Melange

It's been a weird little blend of days. Since I got back from Windsor, I've been trying to hunker down and get some real reading/writing done, and I'm making progress, but my committee meeting next week is looming at me. I have a magnet of a cartoon on my fridge that says "Clive was about to come face to face with the ball he had dropped long ago." I haven't exactly dropped the ball -- am doing a lot of reading and thinking about this project -- but not much of it has coalesced or made it to paper. Still a lot of uncertainty, the kind that Frank and Barnett help me walk through, but Lita tends to squish a bit. So I need to get on top of that.

In the middle of this stewing of ideas, my little online world had some upheaval. A grating cohabitation of worldviews finally came to a head (I think it can best be described as a some flailing badly-hidden judgement from a bunch of small minded christians and the final burst of impatience from a bunch of hooerish pagans -- the usual clash of civilizations). After a Battle Royale, a bunch of us just left and set up a new place. I like to think of it as a Quiet Revolution, abruptly creating a new world where we are no longer bound by the strictures of the Church and they sell unconsecrated hosts in the local depanneur. More drama than I wanted to deal with, but it feels much better to have an online hangout where the complexities of my life aren't met with tight-lipped head-shaking.

I'm trying to create some mindful, quieter space in all of this. I had a good longish run on Monday, hot and elemental, and a stroll-y walk to and home from the dentist yesterday. The view across Riverdale park from Broadview really is one of the best moments in the city. It was good to immerse myself in it, glide through the balmy air and the baseball playing and the people sitting on their porches in Cabbagetown and the honking shouting Italians and the yacking cellphoners on the streetcar. Ran this morning and detoured to my old street so I could see what A has done to the house -- I knew she was doing some work, and it looks good. It's yellow, now, with some really nice landscaping.

Many things in my life are crystalizing -- getting crisper on my conceptual framework for school, a couple of work possibilities, the shape that's starting to emerge for who I can be with F. The lake is in the way, and a few other distractions, but it feels like a life, a space, I can, want to, live into. Quite giddy-making, really.

And this morning, I toasted my bagel in my Grandma's toaster. This toaster doesn't pop, it glides the bread up. I like that sensation.

Tessellations

I'm quilted with images from the weekend. My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful.

My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.

My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.

This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.

The Pollard Triplets

Yesterday was a very. full. day. I kissed F goodbye at 7:00 a.m., knowing I wouldn't see him again for weeks, ran back in with a latte for him, clutching my own americano, then hurled myself onto the highway. I was still on Spadina at 7:30, impatiently cursing the four enormous Chinese tour busses moving like whales to my tiny aggressive fighting fish, but then attacked the road. Being late for the funeral would have been Not. On, so I focused all of the energy in my body into driving fiercely and fully, fast but very focused and attentive. Pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Church in Lasalle just before 10:30. This was a Feat.

First people I saw were my stepmom and youngest sister, then my dear cousin Matt, then, in the foyer to the church, A. She was weepy, and we held each other. She held onto me as I said goodbye to Grandma, crying and saying, "she always accepted us, she was always nice to me." This was true. She was a very accepting woman in some profound ways -- picky about things that related to *her*, but not about how other people lived their lives. Bloody independent. Fiercely determined. (These things I apparently come by honestly).

Being with A was so resonant in this family space. She stayed for the mass, and I could feel the shift from loving connection to a more guarded place as the hour beside each other wore on. But that was okay. We quietly provided entertainment for my cousin's two year old in front of us (A's sunglasses, my business cards), Laura matter of factly referring to A as "Auntie A" to Serene. Still family, of course, in this swirl of a clan that included all manner of exes as well as currents. Stef and I joked that the obit should have just said "survived by a giant unruly brood," and this captures it -- roles not so important.

I do love my clan. From the three aunts who fostered me into being in so many different ways to my cousins who are so in my heart to the impromptu queer caucus Jen, Stef and I found ourselves in. Jen has come into being the person she has been navigating since she was about 3, and this is so good to see. Em and I planning a road trip together because we don't spend any alone time. Petra whispering to me at the sign of peace "don't forget us, there's no one to hold us together." We hang together softly and tentatively, poky bits here and there, shaping each other more gently than my mother's family did.

It's all about belonging, seeing ourselves in our quiet roots, telling the stories. We went back to Grandma's afterwards and went through photo albums, drank some beer, ate leftovers. Looked for the easter eggs that were still in the rafters -- Em found one that said Tony 1982. The annual hunt my dad made. Heard the stories of my dad cramming all the kids into his van without telling anyone else and taking them for ice cream. My dad taking the giggle of girls for a walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses, bringing them back a bit shredded and grubby and overheated with adventure. My dad so missed in the leavening of the clan.

Looking at the pictures, we cooed about resemblances -- "look, this picture of Tony at 8 -- I never noticed before how much Raymond looks like him." "Is this Matt, Chris or Ray?" Mocking our foibles -- "which wedding was THIS, Aunt Susan?" Trying to trace the stories that wind us together. "What baby are you holding here, Mary Ann?"

Some of the stories are so peripheral they evaporate even as we look at the pictures. "I think that's one of the Pollard triplets," said Mary Ann about the mystery baby. I have no idea who the Pollards are, really, remember hearing the name, maybe neighbours, like the 1930s mom bathing her tiny baby (Dick, 5 weeks, it says on the back) in a bowl on a table, gone forever now, an erased extra in our central narrative, someone who shaped my grandmother at some point in her life. Recognizing that we're all like that, vivid in our present moments, eliding into an cypher in an album in an old lady's house as decades slide by.

It all makes me determined to continue to grab onto the present with fierce joy. I want to find a way to help make sure there that without the centre to our clan, we still stay connected. That I keep building the sense of family with A. That as I figure out what kind of a "we" there could be with F, it stays vivid and rooted and about delighting each other.

I left my grandmother's with her toaster as a memento (I love that she used it everyday), and an old pie plate and muffin tin for Melissa. I think she'll like those. My bag is full of photos to scan and build into our mythology about dad, our senses of self among the brood. Stef was worried it would feel like pillaging, but it didn't -- we were building stories together, respectfully talking about what kinds of mementos people would like to take. Using my new treo to take little videos of Issy dancing, Seb kung fu fighting, Em dancing when I bid her to. A swirl of an unruly brood, carrying ourselves forward, connected.

Loosely coupled

When we think about relationships, organizations, cities, as systems, one of the questions that comes up is how tightly "coupled" different parts of the system are -- are two parts of a process so closely wound together that they are completely interdependent, that they need each other to function in order to function? Or is there "looser" coupling, slack in the connections that may create less rigidity and predictability, but more opportunity for creative responses?

My grandmother's death is making me realize how loosely coupled this part of my family system is. There is no reason for us to all hang together, really, no overarching narrative of what it means to be part of this "clan," no central point of connection. We've all had a sense of warm enough "obligation" about Grandma in the past decade, have our own more tightly coupled points of connection (me and my one set of cousins, my mom and Jane) and somehow those points allow information to travel through the system in a reasonably effective way, and we stay a system, of a sort. We enjoy each other at the one or two family gatherings that happen a year -- weddings, milestone birthday parties, the occasional casually put together Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner of who happens to be around -- but the connection points are loose.

One glaring example of this is that Grandma's obit missed a few people. Including Grandpa, some grandchildren, the family members who don't have obvious role nouns attached to them (like the dead sons' wives and Ray and Nicole, whom I think of as my cousins, but who are technically second cousins to me, and not grandchildren to my grandmother). It was, I'm sure, hastily cobbled together by my aunt, who seems to have the reluctant role of making the family happen. I'm sure some people were hurt by the omissions -- and this also points out the gap in any kind of "authority" in our family. There is no "they" to actually be hurt by, to feel shunned by -- just the pointed evidence of the way we hang together, haphazardly, twisted together with old rope in no real patterns.

Melissa and I had a conversation yesterday about how to honour Grandma's memory if she doesn't go to the funeral -- and I strongly urged her not to take Mica on a plane yet. "Maybe a memorial euchre game," she fretted, "among the sisters." That makes sense to me.

Stef and I had a more pointed, self-effacing conversation about our shared experience of feeling quite bad that our first reaction was yes, sadness, but backgrounded to how this affected OUR plans, lives, how our recognition of loss is distant enough to be refracted through the other more vivid ways we connect to our worlds and family. We shared a bit of a sighing reaction to timing -- me re F's visit, hers re trying to recover from illness, find time to go to Windsor with J and his kids later in the summer -- but she also put boldly up front some of the mini-stories that keep the narrative of C----- Family bumping along:

"C and i had better play this one VERY shrewdly, if we're going to keep everyone *else* from using this opportunity to make off with albums full of pics of dad and anything else of his...which really should be ours, not just for our specific lineage but also for our fascination with, and commitment to, studying things like genealogy, where we come from and knowing more about WHO WE ARE..."

"i wonder what happens to the fossilized eggs in her rafters" (A reference to the easter egg hunts that emblematize my dad to us, and the mythic leaving of eggs in the attic from year to year).

"i wonder if grandma WILL be leaving sarah all her lipsticks... (A reference to the infamous time that my cousin, at 6, said "Grandma, when you die, can I have your lipsticks?").

I think that's what the life of this woman, my grandmother was about -- making this sprawling family happen, setting the tone for determination and loose connections, creating a world that circles together, flows in and out of contact points, small stories holding us in familiarity.

I'm looking forward to seeing people tomorrow, seeing my current self in this context, feeling the connections that have shaped who I am and am becoming in this part of my life. And I'm watching myself in that loosely coupled space, gazing at where F and I could go, valuing the other dynamic connections in my life that move closer together and further apart and back again into rhythm. Grateful for the warmth I'm feeling in the end of the coupledness with D, for the continued opening up of my friendship with S, for the warm reconnection with A earlier this week. Grateful for all that is reflecting me back in the ways I want to be seen, giving me space to be.

Leaning into it

My grandmother died this morning, fairly unexpectedly. Margaret C----, born Seguin. Raised 7 children, two of whom went before her. She would have been 95 this September, and, as far as these things go, had a really great run at it. She still lived in her home I remember seeing built when I was a little girl, and in fact, still drove. Very healthy, though of course frail over the past few years. She fell and broke her hip on Monday, had surgery last night, and then died of cardiac arrest this morning.

I'm in the edges of the family on this one, a goer-along, not in the middle of the vortex the way I was with my other grandparents. When my mother's father died in September 2001, the family swirl was a category 5 hurricane, all boats blown off their mooring and the landscape changed forever: anger and drama at the deathbed, angst over the will, my aunt no longer speaking to my mother, locus of family togetherness gone. This is more of a predictable spring rain, the passing of someone who lived a completed arc, no tectonic plates to shift as a result.

Because I'm in the margins here, and was amiable with but not close to this grandmother, I have the luxury of feeling slightly selfish about this. Mildly irritated with the timing, sighing with heaviness at yet another funeral so close after John's, tweaked with loss of my dad, irritated that I can't seem to spend a full week in my place with writing momentum, wishing my time with F wasn't going to be truncated a little. Working hard to find the space to honour my grandmother's life among my edgy little emotional space. Knowing I'll find the right zone, breathing deep.

The space between

In a lot of the work I do about relationships and dialogue, we talk about "the space between" people -- the energy between the "I" and the "Thou" (in the Buberian sense), what it is we create in relationship that is not me and not you.

I've been rolling a lot of ideas about identity around on my tongue for a few weeks now, and had a little flash of insight last night in my little mini-dips into pride.

In the afternoon yesterday, I went to Carly's 2nd bday party, a rich little trip into my running identity, my role as part of J&S's chosen family, my aunt-self to Amelia, echoes of my 8 months in that upstairs apt. I navigated the garden party in my little floral sundress, bonded with J's stepmom Char, felt connected.

Then I had a date with D, our last date-date as we transition our relationship into friends. We had dinner on a heart-of-the-village patio that seems to be the nexus of my Pride Lite. I had dinner in this seething place Friday night with Darrell and David, and then last night, D and I met my sister Stef and her guy Jon (in the pic) there for dinner. On the way in, we ran into our cousin Jen, also out doing the pride thing.

After dinner, D and I were standing on the street, drinking coffee, smoking our single pride Lucky Strikes she'd cadged from someone in her charming way, and I noticed someone dressed in what felt librarian-ish garb -- stoic shoes, long dowdy black skirt, frumpy sweater. "Interesting choice of drag," I thought, especially counterpointed to the crazy carnival drag all around. Moments later, the librarian (who I thought was a guy) squealed, "you were on KINK" and ran over to D. She blushed, he gushed, "I LOVE you, you were so hot, I'm a hermaphrodite from New York City, my mother is a Jehovah's Witness but is totally supportive of me, GUYS, this girl was on KINK." Etc. I stood there, coolly observing in my little black slip, smoking my fancy American butt, watching hir hug D. We all wished each other happy pride, then I turned to D. "I didn't know you were on Kink." We both laughed.

We had a good night, our last one as lovers, honest and connected and loving, both clear that more is not going to work for us, but affectionate in that transition. She is so... brave and smart and dignified. I'm so happy to have her in my life -- she teaches me a lot about relational space.

And that's what I was reflecting on while I was walking home. The space between. My identity triangulated between my family (queer and straight), my most intimate friend (and former lover) of 25 years, my recent lovers, queer and straight, male and female and somewhere between, kinked and not. Me, in that space stretched between all of them, fully, fluidly myself.

My two girls

Am home now, after a good little domestic sojourn with my sister's family and my cousin's happily buzzing home. Lots to do to try to get my admin in order, some client work, some school writing. So just a fly by post with a sweet sweet pic of Maya and Mica yesterday.

Mica

Newbabyniece has been born, joining her fierce grubby sweet-smiled older sister Maya, in the world. Her arrival was a little precipitous -- at home (planned), Sunday (unexpected), with no one there but my sis, her husband and my 2 y.o. niece. The midwives had been signaled but they didn't arrive until a few minutes after Mica did.

Mica's way of slipping herself into the world had already weathered one big sandstorm, back in December when my sister had to have an emergency appendectomy when she was 12 weeks pregnant. The quick, two push Sunday afternoon birth was a remarkably calm and casual way of sliding into our space, really, and greeted by her resourceful parents with a kind of warm matter-of-factness. (Of course, this is my sister who contemplated the appendectomy without anesthetic).

I'm amused by the contrast between my sister's perspective ("it was all natural and I did spend my whole pregnancy working on opening up my hips, it was a lot easier than Maya's birth, with the two hours of pushing"), her very seasoned midwife's perspective ("most births happen with this kind of flow, this one was a little fast, all is well") and the rest of the world (How dramatic! Weren't you on the phone with 911!). I admire my sister's groundedness tremendously, the way the swirl can swirl and she just lets it go. No big drama about the fact that, despite the intense anticipation of the new baby, the one set of grandparents (who were supposed to look after Maya if necessary) accidentally had their phone off the hook all day (Loopy drove over there with Maya after the birth to find out if his parents were dead on the kitchen floor -- they were reading in the backyard, oblivious to the fact that they hadn't heard from their sons on Father's Day) and the other grandmother was in the casino in Windsor with her cellphone off.

And so I enter my Aunt Cate role, reading to Maya, holding the baby in the crook of my arm as we eat thai food, beaming at my sister and her gorgeous, rooted little family. So happy to be part of this seasoned little micro-climate.

Squiggly

Am back at home, busy busy busy, breathing in my own space again and reminding myself what it feels like to live here. The humidity makes me less crisp than I felt in the PNW, and I've had really discombobulated sleep... but lots of things are zinging into place. Had good people connections this week -- two wonderful sleepovers with my gorgeous young friend Amelia -- rich friend time with D and S and the bonus of an incredibly affirming 166 minute conversation with Pamela in chicago, with whom I build so well. I understand me, she her, ourselves together so well in our talk space. Rich time with lovers, as well, including the protracted question mark of F that will be answered, somehow, tomorrow.

Lots of pondering of identity this week, lots of ahas. More about that later. As a portal, a breakfast conversation with Amelia, conducted with the aid of finger puppets.

"You used to have a girlfriend, right?"

"Right. You met her."

"But sometimes you have boyfriends too?"

"Right. Sometimes girlfriends, sometimes boyfriends. You know how Aunt Janny used to be married to a man, but is now with Sheri? Sometimes people like boys and girls."

"But not at the same time?"

"Well, sometimes at the same time. But not usually. But people are all different. You know how we have fairy tales of the prince and princess meeting each other and living happily ever after? Mostly it just doesn't work like that."

[rollicking conversation played out with puppets, veering into gender roles and occupations for princes and princesses, Charles and Diana, divorce and Camilla Parker-Bowles as a green shiny lizard puppet and why Amelia has never heard of C P-B]

"So... it's gay if you're a man and lesbian if you're a woman... how come there are different names?"

"Well, sometimes people say gay for both... but it's a good question and not easy to answer." [Some discussion of the isle of Lesbos, Greece and clinical pathologizing of same sex lust].

"Amelia, do you actually know the word for if you like someone of the opposite sex? Like if girls like boys?"

[she shakes head]

"Most people call it Straight. There are other words, but that's the most common."

"Straight? Why?" [confused face]

"Well, because it's the most common and predictable way to love people... like a road that goes straight ahead?"

"So... if you like boys AND girls, it's Squiggly?"

He thought that I thought...

One of the things I've been reading while I've been here (still in Oregon) is Alison Bechdel's astonishing memoir about growing up, called Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It's a remarkable book -- she grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with a closeted gay father who was a high school English teacher and ran a funeral home. (The "Fun Home" of the title). I've been such a fan for so long of DTWOF, and this graphic novel form for her own life just takes her work to a whole new level.

At a pivotal point in the book -- when she's come out to her parents and this has provoked a shift in her father's silence about his own identity -- she describes a letter from him to her at college: "He thought that I thought that he was a queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too."

I think this is a remarkable way to describe all of the contexts that go into how we make meaning, identity, stories together. We figure out what we think the other person's reality is and we wrap our responses into that.

The book is a tremendous read on its own -- funny and reflective and insightful and tragic and sad -- and beautifully art directed -- and it's also a fractal for the musing I've been doing about identity and storytelling since I've been here. I've been thinking a lot about the point and shape of our narratives, in all sorts of ways.... from a conversation about United 93 where someone said "I know the story, I don't know why I need to see this," to rewatching Eternal Sunshine, which so brilliantly floats us on how our stories, relationships always shape who we are, to thinking about the pen I hold now in front of blank paper, wondering which hooks of my past will become the themes I build my future plots on.

I read an interview with Bechdel where the writer -- inevitably -- compared her childhood experiences to Six Feet Under. She said she'd only seen one or two episodes, and she'd often wondered if Alan Ball had ever overheard her talking in a coffee shop, because the family funeral home/closeted gay funeral director premise seemed too uncanny. Of course, the bare premise is the same -- but the fullness of each version of that premise is completely different. And that, I think, is the mystery and intensity of lived narrative... that we can have such similar bones and yet be so brilliantly different... that the many many many bifurcation points we face in all of our day to day decisions create such difference, different possibilities, different realities.

It's possible to make the point that making a movie like United 93 is a way of not rendering a story "untellable" -- an important factor for any culture... that's true, I think... and I actually thought the true accomplishment of that film was the way it didn't "other" the terrorists (in fact, drew parallels to the other passengers), and the way it played the seizing of the plane by the passengers not as heroic but as a simple act of self-preservation. There were no grandiose statements about saving the lives of anyone on the ground, just a flimsy hope that they might as well try to save their own lives. Those two simple reframes of some of the "assumptions" about the story that tend to mark the way the story gets publicly told -- that the terrorists are "other than" us (scary shoe-bomber chaotic people), that the passengers were "heroes" -- alone make the movie an achievement.

Bechdel's book is that same kind of achievement -- a powerfully insightful tracing of how she came to understand "truth" and reliability, and in a way, to be at peace with the acknowledgement that each of our truths is ours alone, shifting even in the moment as we name it to ourselves. What I build into this is that our moments of shared "agreement" on a truth are the mystery and wonder of how we live together and twine ourselves into each other; the willingness to hold each other's truth as possible even when we don't share it is the art and work of living.

Beachy houses

One more pic of where we were... our house was just behind some of the houses you can see in the pic, atop a little hill. *Apparently* above the expected tsunami line, but there were Tsunami Evacuation signs and warning zones everywhere.

Suspension

Am back in portland. I have one more day here before I go home, and I just want to hang suspended, untethered, for a few more hours. I'm not sure I'm ready to come home just yet, not sure I "got what I wanted" from this time (whatever that was), but I do feel like I nourished myself in some important ways, got some clarity on some things, explored some edges of self and desired self, had a few more questions posed, grappled with some of them, laid a little epistemological foundation for the work I'm doing. I realize how much I love this unstructured time and how generative it is and that I need to make more of that happen in my "real life" -- don't know how exactly, but it's a goal, now.

My time at the beach was good, and I loved the water. Unbelievably unfettered, roiling, endless horizon. I went for a longish run on the tide flats yesterday morning, and a shorter one today. Entering that space, mist and roil and whoosh and hard soft wet dry shifting footing, tugs me down into the earth in a way that nowhere else ever does.

The one edge to the trip was some tension in my coordination with Jane, which erupted a bit in the car on the way home. It was there between us the whole time but I think the little cracking of the surface surprised us both and left me feeling a little bruised. Trying to unpack the meaning of that for me -- it's about matching pace, breathing between the vertebrae, listening deeply, wondering how intimacy will get made for me in new ways. Not sure what to make of it yet.

I didn't manage to capture the full coastal vista we could see from various points along the road on the way back -- we stopped at a state park with an astonishing perspective -- but I did find a twillight moment that represents the place in a tiny way. It's a magnificent place.

Liminal space

We're here, on the coast, in a town called Manzanita, and this ocean is so "in my blood like holy wine," as Joni put it. It's a gorgeous little town (pics when I get back to portland -- I forgot to bring the camera cable) and the beaches are long and deep and inviting. The little house we have is just up above the water a tiny bit (possibly above the tsunami line), with views across the water and hills up to the north. The colours are more vibrant than the gulf island water/sky/mountains that are my first thoughts about the northwest -- pinks and deeper blues and sand along with the endless array of greys. Big waves, constantly moving.

It's the perfect liminal space, this beach, suspended between sea and land. When I was in New Zealand 10 years ago, I was awed by the west coast of the south island, where the land seemed to be in creation right before our eyes -- waterfalls where there were none the day before, seismic tremors that shifted roads and hills, glaciers visibly moving, rushing river where there had been a bridge, rain drumming down with intent. It's less *overt* here, but I feel the same creation energy, mini landscapes sculpted by waves, tiny cultures in the sand, here and gone, endless possibilities.

Don didn't end up coming, so it's just me and Jane, which is a nice face-to-face gaze for us. It's a tonic, this place. Jane and I walked long on the beach until we were alone with the moon after dinner, then stayed up until 3:00 a.m. talking -- family constellations, our work, energy fields we don't fully understand. Then I slept like a well-ferberized baby.

I'm posting from the perfect west coast cafe (good espresso, good scones and muffins, non-quaint stained glass), and we're going driving down the coast a bit today. Then some reading and more good food.

Life is good :-).

Fly-by

I'm off to the beach house today with Jane and Don (Jane is a friend from my school program, who started with me and is progressing about the same dogged but Not Fast pace; Don is her sweet husband). I think I'll be out of online range most of the time I'm away... I'm looking forward to the ocean and the sky and some quiet reading time.

Had a lovely little serendipitious interlude yesterday. I woke up early and hied myself off to a little diner I'd seen earlier in the week. While I was eating at the counter, I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me (why does this never happen at home? It keeps happening here), who turned out to be an interesting, friendly guy. He's a test pilot (something about companies ordering customized helicopters and planes) who lives just outside of Portland, big climber/hiker/cyclist/etc. When we finished our eggs, he offered me a little walking tour of the neighbourhood we were in; we walked on a bridge or two, then talked about hiking in the city, and we ended up deciding to hike on some of the city trails in the hills. All very spontaneous, and we had a wandering afternoon, first tromping on the roads that wind through the hills, where the houses implausibly perch right on the edges. We talked as we tromped --life, travels, relationships, hiking, politics, cities -- and had a warm, connected time. After about three hours of hiking, we descended, shared a milkshake, and parted ways. We exchanged phone numbers, but I don't know if I'll have time to reconnect in the less-than-two-days after I return.

Now, for a quick run along the Willamette, then packing, then off to the coast. I'm sad that this is my last week!

Starlight

Am back in Portland. Feels oddly like coming "home" -- it's all relative, I guess... had a lovely time in Vancouver with my online pals. Was in good rhythm with Katie -- who else would march briskly across a whole city with me, circling Yaletown for an hour before finding it, and never complain about it? We were well matched for walking and talking -- and then dinner with Janice and Bonne was just lovely. What a great little group of smart, accomplished, warm, gorgeous women -- it was a great treat.

As always, it really made me reflect on how odd this little online friendship thing can be. Posting with someone in online boards gives as good a portrait of "who they are" as any corporeal space experience I've had -- interacting on forums mirrors how people interact face to face in some remarkable ways. I've never been truly surprised by anyone I've met in real life after getting to know them online -- really provokes lots of questions about how we enact ourselves, and how some qualities are approximated in different ways in different spaces, but they still add up to the same overall picture. You don't necessarily know the timbre of someone's voice, or their pace of speaking, or the warmth of a smile -- but you know what's going to invoke that smile or make them snort with derision. The number of people I know who've met romantic partners online is testament to the potential intimacy of this way of relating.

And... sometimes I worry about the dispersion of self that is made in such a networked, mediated life. Digital space is as "legitimate" a realm to meet people in as any other space -- and I have such a diversity of people I've connected to because of my online world, such experiences (the Greeley Stampede, for example) I would have never otherwise had. There's also a mutual consent factor to the online world that creates an interesting kind of relational responsibility -- there is a huge difference between middle of the night gut spillage and self-doubt that is expressed online, where anyone who happens to be around, up and willing to participate in the conversation can respond -- and, say, tearfully calling a friend at midnight.

At the same time, I think there is a sometimes seductive detachment to the distance of that space, where the optional aspects of it create fragmentation. The connection *is* pretty much possible completely on your own terms, without having to deal with corporeal irritants or the mutual modulation of energy and space. I think having a lot of connections online (in fora and email) allows both best self (patience, attentiveness, depth of conversation) and a potential disengagement, a kind of a-responsibility, in some ways. Of course, a voice is a voice and you are going to respond to a friend's joyful announcement or depths of sorrow -- but there's also a kind of smooth polishing off of the edges possible that could allow us -- me -- to float above the messy space of intimate coordination. Not sure of the implications of this pondering. Just... pondering.

So... coming back from my little real world encounter with my online world people, I disembarked from the LRT from the airport right into crowds lining the streets of Portland for some festival. Chairs all set up along the road, families doing the so-American tailgate thing with some skill. Little girls marking off Wade Family zones with chalk, kids and parents playing frisbee and football in the road, little barbecues and picnics all set up. Jesus people wandering up and down the street purveying their messages. Apparently there's some Rose festival this week, and this 5K run and Starlight Parade starts it off.

I wandered down to a little tacqueria in the middle of the route and had a chicken burrito and a beer while watching the scene. Portlanders are friendly -- one family invited me to watch with them, having staked out space with an extra chair, just in case. Instead, I perched at the little table along the window in the restaurant and chatted with a nice young couple from Ithaca, NY (who, it turns out, grew up near Detroit) for over an hour, about life and work and the west coast and Detroit and race and Portland and running. We watched the 5K, with the fun costumes and toiling exhuberant people, and the beginning of the parade. I'd had enough festivity, so I went home, struck by how relaxed and happy everyone was. Just the right size of crowd for everyone to have space but a critical mass of energy. Portland really does seem to be this magical Goldilocks zone of "just-right-ness".

Now, some sleep, and some work before I head off to the coast on Monday with Jane and Don. I'm happy to be back here.

In a bubble

That I'm starting my day out with a tight little hangover caused by pharma-company-purchased wine does not conjure up expectations for a highly wholesome day, especially when I meet up with my cyber pals later on.

I've been in this bizarre, rarified bubble of fanciness for about 24 hours now, this Fairmont hotel perched right on top of the terminal building at YVR. Haven't even been outside since I got on the LRT at Yamhill and 9th in Portland yesterday morning at 7:00 a.m., except for the little walks from the rickety dash 8 to the terminal buildings. The place is highly soundproofed, with windows everywhere, rendering the airport a distant mise en scene, a Truman Show of planes and gates and little airport vehicles buzzing silently everywhere and people enactingg departure and reunion. There was a huge window in my room overlooking gates and planes taxiing up and taking off all night long, rain hosing down and reflecting the light in a melancholy way. It feels a bit like watching a baseball game from a box, with eager hostesses proferring shrimp and wine and coffee and fruit and anything your heart desires, while the scene outside is casually available for scrutiny.

From a pragmatic perspective, this hotel makes sense -- a nice place at the airport instead of the soul-deadening boxes most airports have -- and why not a Fairmont, with all its fawning luxury that they never quite get right. The offered coffee never comes when I'm waiting for my room, and the wait stretches to more than an hour and a half, instead of the promised 30 minutes; the wifi works only in the lobby. I observe myself moving from my laid back Portland self into the slightly indignant demanding patron -- when the promise and frame are perfection, it's easy to slip into tsking admonishments at every "flaw." ("I'm shocked that there is no wireless in the room!" uttered with a disapproving moue).

The clients, as always, are lovely, earnest, too-eager and anxious. What happens when good looking geeky science majors meet the corporate world. I worked for my per diem, and it was good to restretch myself into this role. And good to revisit YVR, making more stories on my own to cover up the slight wistfulness of memory of having been here so many times with A. The Bill Reid sculpture, which was our talisman that we had to visit and touch everytime we passed through here, is all shrouded for some kind of cleaning, which feels about right.

I need, now, to stretch my body in the excellent gym and then get myself together to go downtown to hang out for a while then meet my pals. Maybe stare at the little parades of luggage trains whizzing by a while, some pomo version of Pooh Sticks.

Yin

My quiet wafty days here are coming to an end Thursday morning, when I fly to Vancouver for a short but intense little client meeting. It's the oddest kind of the work I do, pure consultation, but on a rapidfire schedule. It's interesting that the pharma companies more than anyone "get" that research with human beings isn't about "discovering" something but about creating conversations that live on in the participants' "real lives." I have to put my "tight schedule" hat back on, and I don't know if I can rouse myself out of the soft space and elastic sense of time I've been living in.

I went to a "Yin" yoga class tonight. It was one of those perfect counterpoints to the running and more aggressive ashtanga I've been doing. Yin was apparently developed to help prepare people for sitting meditation -- to open up the hips and pelvis, stabilize the core, etc. It's exactly what I should be doing, the underneath tautness that I can cover up with all my core strength and bouncy energy. These poses are held for at least 3 or 4 minutes, and it's astonishing to me how intense the simplest "sleeping swan" pose can be for me, with my non-rotatable hips. Working into that depth is a profound journey into the edges that I'm not usually quiet enough to contemplate.

I've found those edges of my sense of self here, in this novel openness of space and time and solo-ness. I have been fully, officially uncoupled from A for more than a year now, and I feel like this is the first time I have really stopped moving long enough to tentatively feel around the edges of where I am to find outlines and boundaries of self. I've been a little lonely, a very different kind of loneliness than the loss of being partnered, and it's a good kind of probing, questioning sense of alone-ness. It's not missing someone else, it's feeling myself fully present to where I am, untethered in space, showing me the edges of where I'm content and clarifying some of what it is I would like to write into my story. It's a good sensation, grounded and rooted and energetic around the outside, deeply challenging in locating and staying in tension with the tight hipjoints and taut shoulders.

I'm a bit sad about the interruption to this face-to-my-own-face time -- I'm looking forward to meeting my online pals and hanging out and having good girltime -- especially Katie!, but I know that when I get back the rest of my time here will just slide away. I have to figure out how to keep some of this space in my life back in Toronto.

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.

Oh, I also meant

to post something about what my living room looks like these days.

Should modesty allow us

I think I've reshaped a full ripeness of self, thank the gods of spinning gyroscopes and other tryst-made visions. I'm feeling settled and *present* and energized in all the right ways. Clarity sharpening on my research project from my time with the slyly perverse phenomenologist in Houston, present in my most physical joyful self from the new connections made (at what point do new characters start to debut here? So twisty when I know they might read it), words on pages that make sense, and God!, sunshine and a marketplace that includes the strobe-lighted punk band last night (too amplified but joyfully full-throated) and a loud singalong of "I saw the light" this afternoon. The voices all twine up and twist me into them, molding me into someone I can finally really feel stepping forward.

Someone on my online forum asked the other day where "queer" fit into my list of how I describe myself. "Is it in the top 3?" These conversations pop up like annualsat Fielding, workshops on identity where we all list these long descriptors. It always amazes me when so many of my fellow students -- Americans all -- list phrases like "I am a Child of God" in their first tier. Perversely makes me want to say "I am a Sexual Being!" No one ever says things like that, the dykes all focused on marriage and families, the fags trapeze artists or secondarily claiming that identity, the straight people all earnest. I don't think I have a hierarchy -- I claimed fluidity of identity in my life list my first week at Fielding -- but I do know that being fully physically connected needs to be part of what I live into. And it feels *good* to be able to spend an afternoon in bed and feel deeply connected but not tethered.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Lynn Crosbie's extraordinary book Liar (a book length poem about the death of a relationship). One couplet felt like a cautionary tale:

I am peering through the slats of a truck, shank to shank
with everyone who has mistaken their life for a prelude

It feels good that I am living into Stephin Merrit's much more playful world: One kiss from me/and you'll be overjoyed and overwrought/one kiss from me/and you'll see god

Like the wind needs the trees

I’ve been reading Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the astonishing series of poems he wrote about Sylvia Plath… to her? To commemorate her? To make meaning of his life story as it intertwined with hers? All of those?

I am struck by one line: "your worship needed a god." Hughes captures here something I’ve been buffeted by through the end times of my life story co-written with B – we only are what we are as we are seen to be that by someone else -- what we make in relationship. (Stephin Merrit got it so well: “you need me/like the wind needs the trees/to blow in/like the moon needs poetry/you need me”). This is a deep and profound truth to me, and the essential focus of my academic work on relational identity. B reviles it, seeing in it an erasing, an obliteration of an essential her. Our subversive loop.

Yesterday, in a writing workshop, my lumpen stuttering paragraph about this core idea was critiqued in front of 20 or so colleagues. I realized with simultaneous placidity and sharp recognition that I do what Judy pointed out, wind my core ideas round with tangles of cord like the abrasive string I use to tie newspapers for recycling, the kind that breaks if you pull it too hard the wrong way and leaves rope burns in your palms. I rewrite. We make and remake ourselves and each other in our relationships. We make and remake each other most profoundly in our intimate relationships.

In the airport today, I realize that this is the first trip since B and I broke up where I haven’t been dragging a metallic, unbearable yearning for my home and life lost along with my always-too-full suitcase, the bulging swiss army bag she called my Red Buddy. I’ve flown seven times, taken the train and driven the 401 multiple other times on my own since last April, and this is the first time I haven't, in the silent liminal space, found tears.

Walking across the (vast, of course) parking lot on a truncated quest for tamales last night, I realized there was no one I needed to find a little trinket for (replaying the ritualized "I was thinking of you" that marked my grandparents' return from every trip, the floppy cloth sunhats with little wicker dolls on them from some sun spot, the grey T-shirt from Raffles in Singapore that conjured up Sahib Grandpa as post-colonial industrialist and which made me sweat in a nasty manner). No one to coordinate with about airport pickups, with the inevitable miscommunication or delay on either side. This was something I just noted, with no yearning. That there are people who are glad to see me home, with whom I sing forward into connections -- and, there's no One Person in the World whose home is incomplete without me. I can be remade in multiple smaller spaces... and today, tomorrow, this is just fine.

Death and Life of American Cities

Jane Jacobs died this week. I read this in the USA Today that was delivered to my Houston hotel room. An interesting counterpoint, since what I've seen of this city embodies everything she reviled. The place is an inhuman scale -- vast distances across heat-shimmered parking lots to get a coffee, sidewalks for "decoration" that go nowhere, zebra stripes under enormous chrome arches across the street that seem to render pedestrians invisible. An enormous mall that the locals are very proud of -- The Galeria! -- that sells kate spade bags and $800 manolo blahniks but no advil or sunblock. I ask someone to help me ("I'm Canadian and don't know these brands -- which of these stores is a drugstore?") -- and hear "oh, you won't find something like that in this fancy mall."

I went for a 40 minute run my first day here and literally encountered only these people on the street: a mexican nanny with a plush white baby; mexican men trying to jump start a decrepit truck; one white guy training for a cycling race; one older white man exercise walking; sherrifs directing traffic. The place is shiny and hard-surfaced, and people are affable and friendly, and it just gives me the willies.

It's been a good school week, though. Very rich conversations about my dissertation project, and I'm starting to hone in on what I need to do. It's bizarre to me how the container for these conversations is always these portals into unexamined US society -- gated communities, affluent neighbourhoods that are completely dependent on illegal immigrant labour, class and race polarization. I caused a fight on my online forum after the quasi-anxiety attack I felt in that Galeria by pouncing on a Texan's smug "I love my SUV" comment. I start to understand eco-psychology when I spend time in these places -- the notion that we are so distanced from our embodied sense of self/connection to the earth that we don't know how to make systemic or thoughtful decisions. I feel like I'm struggling to figure out how to make that framework more articulable -- and it's unbelievably alien in this environment.

Freecycled fragments

As I look for my own new narratives, I have a steady stream of novels-in-one-sentence pouring into my in-box through freecycle.

A story of spiritual quest and abandonment:

OFFER: Bible Study Materials
These must go as one lot. Will wait 24 hours before gifting. Please do not respond if you don't intend to pick up or at least contact me if plans change. Thank you. CDs: Putting up With Each Other; Self-Guided Bible Study; How the World Will End According to the Bible. Books: Jesus The One And Only; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Eve and Rehab; Divine Plan of the Ages

A tale of attempted transformation and hard-fought retreat:

I have one box of Nicoderm Transdermal stop smoking patches for Stage 3. The package is unopened, but the box has been kinda beat up. Pickup only near Bay & Wellesley.


A yearning for vicarious talent:

WANTED: I would like my sister to learn the flute and she can't afford one... would love to give her a flute for her birthday, if you have one you are not using -- would consider it also as a loan for her to try out and would return if you like. Thanks!!

Threads of connection, possibility, new lamps for old.