella Desgagnes' first mission to deliver to the communities isolated along the lower north coast of the St. Lawrence. To show us all he thought we should see, Tony drove fast,  manoeuvring the mini school bus up hills, along gravel turnouts, stopping on a bridge so that we could view the twisting chute, or waterfall, of the Brador. He took us just across the border to Labrador, stopped at the bottom of the hill topped by a giant statue of the Virgin Mary, which was brought over from France in the 1920's, giving this part of the town the name, Lourdes de Blanc Sablon.

Katy at Harrington Harbour

The middle of watery nowhere consists of scattered villages, taiga, stunted black spruce, spongy moss, lichen, tiny wild sweet peas, blankets of white-blossomed bunchberry, the icebergs, almost gone now that we are past the solstice, perroquets or puffins, cormorants, the ubiquitous seagulls. Perhaps not much to see by conventional tourism standards, but for the people standing near the gangplank for this supposedly once a week boat to dock, and for those waiting for them, this is home. Katy, for instance, who was travelling to visit her grandparents in La Tabatière for the first time in four years. She and husband Matt, who live on an army base in Vermont, lugged a stroller, car seat and bags, and four-month old Wesley, while little Olivia made her own way down the ramp where the Gallichan cousins waited. The descendant of a family of sealers, Katy, a teacher, knows exactly where she came from, something her husband envies.

In the tiny (120 pop) community of Kegaska, two young women of Acadian background received boat passengers in the church where they offered small pots of jams and jellies made from partridge berries, cloud berries, goose berries, May berries. They had also baked muffins to sell. The display of the town's history consisted of a folding screen to which were pinned  photocopied pictures of the days when the cod fish were plentiful, seal was a staple of every day meals, and a famous shipwreck, the Brion, put the town on the map for us long as the news cycle lasted in the 50's. April and Susie were born here and do not plan to leave. Their efforts show that despite the decline of the cod fishery, the lack of employment, Kegaska is some place to them.

April and Susie

On the other hand, Shelley, a pierced, curly haired aspiring artist, who is third generation Métis, can't wait to get out, and she plans to do so as soon as she can put enough money together to return to school to study fine arts. "People here are suspicious of anything new," she claims. There are no young people because there is no place to work, other than a few service jobs, like hers, as waitress and cashier at CJ's Epicerie and restaurant, the only one in town. Now that the road is complete, the end of 138, the feeling is that the bank will close, the post office, even the airport. A man four times her age, a former cod fisherman, Cecil Organ, agrees. "The road didn't do nothing for us. Maybe 50 years ago, but alls there is to see now is trees."

In La Romaine, Natashquan, St. Augustin, the Montagnais who now prefer to be called Innu, human being,

Innu woman in traditional hat.

have probably never even considered the question, nowhere, somewhere. These former nomads, the first people European explorers encountered in this part of the world, were settled into communities when the government made school mandatory for Innu children.  Instead of considering where they belong, which used to be everywhere, the question is how to balance the temptations of today with the values of yesterday. Long time former chief of La Romaine, ancien chef and sage George C.S. Bâcon described problems unfortunately too well known from tragic stories reeled off by news broadcasters. The poutine, the chips, the pop, the beer that makes people sick because of what George believes are genetically weak livers; the drugs that encourage young people to listen to their dealers more than to elders like the former chief. Diabetes, which affects 50 percent of his people, including him. He smiles as he speaks, but George says that good news is rare. The French sailors and Basque fishermen who found this coast over half a millennium ago, who were greeted and guided by the Montagnais, turned out to be mostly trouble.  The place that so excited Europeans because of its fish and the furs, the forests and the possibility of finding a way to the Orient, had for at least 5000 years already been somewhere to somebody else.

How to Go With a Flow that Begins as a Dribble

Sure there is a schedule, but prospective passengers are advised that the company cannot promise to stick to it. Not with the unknowns the ship must cope with. So this seven day journey out to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and back starts as a trip that may begin tonight, though the boat was supposed to depart last night, and may return in a week, or maybe more. Hmm. Such uncertainty.  Even the bus from Quebec City to Rimouski is delayed, by a mechanical problem. Before we leave the city the bus driver pulls over to explain that we must wait for a replacement bus, which takes about a half an hour. But the seats are comfortable, the bus uncrowded, and it isn't as if I am afraid I am going to miss the boat. Along the route we encounter another bus with a similar problem. The bus driver stops, apologizes, and we wait for the arrival of the travellers who were stranded on the side of the highway, for how long I am not sure.

This is not a third world country but Eastern Quebec in its late spring glory. Hedges of lilacs and a tall white flower shrub that looks like oleander, but could it be? This far north? Many round capped silos rising from dairy farms on rolling green terrain. Some stone houses but most more modern, though even a few of these retain the classic metal roof in the mansard style. Nouvelle France, the rural part. Stones like resting sheep on the tidal flats of the fleuve St. Laurent. On the side of the road, a rock formation so perfectly striated it resembles a cross section of ribbon fudge. Cow replicas announce dairies. Here the fields are narrow, the same shape as the seignuries first granted in the 1600's. These are not the well worked fields of France, with the typical cluster of houses that make up small villages where farm families reside. Communes. Villages with perhaps a single boulangerie, a pharmacie, boucherie, epicerie. Along the highway here, the bus stops to pick up or let passengers off at Petrocan stations or malls with their SAQ's - government liquor stores - their Provigo's, maybe a Target store.

At last,  Rimouski.  With time to spare I meander along the sea front two miles across from St. Barnaby Island. A hermit lived there. Ironically, Toussaint Le Cartier's name lives because he was a hermit.  Afraid he would perish on the voyage from France to the new world, 286 years ago if records don't lie, he promised God that if he survived he would live alone, off the fruits of his own labour, the first place he could land. That turned out to Saint-Barnabé. The poor fellow was an epileptic, according to reports from those who knew of him. The disease caused one of his eyes to bulge out, and for comfort, he had his dog lick it. Ah, stories: what makes them last? Why has the tale of Toussaint persisted?

The night is warm, the air sweet, the river slowly rising up the long sandy shore as I walk from the bus station to la marina in the late dusk light. A man pruning his lilacs smiles his assent when I ask if I can I take a blossom from his pile. It is almost dark when I reach the quai where the Bella Desgagnes has at last arrived. Soon this one-year old vessel will accept passengers and all the containers the gleaming white crane is in the process of hoisting onto the deck, and we will head downstream, with stops at Sept-Iles, Anticosti Island, Havre St Pierre, Natashquan, Kegaska, La Romaine, Harrington Harbor, St. Augustin, La Tabatière and, just at the border of Labrador, Blanc Sablon. We are not flowing yet, though we rock gently in our comfortable beds as the tide lifts us into the night.

Who do we think we are?

It was no surprise that the discussion at The Travelling Book Café in Quebec wound round to language and how it affects our identities. Language enters conversations at every level here, and it is more complex than the simple divide between those who speak English and those who speak French. In this group of Anglophones, the majority of whom have lived in Quebec for decades, there were a few who claimed to be comfortable as minorities in this French-first province, but others still feel like outsiders. The sense of who they are has changed: since the society around them identifies them as Anglos, they have to consider what that implies, something that did not come up before they moved from Wisconsin or Saskatchewan, Poland, Maryland, Ontario.

As for French, having recently returned from the mother country that gave Quebec its langue maternelle, having learned that many of the first arrivals from France in the 1600's did not even speak French, but one of the regional languages of France at that time, such as Breton, Oc or Gallo, I saw how the French that has developed in Quebec could have been influenced by those languages, certainly was influenced by the classic French in novels that were required reading in school. It would be as if a group of Anglos were separated for generations from other English speakers, and clung to the diction of Shakespeare. Of course that changed with the influence of English-Canadian and American culture via mass media. Still, a grand controverse erupted over the comments, supposedly misinterpreted (but don't they always say that?), of the Montreal tennis star, Eugenie Bouchard, who said that while she fears she may have too much of an Anglo accent when she speaks French, at least she no longer sounds like a Québecoise. The newspaper columnist who responded to this young woman, whom he otherwise admires, was noticeably hurt. An accent reveals our origins, he wrote. We should never be ashamed of our origins, who we are, where we come from, even if some of the wonderful Quebec films that have been produced in the last few decades have to be subtitled for screening in cinemas en France.

Identity: a major theme in my novel You Again, and the topic that elicits such personal revelations at The Travelling Book Café. A man who comes from North Carolina began the discussion with an appropriately general comment about how our identity is influenced by a web of things, including family, country, religion. A couple of women insisted that they are who they were born to be and have never questioned it, but I wonder: have any of us been so confident, life long, that we could avoid asking questions that get to the heart of our being? One good reason for keeping the Book Café to less than 20, preferably 15 people, is that everyone has a chance to speak, and after awhile, the more intimate stories begin coming out. One woman defines herself as someone who is not like the rest of her birth family, who are just plain mean, she said. Another one confessed that the culture she moved into when she came to Quebec with her husband caused her to fall into a depression she thinks stemmed from a loss of connection with self. A 20 year old admitted that while she attends school in the U.S., and is a U.S. citizen, she does not feel like an American. She has lived in many parts of the world with her travelling parents and assimilated aspects of each culture. She is now some kind of hybrid, she feels, no matter what her passport says.

Close to the age of my character Mattie, who tries to rescue his own identity by escaping the identity theft ring he was part of, this young woman's story was particularly poignant. Outwardly lovely and poised, she is searching for stable footholds as she moves forward into a career, into adult life. That won't be the end of it, though, at least it is not for most people, as Mattie's mother, another character in You Again, demonstrates. Sense of self changes as life circumstances change. What happens when you learn that your mother has been lying to you about your true father? What image do you have of yourself when the world no longer reflects the beautiful woman/handsome man you used to be? How far down do you have to reach to find your essence? In what language do you talk to yourself?

The Funny thing about graveyards...

The funny thing about graveyards, at least some graveyards, is how they extend the popularity contest that can so dog the living. At Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, for example, crowds ignore the tombs of men and women who must have mattered to some extent, considering the size of the monuments erected to their memory, size being another marker of importance; but who are they now, to anyone but their descendants or, perhaps, followers? Most visitors head right past them, searching for the graves of the famous.

I went to Père Lachaise because friends had universally recommended it, and I was not disappointed. It is a lovely place to walk, to admire the sculpture, to read the sentiments etched into stone, some partly weathered away, to think about life and death and fame and impermanence.  At Lachaise, the biggest draw is the "Light My Fire" man Jim Morrison, whose grave is reportedly the most visited in the world. The second most popular in the cemetery tourist trade is that of the voodoo queen, in New Orleans. That one I saw and thanks to the commentary of an unofficial and colourful guide, I enjoyed it. Morrison's I missed, not intentionally -- who doesn't love a curiosity --  but because I didn't feel like going back to track it down after somehow skirting it on my first try. There was so much else to see. Oscar Wilde's grave may be the next most renown at Père Lachaise. This wit, playwright, novelist, poet was very popular before he was arrested for "indecent acts with men," imprisoned, and died destitute at 46. Another bad boy, like Morrison: nothing like the allure of fallen stars. Whatever is left of Wilde remains far up the hill from the main entrance, but I persisted, again out of curiosity, and found it by spotting the throng around it.  The modernist stone angel that adorns the stone lacks the romantic grace of the figure on Chopin's tomb, for example, or the grandeur of La Fontaine's and Moliere's, contemporaries and French literature greats whose memorials share the same plot. In fact, according to one American tourist who was deciding whether or not to pose for a picture at the Wilde grave: "It's not even cute, but since we came all this  way...."  A more amusing encounter occurred chez Bizet, where I found two fans whistling tunes from "Carmen" at the composer's grave. Made me want to revisit the wonderful duet from The Pearl Fishers

Things that live after us. The quest for immortality. We want at least some part of ourselves to endure... in a graveyard, a diary, a foundation bearing our name, a book, a painting, an opera.  It may be why some 14,000 years ago, hunters who looked like us and had our same capacity for intelligence walked deep into Grotte Niaux to leave paintings whose significance we can only guess. Why determined and ambitious humans in the neolithic period went to immense trouble to align mammoth stones in fields near present-day Carnac, in Brittany, monuments that have no names and no certain meaning, except to show that those folks, like Kilroy, were here.

The Good Life...can she take it?

The heavy iron gate squeaks open and there she is, an estate in south west France that friends have leased for the blossomy month of May. What do do?  Gasp, offer gifts, accept a glass of wine, and then...

A villa perhaps two centuries old, situated in the midst of Languedoc Rousillon wine country, among undulating vineyards, this place is anything but simple.  Original terra cotta floors, a marble spiral staircase whose dark oak bannister was burnished by hands that probably lifted clusters of grapes only to inspect their quality and order them picked or not. Four bedrooms that include sitting rooms lofty with cushions.Two smaller, charming bedrooms that overlook the red roof tiles of a cottage where once resided some of the many workers required to maintain the estate; two living rooms, a formal dining area, a snug with a table big enough for a large family or a family of friends to sit around while a wood fire crackles beneath a mantle lined with maquettes of roosters in various sizes and materials.

There is much eating and drinking. The plan for the week is for each guest to present a five course meal in return for his or her stay. One evening, a young British wine lecturer arrives to offer the eight visitors from Canada, England and Dubai a tasting of eight local wines, including the blanquette particular to nearby Limoux, and a port that enhances a creamy, locally-produced blue cheese, and dark chocolate-covered prunes from Agen. The charcuteries plate includes sangliers, wild boar, and is paired with a Cuvée Classique, a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Mourverde grapes, from Corbières.

In the groggy morning light serrated by the vista of the Pyrenees, she thinks, this is too much. Of everything! Too many perfect croissants, too

much wonderful cheese, certainly too much wine, and more daily conversation with people she barely knows than she can normally abide.

She has known lean times, when she borrowed from her credit card to pay her credit card bill. She drives an antique car, so called, because it is over 25 years and still runs. She instinctively follows Thoreau's advice to "simplify, simplify"; and it is not a hardship to do so. She has never felt deprived.

And then.... it is her turn to present a meal. She visits a local market, and simplicity - farmers in stalls, piles of radishes, fluffy heads of green and purple lettuce, petit pois, broad beans, asparagus, small, sweet melons  de Maroc, refrigerated cases of recently killed chickens and ducks - segues into excess. She buys not just one canette, but two. Fraises des bois. Chocolate that will become the dark chapeaus atop flutes of the berries she plans to drizzle with orange Armagnac she brought from Lectoure. Fromage de brebis, de chèvre, des vaches des Pyrénées. Following Julia Child's recipe for Duck à l'orange consumes the entire day, but her frequent trips between the kitchen and the pantry take her over the flat, sun-warmed stones of the terrace. She takes off her shoes.  She can sit beneath the awning to peel the oranges, stem the haricots verts, the slender kind that seem so particular to France. While the sauce is simmering, she walks down the hill past vines producing the season's first grapes, past a horse farm where mares and foals graze on an emerald hillside.

The sautéed new potatoes are perfectly crisp, the berries impossibly sweet, and the temperature mild enough that the company can enjoy tea and the Armagnac outside. As the host is filling his glass, a pink spot of sun just going down at this hour hits his forehead. Everyone is smiling.

The good life... hmm. She gets it.

Chez Nous!

Two images continue to flicker in my mind: a small woman with greying hair poised on a cliff top above the Atlantic on a day so sparklingly luminous that the sea below might be the Caribbean. The green field where she stands is dotted with tiny daisies; slender, wild Margeurites sway in the taller grass behind. Below is a pocket of ochre sand where swimmers are taking advantage of this warm mid-May day. The woman points to the plant-choked trail her family used in the summers to get to the beach. She spreads her arms: Chez nous, she declares. Chez nous! This is us, the family's home; the parcel her ancestors were granted when France accepted 78 of the Acadian families that had been expelled from Canada, been taken prisoner by the English and spent 8 years in an English prison; victims of the ceaseless battles for power in that era between the French and the English. This happened almost 250 years ago and Maryvonne LeGac's family has remained on Belle Ile ever since.

The other image is of Maryvonne standing on the ramparts of the citadel at Le Palais, camera in hand, watching the drapeau Acadian, which hangs higher than the French flag, waiting for it to catch a breath of air and flutter out so that I can see the yellow star on the field of blue. "Bouges, bouges," she commands, to no avail. Later that same evening, at a meeting of the Acadian Association of Belle Île sur Mer,  the flag came into it again as a smaller version resisted the tape she was using to stick it to the wall behind the desk where she would preside over the annual meeting. President for nearly twenty years, she is an energetic advocate for memory. Earlier, as we came through the museum at the citadel, the back way, we encountered a group of French pharmaciens and a guide who was giving them the short version of  the Acadian history on Belle Île. She couldn't let him continue. He was getting his facts wrong, and so she broke in and rattled off a description of the expulsion, or Grand Dérangement, as it is known, the distribution of the expelled and the final arrival of the 78 families at Belle Île in 1766. The group spontaneously applauded her when she finished.

The sad story of the Acadians inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic poem Evangeline, and the wonderful novel Pelagie-la-charette, by Acadian writer Antonine Maillet. Evangeline is the romantic account of lovers separated by the Grand Dérangement; Pelagie is an epic tale of the return to Acadie. Despite Homeric-type challenges, some did make their way back, thanks to the strength of the fictional  Pelagie, a woman upon whom Mme. Legac might have modelled herself. The work she has done on behalf of the Acadian association won her the prestigious Médaille Léger Comeau last year.

Although it is the recollection of suffering that unites them, the story of Acadie has a happy ending. The Belleilois Acadians ended up with a lyrical place to live and raise crops and children and live out their lives. Some left voluntarily, to find more opportunities for numbers of the children in their large families, and peopled Louisiane, where they are known as Cajuns. Many of them have never left Belle Île, or have left and come back, bringing husbands or wives, inviting friends.  After the meeting near the Le Palais Mairie Saturday evening, after toasting one another and the occasion with sparkling wine, everyone repaired to a nearby crêperie for a feast of Coquille Saint Jacques, rack of Bell Île lamb, and crêpes piled with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. A table consisting of  many Granger's, one of the original 78, broke out in song often during the meal. Everyone stood for the anthem of Brittany, and everyone joined in for:

"Viens voir L'Acadie, Viens voir le pays. Le pays qui m'enchante..."

A sign I saw at the Musée du Nouveau Monde a few days later, at La Rochelle, noted that Le Grand Derangement produced an effect opposite to what the English hoped for; instead of destroying their spirit, the trauma reinforced the Acadian sense of identity. A happy ending indeed.

Un plus parfait Paris

Parisians have not been living up to their reputation. Instead of the dismissive arrogance the world knows them for, I've found them helpful, even friendly. The man who sat down next to me at a metro station, who was resting after a long day, curious to know where I came from. After midnight, on the Marie Lillas line, a platform deserted except for me and a toothless man hunched in dirty clothes, un vrai misérable, who raised his head to tell me that the line terminated on that side, that I had to go à l'autre coté. The charming jeune filles we encountered as we ducked around a corner to escape the crowds at Sacre Coeur: "Do you mind?" they asked us. "We are making a project for our English class at school," and proceeded to ask about our impressions of Paris, our favourite French food. The helpful man in a neighbourhood hardwood store in the 10me arrondissement, who not only figured out that what I wanted was a reveil, not a reveilleur, but supplied a battery as well as instructions for using the tiny alarm clock.

Mon français is far from perfect, but I asked for and received directions and enjoyed short conversations with people and no one responded to me in English, as I had been told to expect, "because they don't have the patience." Well, they did. Even when I said, plié on the street of tissue, or fabric, when I should have said plissé.

My host in Paris has a studio literally furnished with books. Towers of Gallimard editions with their distinctive cream jackets, and other editions, support a small table, a desk. Outside, in the courtyard, pink roses bloom and birds sing. Just down the street, along the banks of Canal Saint-Martin, people enjoyed the sun, and later a warm evening, bateaus and small flotillas of mallards slipped by, people hurried away from the neighbourhood's renown boulangerie with baguettes or some hefty artisan bread, their escargot (a pastry) or croissants.

Of course, at this time of year, not only are the chestnut trees are in blossom, tulips, iris and every other variety of flower seems to be blooming. Booksellers man their stalls along the Seine no matter the skies, and  the cheap plastic ponchos of tourists waiting their turn for Notre Dame flutter in the blowy, showery, sometimes brilliantly sunny, altogether unpredictable spring weather.

 Of the two especially wonderful restaurants we tried, the more interesting concentrated on combining tastes, a curve of chili powder and a mound of apricot conserve framing a rectangle of brie, for example. A reflection, perhaps, of the mixing of peoples in this storied city. Waiting in line at the Pompidou Centre, I heard Punjabi, Spanish, English, German. Languages I could not identify. A rich palette of human voices and human skin colours.

Inside the Pompidou, a woman methodically photographed virtually every tableau she passed, the image and then the description, the artist's name. Chance placed us in the same galleries all afternoon. Click, and there she was, a mid-aged blonde, wearing black, aiming her big camera. Click.

Alicia Penalba: "A form becomes abstract because it creates a new myth that does not come from the spirit of man."

To TO

Off the plane, on the bus to the Kipling subway station, the grey look of the city, the people. The winter fatigue.

Table for two at the Travelling Book Café, where Margaret Hollingsworth and I focussed on writing and publishing. This old friend, a long time writer with many plays to her name, a novel, short stories, essays, has become a poet, and after a lifetime of writing, her original ideas, her stunning language, she wonders, is it good enough? Even having won a poetry contest hasn't convinced her. Still, if no one else will publish her collection, she will do it herself..."because I have spent all those hours..."

Tulips in all the stores. The fragrant, bountiful St. Lawrence Market. The awful, embarrassing mayor. Someone you wouldn't want even at a table beside you at dinner. It's sad for him and also Toronto. Line ups for everything, transit, transit, people, people, but...

The wonderful hot docs festival, three films in all: the powerful "Virunga", about the endangered national park in the Congo, a World Heritage Site. Why do these stories never change? Why are corporate values, in general, so contrary to nature? Proceeds from poaching mountain gorillas fund the rebel armies as do payoffs from SOCO, the British oil company that wants to use Virunga as its own private profit well. Not much different than in King Leopold's days of rubber high grading. Instead of chopping off human hands, the hands of  gorillas are chopped.  Wonderful footage, sad story. Somewhat splayed story structure.

Then "Rich Hill", the intimate look at this Missouri town of 1500, and three boys anyone would term at risk. Fabulous job of intimate film making, character revelation. Andrew taking care of his parents, Harley about to explode, Appachey drifting, smoking, reverting to a baby with his head on his mother's shoulder before he enters juvenile court. Beautiful camera work, too.

My least favourite, "Lady Valour", not because of Kristin Beck and her situation, her having come out as a woman after a career as a U.S.navy seal; but the CNN way of underscoring with loud music, concentrating too much on the nail polish and the high heels of this so-called princess warrior. I'm not sure the film really did justice to Ms. Beck, though the director had her explain her situation again and again and again. Most touching part, Kristin's father, brother and sister. The emotional toll of Kristin's transformation, the love they felt for her... that said more than any of the statements she made about how hard it was to be her.

Traffic tie ups slowing down the Bathurst bus on a long, rainy day.... but, charming side streets with narrow brick houses and peak roofs. Sun breaking through, wind blowing away the clouds and, finally, free ice cream and a dancing cow to celebrate the opening of the new Dutch Dreams location on Vaughan Road, and also Dutch liberation day!

A denouement via email

 After the first ten years, it was a friendship that continued mostly by email, though we didn't live that far from one another. Timing, ability to get around, the obligations that claim the hours... all that came into it. But now, because of those emails, I am left with proof of the endearing oddball he was. A mutual friend, a theatre director, used that word, oddball. A catchall word, one of the kinder, that assumes a multiplicity of unusual  traits, so, in that way, correct. Intelligent, funny, paranoid as a character in one of the Russian novels he liked to refer to. Full of pain, from the illness that gripped him when he was young, from the loneliness his acerbity and intensity guaranteed; and, near the end, from the side effects of medication for the post-polio syndrome  that hampered normal activities, a pain that finally enraged him. It had been almost ten days since I heard from him, an otherwise almost daily emailer. The emails came from addresses such as wildblab at yahoo; Superior.E.Blab@; doublestriplestinkywinkgazinki@; izwuzz@gmail; oinko.boinko@

The subject headings were just as unique: Dearest sweetest monkey toes and lips; or Phew...I'm off the hook...looks like I'm not the only playwright who got castigated for using profanity; then,  Sorry just trying to organize pain m,angem,ent; and, I am so far behind..writhing in agony has replaced writing about my characters

so i feel weary from infection plus the pain of having the equivalent of 300 infected molars in  a leg sized jaw!

Yet also, Have you noticed a change of voice tone in female news readers?

They all sound as if they were having breathless high blood pressure issues during orgasmic speed sex with giraffes while hang gliding over Hudsons Bay.

His signature might extend several lines, or feature a picture; one time Vishnu, another an image of a thoroughly muscled arm. When he was younger he worked out at the gym and bulked up to an almost grotesque state at one point. He used to be the first guy you'd ask for help when you needed to move.

The polio that kept him bedridden as a teenager, also made him a constant and prodigious reader then, and throughout his life; literature, philosophy, theology, economics; books about other writers, too. He might send a link to an article about Thoreau, or a snippet like this:

When artist Baroness Elsa punched poet William Carlos Williams in the nose in 1921 for rejecting her advances he prepared for a rematch by training on a punching bag.

When she attacked him again  on Park Avenue he said that he "flattened her with a stiff punch to the mouth" and had her arrested by the police.

In his second last month he sent me a list of books he had read or had started in recent weeks, which included: Divine Filth: Lost Scatology and Erotica; How The Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought; Death in the City of Lights, Calming your Anxious Mind; The Loom of God, Tapestries of Math.

Though several of his plays had been produced, he'd won grants and was considered by many who knew his work to be an under appreciated comic genius, he worked in social services with the street people most of us never get to know, those with mental illnesses, addictions and physical disabilities. The hardest cases. He knew how to talk to them, was big enough that he didn't feel threatened by unpredictability, and his wide ranging compassion inspired their trust. Eventually, though, respiratory problems and difficulty walking forced him to go on disability. Things got worse. Is it any better I wrote?

I'm

Trying

The pain makes weep

 Not from

Sorrow

Just from physical anguish 

Finally, it got to be too much to bear.