Pansies

Quiet weekend. Lots of domestic stuff, currently batting even. Got car in shape for trip to roc and stuff put in place to list it for sale this month (this makes me sad, letting go of my wee car, but I am doing a LOT more highway driving than I expected to be when I bought it, and it's just not the right car for that). My ex KINDLY came over and replaced my toilet parts, but now the tank is leaking. Sigh. It's ALWAYS somethin'.

A propos of nothing, pansies around the corner from my house. Note the graffiti on the tree.

Nicoise perfection

I had a perfect day yesterday. It's finally mudluscious shoulder-baring, patio-sitting spring here... and I'm downright giddy.

Got up yesterday and marched purposefully to St. Lawrence market. Dropped $23 at every counter. Spent $30 on exotic vinegar (pomegranate champagne? really? how very Silver Palate/1985). Bought Good Fish. Marched home, humming with warmth, and literally could NOT prevent myself from hopping into real running shorts and a singlet and heading out into the sunshine.

Then, made a Perfect Salade Nicoise. F arrived for lunch (after an unbelievably busy week) and we seared two small perfect piece of yellow fin tuna to barely cooked. Drank half a bottle of a cold spritely chardonnay. Best lunch I've ever made, I think.

Had a lovely entangled relaxed afternoon to the beat of the crazy drummers (verdict: drummers quaint and amusing to walk by while eating an empanada, not so much as a permanent soundtrack right outside one's windows). Walked through the streets together to have a beer with a friend while listening to some jazz, let the warmth flow over us.

In just-spring, and the goat-footed balloon man whistles far and wee.

Traffic islands

I keep finding myself in the middle of busy streets, in that fake-safe point on the yellow line between two different traffic directions. I realized last week when I was with F at the university, I keep putting myself into the middle of the street so I can cut across the parking lot to get back to the library -- going to either traffic light seems like an insufferable burden, a waste of precious time. I keep doing that on spadina, too, have become one of those people pushing my way through traffic, perching on the little ledge that separates the streetcar lanes from the cars, darting like frogger between vehicles.

That I've noticed this repeatedly lately tells me something -- some new level of impatience, feeling pushed, no time, dashing from one place to the next. This week, I'm bloody tired, and "technically," there's no reason to be -- I've been sleeping a reasonable amount, am just WORKING, really. But just... no restorative time, and never ever getting to the one thing that's hanging over me, the pilot. So I cross streets in the dangerous middle, find myself hovering in suspension between here and there, never getting there fast enough.

April is busy. I'm peering over the hedgerows to the end, really needing breathing space.

Petals

I'm feeling frazzled -- just way too much client busy-ness this week, my dear friend and business partner S leaving for Europe indefinitely -- a lot to do, not so much bandwidth. But I needed to stop and look at the tulips opening so gorgeous-ly in my dining room. Was walking home with groceries the other day and stopped at the flower shop downstairs and asked "I have $11 in my pocket -- what can I get?" Then, miraculously, my cousins brought me some stems that matched perfectly. Perfect and luscious today.

Now, fitting in a quick run. It's above freezing and *almost* sunny. Maybe will brave the lake.

Hoot

My cousin is achieving Great Things as Miss Hooters.

I learned on the weekend that one of my other cousins apparently got a boob job as a gift from her husband. ("What'd she have done?" asked another cousin. "Bigger? Raised? Lowered?" "I don't think anyone has them lowered" offered HER husband. Then we talked about vasectomies).

The hooters thing is just... sigh.

Egg, redux

We had a family ritual while I was growing up that easter was the time we got new, cheap, one-season outdoor toys like hula hoops and skipping ropes. My dad would stress test them to their limits most easters. He'd also ringlead an egg hunt at my grandparents' in which we always maintained the fiction that we had "not found" eggs the previous year -- they were, of course, always resquirrelled after they'd been rooted out. I've blogged about this before.

Today, coincidentally, my cousin brought me over a little bag of things that my aunt had retrieved from my grandmother's house after she died. Including one of the petrified eggs planted at least two decades ago by my dad.

I miss you, dad.

***

(The package also included a hilarious thank you note that I wrote to my grandparents when I was about 8 -- "Thank you for the card and the money. It was the most money's worth of a dollar bill that I got. All the rest were one dollar bills." And to be clear, I signed my full name).

A thousand ages in thy sight

Conversation reported by my cousin, from two of her more secular friends:

Wife: What's good friday anyway? The day jesus died, right?

Husband: How'd he die again?

**

A little mind-boggling, this lack of basic cultural knowledge -- but at the same time, charmingly other-dimensional. I remember a fracas back in my grad school days in the mid-80s, when we were being introduced to the wonders of mainframe computers, and Dilworth instructed us to "type the lord's prayer" as a test of our ability to use the word processing program. There were at least two or three people in the class who said they had no idea what he meant, and he responded with some outrage about this being a basic cultural artifact, like shakespeare or the national anthem.

The conversation pings me also back to a second year comparative religion course I took as an undergrad -- I wrote something in a paper about the crucifixion being the "mythology of christianity" and the prof scrawled back "IF christianity has a mythology, this is not it."

(Again, mindboggling in a professor of comparative religion, but I supposed discovering the narrowness of realms of academic expertise has been part of my gradual awakening into adulthood. I will note that I seem to recall that this prof had some sort of seamy interlude later on in life in which he was knifed outside some bar in detroit, and I didn't have quite the same gasp of horror as I might have if he hadn't made me squirm in disgust).

All of this is really postmodernism in freeze frame action... assumptions that one's own mythology is the lens through which we all make cultural meaning -- and at the same time, so much *is* refracted against it, including the basic structure of canadian holidays and the tying together of redemption and the new life of spring. My online friend in Chicago notes that their cardinal was blessing easter baskets (wtf is that about, she says --I thought the baskets and the bunnies and the eggs were all pagan fertility symbols) when he fell down and broke his hip yesterday. Again with the absurdity of it all, like the enacted Passion in the streets of the italian neighbourhood here in which at least one of the Christs over the past decade was purported to be a well known gay leather boy sub quite into the flogging.

All balled together, creating riffs of bizarre intersection, some grappling by well meaning people for christianity that is about caring for others, all obscuring the way that religion is so efficiently used to create a "we" that others everyone else. It's easiest to think of easter as the affirmation of wanting to Do Good that my mother wants it to be, or the playful spring ritual of eggs and outdoor toys after the bleak winter my dad always made it. I squint at all the pieces that filter together across my own life, and can only find the bricolage of mud luscious spring, propulsion for rejuvenation after the bleak grey winter. Fresh hope for a drive around the lake where my car isn't in danger of being blown off the skyway.

Here at the right time

It's easter again. Last year at easter, I was such a newbie blogger, so unsettled in so many aspects of my life. Had hit the nadir of misconnection with my ex, had moved, was exhausted and feeling my fumbling way toward the next thing. Not sure where my paying work was and even less sure where my real work was. I went to windsor to see my family at easter, and drove home still frayed at the edges. I have a vivid sense memory of being in the dark car on that sunday night, driving faster and faster as the car filled with music, and in that cocoon, able to feel reborn, opened up, letting go of the stuff that was besetting me. My therapist called it my own redemption -- christian metaphors aside, it did feel like emotional crocuses.

Into that space, I reconnected with F, went to Portland, got back into my work and refound the pacific. Then really connected with F, and found our way to where we are now, a full fledged couple of six months this week. Found my way, fumblingly, so much closer to my real work.

Today, driving back from roc after dropping F at the airport for a work trip to europe, I dragged a whole new basket full of frayings. It's... so full with him. Loving joy between us, he makes me laugh and sigh in all the right ways, supports me in my work, drives me forward with his ambition. Makes it okay to be me, in all my foibles and complications, sees my future.

And yet... I can't just relax into it, can't be happy in it. I'm always *poised* for something to be wrong, can't roll with the natural disrhythmia of trying to figure out how to balance our intense then apart time, life here and first lines of warp on the loom of us there. Less tangled into lives here, not in anyone's life in roc except F's. Not sure how to be "here" when here is in love, partnered but not in the same place, no "next life" yet clear, my life in toronto still pinning down the corners of my tent every time I try to up stakes (necessarily in the work sense), but yearning for a next place where I can feel a bit settled and find a rhythm. Colleagues and friends I click with here, flesh and ideas I click with in a place neither of us particularly wants to be.

The outside world glosses my current state as "busy." "Stuffed" is more like it -- gills bulging, eyes popping, touching down into each realm just long enough to almost get it right and then resent it for not being the only thing. I want reassurance that isn't possible from F, and it's about wanting so much -- life that holds everything I want to do more comfortably, more gracefully, more easily than now, life with love and work and home and friends entangled.

When I got home from Portland last year, I wandered around my flat in my bare feet playing Josh Ritter, just feeling the now, ripening with the imaginings from F, from the sense of my work that was starting to take shape. The colour of the sky in portland still perches at the edge of my consciousness, so much promise for clearing, for the energizing splash of coolness before and after rain. So much promise for feeling at home somewhere new. I am halfway to somewhere new, and am feeling ungraceful about knowing how to hold what's important in the past, threading into onto the loom of the new.