Floors of silent seas

Reading reading reading, human development and self-development and how we become persons and all of that. Quiet reading grey day, no verbal conversation at all except the utmost transactional (ordering a frittata, paying for an americano, asking a young woman in the library to look after my powerbook while I used the washroom). Lots of conversation with Shotter, Harré, Gergen, Vygotsky and Bruner, though, slowly making it to the page. Fascinated by the work on dialogic self in babyhood -- how moms look for "replies" from their babies and shape how they become persons-in-culture. Discovered a new word for the pool I'm paddling in -- ethogenic.

Had a lovely day yesterday with Jane and Don, visiting their cosy cat-filled, vine-encased home, then a (wet) trip down to the Columbia gorge. Nice to see this gorgeous part of Oregon, reminiscent of the parts of NZ that seemed to be self-creating right in front of my eyes. Did I mention it was raining?

Lots of conversation there that will make it to written text soon. For now, just letting the neurons fire and humming along in productive flows of light.

Keeping quiet

Beth and I have been talking about John this week, of course -- she talked to S-- at some length-- and it's been very unsettling to realize that he knew he was sick but didn't want anyone to know. And was very very depressed and hard to deal with. I feel like I should have recognized some of the signs and it makes me heartsick and pissed off at myself that I didn't.

Sometimes I see patterns and have the most stunning intuition and can read people and situations with the finest calibration... and sometimes I'm thuddingly unable to see anything. Like my failure to EVER recognize when someone is wearing a wig. I have been known to say blindingly oblivious things like "how come your hair never seems to grow and always looks exactly the same?" to blushing, self-conscious alopecia victims. I also never notice when people look pregnant (unless I know they are), when they've lost or gained weight, and when people are high. "Huh, strange conversation," I'll muse, when *anyone* else would have known at the second word that the person was totally baked.

A couple of years ago, John sent me back all of my letters. "Here," he wrote. "I'm cleaning out some files and I thought you might want these. For the archives."

How did I read this? It pissed me off. I felt rejected. "Why would he send back my LETTERS?" I groused to Beth, to A. "I thought they were important to him. This is his passive aggressive way of saying 'you never write to me enough so our correspondence might as well be at an end.'" Did it even remotely occur to me that he might be sick, that this might be a little "cleaning up the loose edges" act? Nope. And when I found his letters when I was moving, I sent a whole whack of them back to him. With a letter about why I was moving, etc., which oddly, reignited some connection. But it never occurred to me to ask "are you okay?" or to make time to go visit him.

I think we all do this -- develop little blind spots, shoulder checks we never perform. It's part of how we thread our lives together, maintain momentum, create and reinforce our stories. And mostly it's okay. And sometimes there are catastrophic crashes of coherence, what was not seen is suddenly, glaringly in our faces.

In the year or two before my dad died -- after I moved to Toronto, started seeing A -- I had one of those grinding tectonic collisions. One episode after another where, in retrospect, I could have read "I know I'm dying and I'm asking you for absolution." And I never let myself read that -- uncomfortable at his pain, unable to respond to his interpretation of my sign-language-only romances with women as a result of my "hating men because of [him]," unbelievable discomfort at his panic and fear when he called me, feverish and hallucinating, terrified of Nurse Rached who was after him. My response was to cut conversations short, to tersely close in. I will always have, right under my skin, this raw ganglion of knowledge that the last time he ever called me, I was immersed in a stupid tv show -- a Q episode of TNG -- and sort of desultorily said "I'm in the middle of something right now -- can I call you back later?" And then... I didn't -- avoided, as always with the phone -- and a couple of weeks later he went on holiday with Petra and the girls, and then, died. And then, died.

Failures to shoulder check, pulling into lanes without looking, unfinished conversations. Needing to recalibrate my gaze, keep quiet in a new way. As Neruda got it, with such perfection.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death

Pranayama

It's raining again. I haven't done much work yet today, but I've been busy. Amazing how I can fill my days :-).

I started off with another ashtanga class, though I was a little wary about whether I was a little too fatigued after running/yogaing every day since I got here. I was right -- I *was* too fatigued -- and basically stuttered my way through the class -- but it felt good to do it.

I treated myself to a diner breakfast after that, a warm, crammed little place with stools at counters and classic diner food. The place was crowded, and after a few place switches to accommodate people who wanted to sit together, I ended up in a freewheeling conversation with a gastroenterologist, originally from Manhattan, for about an hour. We rolled over politics, urban life, poutine, near death experiences, levels of consciousness, mechanistic models of health and how societies make decisions. It was such a good conversation it made me want to track him down and ask him to go for a beer. But that might look a lot like *stalking*, so I'll probably refrain.

Hummed myself home, started doing some work, got distracted by this and that, and decided that it was sunny and I wasn't being productive, so it was the perfect time to go on my Beverly Cleary quest. After some poking around online, I went off on a little Amazing-Race-like task to get myself somewhere I couldn't quite visualize. It goes against my deepest grain to ask for directions -- I have such a *weird* thing about people knowing my business -- but the bus drivers were very helpful.

One little moment on the bus was thumpingly sad. When I got on the second bus, there was a woman speaking so loudly I couldn't hear the soft-spoken driver. My first reaction was "jeez, does she have to be so LOUD?" -- but then I realized what she was saying. She had two little boys with her, and was talking to a woman a few seats away, who apparently didn't know her but had some personal connection with her story. I slowly pieced together that this woman's husband had been in a coma since a car crash 3 years ago. The other woman on the bus had gone to high school with the other driver, who was, maybe, drunk? The crash was in 2003, on a bridge, and this poor woman -- who, I surmise, was Haitian, based on her accent and the fact that she kept slipping in french phrases -- had been left with 4 kids and six weeks pregnant. So now, five. She looked a little beaten down by life but with a raw, robust momentum to just keep going.

The park with the Cleary statues was a luscious lovely place, very welcoming, near a high school with very un-Cleary-like kids. (Lots of SHIT and ipods and loud pushing). I loved the idea of the tribute, found the actual manifestations a little lacking. Ramona looks weirdly simple-minded and Henry looks like a WWI doughboy. But Ribsy was effective (at Matt's behest, I made a passing young mom with a stroller take my picture sitting on him), and I found it delightful to realize that there is a *real* Klickitat St. It's about the most perfect residential street in the world -- lush flower beds, blooming lilacs, warm full trees, sweet houses in different west-coast colours. A little more *grand* than I imagined the Quimbys and Hugganses living on, but the mood was absolutely right.

Took a wild reckless risk and jumped on a little streetcar to return home, even though I wasn't sure where it went. I like this kind of unfettered wandering. Ended up at Nordstroms where I tried on a couple of fancy dresses for Beth's wedding (couldn't find anything) and came home, tuckered out. I think tomorrow has to be completely focused on working -- my little holiday is over -- but it was a lovely day.

Four more things

to love about Portland.

1) Amazing woo woo energy healing massage person who made me feel more aligned and open than I have in a very long time. I *felt* energy whooshing out my ears at the end. Very very strange thing.

2) Sushi Land, with little conveyor belts of tiny little coded-for-price sushi selections whooshing past that you just snatch and eat. Had inari, salmon nigiri, edamame, kappa maki and unagi for $6. Loved that the fellow munchers included students, yoga-ists and cops on their lunch hour.

3) I got carded ordering a Corona at Chipotle the other night.

4) No sales tax.

It's a good place :-).

Channeling Ramona

Am here in Portland, where the weather is behaving in true Pacific Northwest fashion, with hosing-down cloudbursts intermingled with the kind of faintly filtered sunshine that warms me through. I just wanted to make a quick update.. there aren't many plot points to my life here, just little darts outward here and there, feeling open and alive and refreshed. My days are taking a shape that looks like: exercise (running or yoga); a good Americano from the Coffee Crutch on Yamhill (run by the sweet bearded boy Ryan); breakfast and some email/forum catchup; reading and making notes; a long late afternoon walk; some cheap dinner somewhere; more reading; lots and lots of sleep.

I could surely live like this. I love this bright little loft perched up on the corner of this 8 story building, view into the tall houses nested in the hillside, the cranes of a narrow condo being erected straight across from the desk, the spire of an old cathedral just to my right. Lots and lots of green. I love the human scale of Portland -- the polar opposite to Houston -- walkable streets, ground and eye level stores and cafes and homes and offices, the best bookstore anywhere (Powell's), a long runnable riverfront, long Czech streetcars efficiently trundling across the city. Slightly shabby buildings much lived in and inhabited, all of the new condos manageably small in magnitude. And the weather -- the rain wakes me up and makes me feel alive, a sensation I always felt in my trips to BC with A, direct tension with her feline crankiness at anything wet.

Had an intense ashtanga class this morning, 5 other women, all pliable and glowing with Pacific Northwest health. I hadn't done a class for a couple of months, and I'll feel it tomorrow -- but I felt *open*.

It's funny, this back-of-brain sense of pilgrimage to the world of Beverly Cleary, her books so simultaneously wholesome and uncloying. I always hankered after Klickitat street, and it tickles me that scenes from her books keep flashing across as I walk the downtown streets. The Oregonians exibit at the Museum around the corner evokes the Mitch and Amy gold-panning episode, the rain the pink raincoat with the black velvet collar that Shelley disdained, hankering after a beat up yellow slicker. And everywhere, Ramona trying to lose her shadow.

Sometimes recursively ducking back into the characters of my childhood give me the sense of all new possibilities. It's a good place to create from.

Wonder who you've been in rhythm with

"Carelessness is what I miss." Jeff Tweedy is eloquent, as always, in my
headphones on the train as I make my way back to Toronto from Windsor. I postponed my trip to Portland for two days so I could go to John's funeral. I'm glad -- I have never regretted this kind of pilgrimage in memory, and have regretted not doing it once or twice.

Windsor always makes me a little wistful for what never was. The tiny houses crammed along the lake in Belle River, the worn out, inarticulate houses that seem to close in on themselves in the neighbourhoods near Walkerville -- they tug at stories never written, never yearned for, but somehow still missed. Embeddedness in a tribe set in the same community since it was established three centuries ago by the french who left their mark in the shape of the long lots, a place defined by familiarity of patterns, faces, where Bethie can yell Hey Vernsie to the one car that passes us when we're at starbucks on the quiet Saturday morning.

The funeral was both lovely tribute and a bit muted. A bit out of rhythm. John was cremated, with no viewing. And it turns out, with with my Catholic upbringing and expectations about death, it seems I need to see the body to know that I can really let go, to feel the hot welling up of loss. I kept feeling one or two degrees removed from connecting to my sense of loss. It was curious.

The mass was as warm and about John as the form can be, in the university chapel where he and S-- went to mass every Sunday. The priest at least knew him, and there were two small tributes following communion. One came from the department secretary, who fancied John her best friend. "This is not a passionate love story,"she began, "but a story of friendship, which is a kind of love." I read and hear the longing in that, my perception that she was always in love with him, yearned so much for what he had with S--. Her opening disclaimer seems heart-breakingly exposed -- and it also profoundly doesn't matter, two people participating in a relational space that means something different to each of them, each satisfied in what they're getting.

The most wrenching part was S-- who was simultaneously gracious hostess managing the occasion and hapless observer as things took on a -- for her, apparently, unanticipated -- flow. I think she envisioned people doing further tributes to John at the lunch, but she was quite delayed arriving, and we didn't eat until she got there, and then when lunch was finished, it was already 3:30 and the Windsor contingent got up to make its way home. She was stricken, obviously expecting that now things would move to a new stage. I felt... dreadful, leaving, not really spending any time with her, not even certain how I could have characterized some homage to John in a meaningful way at that point.

This funeral put some shape to how I've been experiencing time passing in a new way since I turned 40, an awareness of my life having taken shape in multi-year chunks, 5 years in this epoch, 14 years in that, whole story arcs begun, lived and finished, stowed behind me in the map of time that I'm allotted. Of course making me wonder how many chunks I get, altogether.

My friend I was staying with had an argument with her fiance last night about their wedding invite list last night, and what swam through the words was his yearning for the people who'd been part of his earlier arcs in life to be part of his today space, she seeing them only in how they relate to her and him with her and feeling them cold, disconnected, unnecessary.

I am feeling a ... profound sense of that necessity of people who've lived your past with you even if you've lost them in the today space, the way John was side-shelved with me.

This is, I think, the appeal of the life lived in the long lots along the river -- people present in your immediate world, not misplaced out of reach. Only the most minor of the plot points of my life were actually lived in those houses -- I remember coming out to one of these places to visit...someone? ... with the Bondys when I was a little girl, warm lemonade in cunning and novel little plastic bottles, a summer-lit early dinner with my dad and Janet in high school, she, like all of my friends so neurotic in front of my dad, making him impatient by feverishly tracking the calories of everything she might possibly consider eating. My dad's very present self-immersion in what was right in front of him simultaneously zen and make-do, like the vague disappointment of the actual taste of an oily, melting soft ice cream cone on a hot summer evening.

I was grateful for this chance to cycle back through some of those lives of mine through the funeral lunch. The core english dept. gang were there -- all of the guys who taught me, against whom I refracted and tested and shaped my ideas, my self. They were gentle yesterday, fragile and warm in their own aging. GM so loving in his eulogy that touched on James ("boring to the end," John had said when informed of James' last words), Whitman and the Waltons, his bearded mouth calling me dear as he bent his stooped body to hug me. A long hug with McK who is clearly struggling with some ailment beyond his long-standing diabetes, speech a little slurred, so warm.

A long conversation with TD that felt weirdly simultaneously like space with a father, a teacher, a priest, a first date, weaving over the rough nubs we'd made when he taught me. Would he remember that he told me I couldn't get a phd unless I got my tubes tied, because I could never be a professor and a mother, or I'd be a "monster"? Would he ever have known how I wept when I got a C+ on one of his exams, not living up to my fragile belief in my eloquence and insight? Yesterday we wandered over the poetry I'm reading, divorce, spirituality, parenting, love, connection, and we held each other warm. He sent me a sweet email about what a "lovely woman" I'd become later last night.

Connecting with these guys was like an unspoken thank you and apology for my youthful edges and accepted forgiveness for their sideways kind of parenting, the shaping of us in encouragement and faith and careless purveying of opinions with unexamined weight. A shared, carefully carried recognition of the heartbreaks and hopes of lives lived, the carelessness and hope that draws us together.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence

Take a close look at this picture. What does it look like to you? The bar coded label is a clue that it's food of some kind, scooped from the bulk bins and conveniently packaged. Rice crackers, maybe? Some kind of mints?

Hint. My sister bought this in the snack aisle at a Loblaw's in Gatineau, Quebec. Next to the ju jubes and prepackaged almonds and nuts and bolts.

Can you make out the label? Hosties Rondes. That's right. Round hosts.

Hosts. They are. actually. Hosts. The thin, crumbling, explode-on-your-tongue, stick-to-the-roof-of your-mouth, Lamb-of-God-who-takes-away-the-sins-of-the-world wafers. Hosts. Unconsecrated, presumably, but those self same foam avatars of faith and obedience and mystery. The larger ones that the priest solemnly breaks in half and "makes the thing that looks like an owl," as my sister remembers it. Sold in the snack row.

If I had guess for 1000 years what was in the bag my sister brought me, a bucket of hosts sold in a depanneur would not have *ever* crossed my mind.

In the movie Les Invasions Barbares, Denys Arcand crafted a brilliant illumination of the precipitious way in which Quebec shrugged off the cloak of the Church. Trying to raise some money (for a hospital), a priest leads an art dealer through a dim, dusty basement jammed with statues and relics unhinged from their perches. The foci of adoration of decades, centuries, now worthless, empty as a puff of air.

To me, that scene resonated as the most powerful example of an empire rendered irrelevant in one heated moment. Until now. Des hosties rondes, idly munched on in the car or on the deck at the cottage, familiar and reassuring on the tongue, no need to examine why.

"This was the second set I actually bought you," admitted my sister. "We saw them the first time when we were camping last fall. I bought you some then, but we ate them all on the trip back. They're weirdly addictive."

I eat one as I write this. Yes, Sunday after Sunday rises to the fore on the taste of it. Another one. A sacrament of anachronistic curiosity.

Losing people

John D, my old mentor, friend of my youth, prof of my first academic foray, died today. Very suddenly, of apparently undiagnosed liver disease.

Our connection was written first over tiny 80 cent glasses of draft, lunches at the DH where I reveled in the sound of my own voice, self-important at being lunched like this, thrilling at the poking at the edges of what this connection could be. A vision of him singing to me with Elvis on the sound system, I Can't Help. Then laughing in his slightly snarky way. He made me believe I was worth attention, buffered my rumpled self through my coming out into adulthood, queerness, love.

We roamed together after I moved to Toronto on reams and reams of paper. In my first real job, when computers and fancy paper were a novelty, I'd write lengthy letters, then print them on art samples, cerlox them, emboss them, showing off the post-gutenberg tools of my urban life. I'd send him unimaginably dull documents I'd produced, research into insurance fraud or media backgrounders on battery recycling. He once commented that he was impressed that my work was at least "involving," a phrase that stuck with me.

He loved me hard, in his odd little sarcastic tweaking way. Then, I lost the plot with him a bit when I made the shift to finger-tip fast email, reserving post for packages, cards, Special Things. But we'd connect over the blips, poetry fragmenting into my mailbox, catch up snippets of our narratives. He went on cruises with Sue, conferenced with his Steinbeck compatriots, wrote his music reviews, worried about his daughter, became a grandfather. I was happy I made the effort to go to his retirement party a couple of years ago, my presence part of the surprise that he seemed to appreciate.

Last summer, when I wrote to him and told him about the end of my marriage, he sent me an incredibly loving letter, assuring me he was enfolding me hard and tight. It mattered.

I'm sad and shocked. Beth and I never made that dinner party happen, never quite sure how to bring the two decade old history into our current lives, loving him in a sort of rueful, "does he just sit and drink and listen to music all the livelong day?" kind of way. We knew he didn't, really, but his Slavic romantic brooding was always foregrounded in the space between us.

I can't find my copy of the poem he wrote for me. But this one he wrote for Friend and Lover will do.

Pupil

Another one has entered in
by eyes, and dwells inside;

another "student," come to teach
herself to me. Another talk

that leaves me feeling touched
as though the talking keyed

an arch that had been building
-- leaning pillars, unawares --

through many careful years.
Although I stand before them

naked as a model daily, when
one in hundreds proves to know

my inness like a lover's body --
blush! Another thing like love!

Cape Fear

When people graduate with their phds at my school, each of them speaks for 3 minutes at the ceremony as they're awarded their hoods. This is usually a pretty textured tapestry -- emotional outbursts of gratitude to loved ones, glimpses into passionately pursued work, hoots of achievement. I'm always teary and marveling at the communal nature of "becoming a phd" -- where my faculty, for whom this is old hat, mutter about being bored at having to hear too many times how much people love their husbands.

Last January, a woman I only peripherally know gave the usual glowing kudos to her husband for his support, and pointed him out with a great warm smile as the one in the audience wearing a cape. Dude was indeed fully kitted out in a RenFair-like garment, flowing purple over a nondescript pair of black trousers and a black tshirt. "That's just a thing he does," said Suzanne, loving amusement on her face.

I pondered that for a long time afterwards. What does it take to accept this kind of difference in someone you love? Where is the line of tolerance, and where does it become "just something he does" type of acceptance? Was there a point in her marriage where she sat down and said "hey, look, I thought this was a phase, but it's been 10 years -- seriously, you're 45 years old. Time to confine the role-playing to the stage or the bedroom."

The warm grin on the stage as she gestured toward him held no hint of that kind of conflict -- just unabashed acceptance of something acknowledged to be just this side of wacky. My first reaction was to eye the cape with something of a "what the?..." double-take; the second was to scrutinize Suzanne's face for clues about how she'd achieved this equanimity.

I keep thinking about this moment as I ponder both the freight of my past. Where did my anxiety at my differences from A slice between us? Where did my clench of concern at overly-butch when she buzzed her hair one notch too close to the scalp constrain and curtail both of us? Where did my worry that she would be perceived as incompetent or goofy or insufficiently informed about anything mute us both? I know I always pulled tight on differences, projecting my own fears and hopes into her performance, struggling with being able to stand back and shake my head gently, amused, accepting difference, visible fumbling, divergence of opinion about important ideas. Enmeshed in the "us" in such a way that I couldn't hold her at arm's length, buoyed by my gaze regardless of pursuit.

As I start to glimpse new possibilities for my relational space -- could it be?... maybe?...I'm carrying this startling recognition about how my own self-consciousness has been projected onto my lovers. Like my hot shame, long ago, when Beth made an idle comment about my ex J being a "surprisingly bad dancer." Getting underneath the fear that has often bound my legs and support, wanting to be that person publicly, fully loving my crazy husband in the wacky cape. Carefully tracing out what that means in action.

My neighbour across the hall, an efervescent design student, was struggling the other day to pile way too many things on her bicycle to take to school for a display. I intervened and gave her a ride, and she thanked me profusely. "You're my hero," she said," lugging her bag full of fabric. "I'm going to make you a CAPE."

I laughed and said it wasn't necessary. But for a moment I had a vision of myself in a swirly silky floral cape, experiencing the world from inside the fabric, free and full and open. As I start to embrace the possibilities of this nascent relationship with D, I'm carrying that imagined softness of the silk on my skin.

And She Was

Gorgeous rainy day today. Did nothing "productive" -- worked out on my spinny bike, answered some emails, went for a long lunch with Suzie and a couple of clients, got my hair coloured by the luscious young Jessica. Was dancing around my apt. getting ready to go on my date with D tonight and it dawned on me -- I'm happy.

Who'd have thought it?

Nobody, not even the rain

In another life, I wrote a paper for a critical theory class about the ee cummings poem that starts "somewhere I have never travelled." To teach us about "intentional fallacy," Watson (the prof) had taken cummings' name off the poem and instructed us to treat the text alone, without context. I remember pissing him off by playing with gender pronouns, writing about the poet as a "she" speaking of her lover as displaying "intense fragility" -- a quality I saw in D, my male then-lover. Watson saw this as a deliberate provocation. (Of course, he was the one who later warned me that doing a phd would "unwoman" me and I would end up "like Lois," our gorgeously Bryn Mawr dyke dean).

I keep thinking about that idea of experiencing a poem "without context," and the "rules" about what kind of context I could legitimately bring to my reading. Right now, in all of my meetings, connectings, discoverings with the people expanding my circle, I'm sharply conscious of the "high context" everyone brings to every meeting by this point in our mid-lives. So many stories already lived, so much "intense fragility" woven through amazing strength and capability.

I feel like I'm in a place where I'm ... kind of awed ... at the unfoldings of experience, histories, hopes that the people who have been in my life for a long time, and the people I'm now encountering, are carrying as we connect. I feel as though, somehow, I can now hold myself open to a compassionate place -- can see past the simply put statement of "we were together for three years, it ended, it was hard" to the layers of managed pain and thwarted hope, intertwined into a willingness to embrace new possibilities and new stories.

I feel like I have found a place to be able to behold and observe and hold the stories with a fairly -- to me -- profound and new compassion. I keep seeing the plot lines of strength -- the boundary-drawing stands to stop pain, the uttered hopes about intimacy despite a landscape of betrayal, the sheer power of self-definition against experiences that whacked against desired self. I'm sort of awed at the capacity for the people in my world to absorb, make meaning of and achieve agency through history that could toughen, but instead seasons and creates the kind of vulnerability embedded in strength that allows for true depth in the space between us.

I'm feeling like I'm in a grateful and open place. And wanting to live into who their trust makes me.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Waiting for the knock

All weekend, I've been half-waiting for a knock on the door.

On Friday, Barbara was doing her thing to hang my the antique windows I bought to create a sort of free-floating "wall" between the entrance door and my bedroom. (I had this sort of vague bricolage/pomo idea of using the windows; Barbara's amazing skill with display and types of hardware I didn't even know existed brought it to life). I'm working away, she's drilling into the ceiling, BRGRRRRRRRR, BRGRRRR, and then... FUCK! At the top of the ladder, she's simultaneously laughing and cursing, an "I can't believe this happened" expression on her face. "Um, I just hit air through the concrete. I think I might have drilled through your neighbour's floor." "Um, do you want to go up and see what happened?"

Both giggling -- how freaking absurd is this, imagining a little gopher-bump in the cork floor of whoever-it-is-who-lives-up-there that I know only by the occasional sounds of what is probably a treadmill and the odd billiard-ball-dropped-on-the-floor in the middle of the night noise. We strategize, every cell in my body resisting actually going up there to introduce myself with the declaration that I may have created a peephole between our already illusory personal space. We decide that surely -- surely! -- the floor is thicker than the (considerable and aggressive) length of B's concrete drill. We plot how to hang the windows with not-as-deep anchor thingies. I chicken out of the at best, embarrassing, confrontation, at worst, expensive and filled with understandable rage.

B continues the project, I continue to hang back from the teeth-clenching drama. And all weekend... so far... no word. And I hear them at home last night, so whatever it was, at least it's not -- apparently -- stunningly visible.

The windows need a bit more propping up -- they're bowing a bit in the middle -- but they look great.

Being Don/Being Curtis

My pals on my online community have been talking this week about what should be done with our corporeal remains. We veer into this territory with some regularity -- it's one of our persistent topics of conversation, like cooch shaving and whether women should change their names after they get married.

This time Cheryl added a new twist in the form of Don, "a friend whose ashes ended up in my possession. I don't really understand why, as he had a wife and a daughter. He's in my liquor cabinet, which is appropriate and keeps me from having to sweep him up when the cats knock him over."

Cheryl was writing out her instructions for what should happen should she be flattened by a bus or what have you, and realized she should also make some provision for Don. Various suggestions were made -- planting a flowering shrub and scattering him around it, sending Don as a wedding gift to his daughter, making a diamond out of him or sending him to be incorporated in a man-made reef in the Carribean. Kassa suggested ebay. Someone else offered to come and pick Don up as an excuse for a trip to Chicago.

Renee then declared that she'd just realized that when she dies, she wants to be cremated and "have my ashes passed around among random people with a minimal amount of concern for me, but with enough decency to keep passing me around. I wanna be Don!" She thought it would be cool to "live in someone's liquor cabinet for a while, then on someone's mantle, then stuck in the basement for 20-30 years, then maybe an end table somewhere."

Another woman imagined about being put in the trophy case of some San Antonio sports team, or spread on the field. I had the brainwave that I could be in a sealed urn used as a kind of "talking stick" for group facilitation.

These flippant musings about nomadic post-life existence led to some serious focus on living wills, organ donation, etc. As a group, we were clear that our organs are up for grabs, open for the continuation of new stories in other people who badly need them.

This conversation intersects with the 8th birthday this Sunday of my cousin's son Curtis. Curtis had a liver transplant when he was 9 months old. My cousin, one of the most amazing men I know, donated part of his own liver. My own teeny tiny part in that whole epic experience -- one afternoon post-surgery that I spent holding the so-ill bundle of sticks that was this baby in a darkened room while his dad recovered and his mom slept -- was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. And here we are, Curtis this incredible 8 year old of curiosity and will and generosity and cuddling on the couch and enthusiastic devouring of online satellite weather and darkness maps, imaginings of climbing the highest mountains.

Happy Birthday, Curtis. Sign your donor cards, everyone.

Parabolic Reflectors

I spend the afternoon today reading and working on the back patio at Moonbean, the fair trade emporium a block away. Half in sunshine, half under awning, 6 or 7 people reading and writing, silently nodding to each other, resin tables and chairs simultaneously cheap student patio furniture, café society, makeshift library. Library norms for conversation prevail here – only the couple who is studying together is chatting, quiet and giggly. Everyone is reading, working on laptops. Reggae and rockabilly drift in from other unseen parts of the market.

Today, the guy with the bull-like nostril piercing is wearing a red Conformity Training tshirt and tapping his suede-patched knees restlessly as he reaches for words. He's a fixture at Moonbean, but this time there are no over-eager Saturday market tourists grabbing at his jacket in excitement where it hangs on the back of the chair, “where did you GET that?” about some anarchist anti-Bush graffiti he’s sewn into the denim. Just his pen and journal and gentle, absent-minded tracing over of a newly inked tattoo on his forearm with his fingertip. Everyone else is a 20something student, reading and sipping.

Like every library, this one has its off-kilter-masquerading-as-present guy. Unlike the ones at the Lillian H Smith branch, whose Inner Dictators Addressing the Throngs gravitate to the balcony that surrounds the main entrance, this one is a Chinese guy in his 20s or 30s, neatly dressed in a camouflage t-shirt and jeans, carrying what looks like a typical leather bookbag. He sits down, alone, and pops open a can of Coke. He belches, loudly, and immediately burbles with equally resonant laughter. He belches a full series of prolonged juicy notes, punctuated with full-throated merriment. He guzzles the coke in about a minute, then sticks the can in the metal bucket ashtray in the middle of the table and lurches a little, toddler-like, off to the bathroom.

The other seven of us gaze into the centre of the space emptied by his leaving, giggling and quizzical. “Maybe he just realized that pop can make you burp,” laughs the ringletted boy who works the espresso machine sometimes.

Belching boy returns, carefully and elegantly picks up his jacket and bookbag, and leaves, performance over. I return to reading about Skinnerian behaviourists.

**
As the afternoon wears on, the readers dissipate, and the smokers arrive. Two girls who maybe seem to be tourists -- there are maps and some european looking green, yellow and black sneakery things accompanied, improbably, by black legwarmers around her ankles at the bottom of her jeans. They cuddle a bit as they smoke and read.

Around them, beers start to replace the lattes. Guys with lots of hair and tattoos and large ugly sunglasses smoke and talk about roadies, ultrasonic ways to scatter roaches from an apartment. People lie on their cellphones about where they are. The quiet reading space becomes chatter.

Distracted, I notice for the first time the building immediately adjacent to this back yard. A... house? a completely ramshackle structure, patches of exposed wood with ancient peeling insulbrick, water stained flattened corrugated boxes in the windows, a Bell ExpressVu satellite shiny on the roof, cupped to catch the waves.

Symbicort-fueled grumping

My chest seems to belong to a wrinkled old man named Leo hanging out on the docks behind the Sunnyside in Lasalle, a lifetime of smokes rattling around in there. Coming back to the city in full allergy season bloom means I've been sucking on my inhaler like, well, like some addictive substance a person sucks on. This wet mop needs-a-lung-brush feeling films over everything and my Monday is just mundanely grumpy. I'm grumpy that my cleaner turned into a petulant adolescent while I was away and not only didn't show up when she was supposed to (nothing like coming home to dustballs after a week away when you've been expecting shine), but spit defenses about it at me ("I couldn't remember what we agreed to! I was really busy and I worked at Dish three nights last week! I couldn't find your phone number because I got a new phone and the old one wasn't charged! It's really hard to fit you in now that it's only every three weeks! I didn't get your email! etc."). Classic example of a conversation bifurcation point -- what could have been: "I noticed you didn't come, is everything okay?" /"I'm so sorry I didn't make it and I didn't call you, I was crazy busy, I should have called you though" became "Are you sure you can fit this job in?" "Fine, I'll return your key then."

And thus worlds vanish in the blink of an eye.

She's coming today, but I'm grumpy because I have to go out and work in a coffee shop or the library until my 4:00 p.m. meeting, and really I just want to curl up on the couch with Theories of Human Development on my chest and snooze.

In the middle of all of this grumpiness, I skim the Globe headlines, procrastinating in my usual "is there REALLY nothing more to read in that 120 column series on life with children that Siobhan linked me to that's made me laugh so much?" absolutely pointless kind of way. Apparently, there are Australian miners trapped underground, and they can be communicated with but not yet freed. The first words of one of the trapped guys: Mr. Russell's first words to his rescuers were short and to the point. “It's [expletive] cold and cramped in here. Get us out,” he implored them.

Um, yeah. Kinda. What the hell else would he say? I remember years ago hearing a similar report about some people trapped in earthquake rubble after two or three days. Their first words? "Get me out of this rubble." This was reported with great gravity.

Seems about right to me. Maslow and the hierarchy of needs and all of that. And mine right now? A cup of good coffee from Moonbean and a winch to drag myself into some able-to-interact-with-the-world space.