The Snow Hen of Jostedal: A story of lust and unspeakable sin

 

The Snow Hen of Jostedal

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

Part 1: GENESIS

Once there was a little legend walking about, that we will name Jostedalsrypa.

Why such a long handle, you may ask? when it would be a lot easier to name him (her!) Junie or Jolie or some such other two-syllable name?

Because Jostedalsrypa is a myth.

Jostedal, as we will now call her (given that the other name is just too long to remember) is sometimes called the Snow Hen of Jostedal. I first encountered her yesterday, though her myth (reality?) goes back to the 1300s, when the Black Plague was harvesting Europe with a scythe as lethal as the Reaper’s.

When all was said and done, when all the ploughing up to make graves and the burning down to make sanitary lodgings had passed, when the few people left on the earth were breathing little sighs of relief here and there, Nordrik walked the sylvan glades and frosted peaks of Scandinavia. He looked up with tears of gratitude at Scandy’s burning skies and thanked the Norse gods that he had been –

But enough of this, it's getting in the way of the story.

Back to Jostedalsrypa. While this Nordrik (or Norhan, or Norvasken, depending on which scholar you quote) was beating the bushes for edible mushrooms, he heard a stirring sound.

Not like you’d stir your coffee, but more of a feather-on-leaf stir, very frail, a shaking of the bushes so minute that it might just be the stirrings of a bug.

With his ailegaard (walking pole), he gently parted the bushes. Nothing.

Then he kicked the quivering bush with his foot.

This provoked a whooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh
sound, akin to the whirring of doves spiralling upwards, of partridges flushed from the bush.

But the wings of this creature (if creature it was!) did not carry it far, as just a few feet off the ground it fell with a dismal thud.

He looked at the strange thing.

It was shaped like a hen. It looked like a hen. It flapped like a hen. It was partially camouflaged by snow, dirty snow that was half-melting and had formed around the hen as a sort of protective covering, an ice nest.

“I will call her Jostedal, after Lake Jostedal and the City of Jostedal and Jostedal Canyon," said Norrdka, lifting the terrified bird from the snow and marvelling at how heavy she seemed in his arms.

Her head jerked this way and that. A snow hen! Imagine that. So those silly legends must've been true after all. She seemed to have the intelligence of a – well, of a hen. Her feet paddled the air. Still Norrdka trudged, wondering how she would taste stewed up with a side dish of mushrooms.

The Black Plague had left its survivors with a keen appetite.

Nothing that moved was ever wasted, but because the Snow Hen was displaying nesting behaviour, the family held back on eating her. Everyone clucked with joy when Jostedal produced her first egg. “But do not eat it yet!” cried Gromkin, the snow-crowned patriarch of the family and the one who had suspiciously survived the Plague by hoarding quail eggs in his pockets.

“Why, old man? Why not eat the egg as a side dish with the chicken and mushrooms?” cried Norrdka.

“I have a recipe for Chicken Eggskongg,” Mama chimed in.

“Hatch this egg. Nurture it. It will be extraordinary.”

Even those who did not agree with Gromkin decided they had better listen to him (he would whack them on the side of the head if they didn't), and keep the Snow Hen around as a renewable resource for food. Meantime, they had this egg, which seemed somehow magical in their sight.

They could not sit on the egg, so after a meagre dinner of wood fungi they coaxed the chicken to sit down and incubate it. It took a lot of shoelaces to tie her down.

But something very strange happened in the night.

PART 2: PARTHENOGENESIS


Norrdka wasn’t the first to discover what had happened to her. It was the old man, Gromkin. He saw the two of them over in the corner. The old man had a stick in his hand and was poking at her.

Squatting in the corner with not a stitch of clothing on her comely body was a beautiful young maiden!

Could this be the Snow Hen of ancient tales and stories? How was that possible? Were they all seeing the same apparition?

The beautiful naked maiden whom they soon dubbed Shnowen had grown a sort of covering of white feathers over its body. And to think they had nearly eaten her the night before!

“ARE YOU HERE TO GRANT US THREE WISHES?” shouted the old man to the perplexed-looking chicken-lady.

She turned her head this way and that and made low, barely-perceptible clucking noises.

“ARE YOU HERE TO LAY THE GOLDEN EGG?” he shouted.

“Do be quiet, Father,” Mother cautioned him. “She is perplexed. Besides, she has already laid an egg which may be of inestimable value to us.”

And lo, it was.

As Shnownen walked around the bare cottage pecking the floor and flapping her arms. a crack began to form in the egg. The whole family, all seventeen of them, gathered around it in anxiety and hope.

The crack was very slow to form, and Grandfather Gromkin wanted to whack at it with his splinggboln, but the rest of them held him back.

And just as they were all about to give up and serve up this egg with a side dish of roasted fowl, lo!

Out popped, not a genie or a monster or an apparition or a dybbuk or a djinn. It was a child.

It was as child so tiny and radiant that no one could believe it. “That’s a chick,” declared Seventeenth Brother.

“It’s never a chick. It’s a homunculus.”

“An automaton, I’ve seen one of those, it was an old monk that could walk around.”

“Silence!” cried the magical child, who seemed to be made of purest gold.

“State your business,” bellowed the old man, who was very direct.

“I have come here not by accident, but by design. I am here to refine human nature. I see cruelty everywhere, I see grabbing at food that belongs to others, I even see people eating each other’s flesh.”

“NO! It never happened”

“How can you even think such a thing!”

“You must be evil. How can you abuse us like this?”

But the family felt a deep and secret shame. The Black Plague had certainly brought out the worst in everybody.

“Here is the test,” the magic child replied. “For forty-seven days, you shall have no food. The doors of your humble cabin will all be locked. This is a test of your character and of your ability to be selfless, and will redeem you for the black sins you committed during the Time of Pestilence.”

“Forty-seven days? Whoever heard of THAT? Why not forty days and forty nights?”

“Shhhh, Grandpa Gromkin, maybe he’s joking.”

“No. It’s not like that,” broke in one of the many anonymous brothers. “It means forty days, like Noah's rain in the Scriptures, PLUS the seven days it took for God to create the Universe.”

“Ohhhhhhhh.” They all relaxed a little.

The first few days were rather exciting, as the tiny golden child talked non-stop about many amazing things while Shnowen, now called Shwenon, picked and plucked and made hen noises. A few times Eldest Brother pursued her around the cabin, and no one could tell if it was for food, or some other purpose too dark to mention.

After a while, that bird began to look better and better.

Grandfather nagged the magic child day and night. “Are you sure you really meant FORTY-SEVEN days?” he asked him. “Maybe you only meant seven.” There was a faint clinking sound in the background as the family tightened their belts.

On the thirteenth day, they decided to kill the chicken.

Why not kill the chicken? They would not survive unless they did. But the axe and the knife and the other implements of cold-blooded murder were all outside, so they would have to corner and strangle her. This was a nearly-impossible task with a human-sized bird.

So they began to tame her. Here, chicken, chicken, chicken! Nice chicken. Because she was starving to death, she would do just about anything they asked of her, including the unspeakable act I mentioned before.

But I shall draw a veil over such evil.

One day, however, in spite of the brain fog of famine, one of them had an idea.

“Wait!” Sixteenth Brother cried. “If we can last out this wretched forty-seven days, imagine what this bird will be worth for us.”

“We can put her on display.”

“Make her do tricks!”

"All sorts of tricks."

”And she’s beautiful, and naked. So you know how people will respond.”

“But forty-seven days. . . “

“Listen,” said Grandfather. “I’m close to a deal.”

For along with greed and pride and lust, and anger and envy, and all those other things we’re not supposed to do, Grandfather excelled at crooked wheeling and dealing. Soon he had bargained the child down to twenty-four days. With his mother held hostage, about to be roasted on a spit, he was in no position to argue.

The force-field around the cabin began to waver.

The family wondered if they could hold out much longer, as the chicken was getting skinnier and skinnier and sat listlessly in the corner pulling her feathers out. She looked bad and would not enchant or even scare anyone.

“Goddamn you, Snow Hen,” cried Norrdka, cursing the day he had ever found her. “You started this. You’ll finish it.” He rushed at her with every intention of strangling her. But she was too feeble to resist, and collapsed with a drawn-out cry.

“NOW have we passed the test?” asked Fourth Brother hopefully. They had, after all, not KILLED the chicken. They had resisted killing the chicken, who had obviously died of natural causes.

“You failed it a long time ago,” the child answered. “What is more, there is no spell. You could have left the cabin any time you wanted to. So you committed yet another sin."

"What could that be?"

"Stupidity."

”Mountebank!” cried Grandfather.

“Look at your Snow Hen, once so beautiful and so full of promise. She has died of hunger and despair. Not only that, there is no meat on her bones to sustain you.”

“I could make a good stock,” Mother suggested.

“I could stuff her, you know, put her on display.. . . “

“Silence! You people do not deserve to be in the presence of magic, because your souls are dark and selfish and full of corruption. You abuse the thing you claim to love the most and keep her captive in terror.”

“No one will know.”

“YOU will know. The knowledge will suck the strength from your soul and blight all your days, and continue for seventeen generations."

“But this is why they made Jesus.! If we repent, he will take all our sins away."

“Not this one.” Disgusted, the child burst into a ball of flame that grew and grew and grew until it consumed the entire cabin.

There was but one person spared. As white smoke surged up from the chimney, a bird with dazzling white feathers emerged and grew larger and larger until she seemed to fill the whole sky. The Snow Hen of Jostedal had freed herself from the prison of human darkness, never to return.

POSTLUDE. The provenance of this piece is strange. Years and years ago, I saw a NOVA program on PBS about a girl named Genie, a "wild child" who had been tied up in a dark room for an incredible thirteen years by her sadistic brute of a father.

The girl couldn't speak, could barely walk, and was the size of a seven-year-old. While the public may have seen a horribly damaged child, the scientific community saw a blank slate - that is, blank except for a lot of dollar signs.

The documentary recounts the stampede of interest from scientist, linguists, neurologists, sociologists, and many other ologists who scrambled for research grants to "study" Genie. This was in 1972, and NOT ONE person believed that it would be preferable for Genie's welfare to be placed in loving foster care until she gained enough stability to work with the scientists.

It did not even occur to them.

I can't recount all of this heartbreaking story because it's too complex, except to say that the girl was eventually abandoned by the scientists who had so greedily fallen on her when she was released from her thirteen-year prison. When she was finally de-institutionalized, she was taken home by two of the research scientists like some sort of shelter dog, then abandoned a few years later when the grant money ran out.

At the end of this wretched story, Genie is "put away" in a nursing home, and that's the end of it. Since she's younger than me, she is probably still there, in another sort of prison. I did find a reference from some time in the '90s, when an observer insisted she was "happy and content" in the home she had never chosen. Certainly she has no power to object.

I recently watched the NOVA program again - I'll try to find a link to it, it's riveting - and then acquired a book called Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. I was sure this book would be spellbinding, but 50 pages in I began to wonder whose side he was on.

He spent pages and pages on the work of Noam Chomsky, a pop icon and pseudo-linguist who believes there is only one language in all of human experience. As far as I can see, this demented idea has nothing at all to do with Genie and her difficult, halting acquisition of language, but it helps the author distance himself from all that mess and align himself with someone trendy.

But there's something else here, and I have to admit when I first read it I groaned. "I've been diddled," I thought. He listed various "feral" children that had been found roaming the woods over the centuries, and the farther I got into the list the more sure I was that he was having us on, making the whole thing up as a way of disrespecting his readers and jerking the leash.

“Among the cases of wild children discovered over the last seven centuries, more than fifty have been documented. The list includes the Hesse wolf-child; the Irish sheep-child; Kasper Hauser; the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter of Hanover; the second Lithuanian bear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburg sow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra; the Indian panther-child; the Justedal snow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle-child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas, the South African baboon-child; and Edith of Ohio.”

I think it was Edith of Ohio that did it. This HAD to be a mean form of satire designed to jerk the reader around. But like the diligent little Googlist that I am, I did a search for each and every one of these names, and lo, they WERE mentioned somewhere, even if briefly, as part of a list of "wild" children. Most of them are considered myths, an extension of the ancient story of Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves.

I'm not sure quite how that led to the story of the Snow Hen, except that the name really grabbed me: it seemed like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The arc of the story is pretty crazy, because there IS no arc: I literally took it word by word with no forethought at all, no sense of what might come next. At various moments you have to stop and try to shape the story a bit, and then of course edit it later for inconsistencies. But I did very little of this.

It occurred to me while making my lunch today that perhaps the Snow Hen is Mary, Mother of God, and the golden child is her son Jesus Christ, holding those wicked people in the cabin accountable for their sins. He doesn't let them get away with anything, not even throwing the Bible back in his face. 

 I hope Jesus would approve.

MEGHAN'S MESS: Why this needs a re-post!

 

I don't like to waste space (except that I do, sometimes) on such an insignificant figure as Meghan Markle. But the worst of her many "worsts" is how she holds herself up as a fashion icon. People really buy this, supposedly, though she looks dreadful most of the time, with the worst assortment of ill-fitting, ill-suited, badly-designed outfits that make you wonder if she even uses a mirror.

These "industrial beige" pants are a case in point. I don't know at what point high-waisted, pleated, baggy, wide-belted polyester pants came back in style. I remember "high-rise baggies" in the early '70s, but eventually they gave way to increasingly lower-rise pants, an inch or so lower a year, so that by Year 5 or so they barely covered a woman's ass. Thus, when she bent over, her entire ass, and I mean both cheeks, could easily pop out and display itself. I considered this an abuse of the public consciousness, because you just could not look away, and it went on and on for literally years. Then, relentlessly, fashion dictated that beltlines would rise again to a more decent level, which caused me to breathe a sigh of relief.

When I first saw my very stylish granddaughter wearing  a version of these in a much nicer colour, I was kind of amazed,  but happy about it. But to see Meghan in them somehow didn't quite make it. She has a very square figure, is short and has no waist, so pleated pants just widen and flatten her in all the wrong places. NEVERTHELESS, on her podcast she not only wore the above beige pants, but (of course) MERCHED them on Meghan's Mirror (an ironic title if ever there was one). These relics from  the early '70s went for somewhere around $350.00. But just look what happened when she actually wore them!

YES. These selfsame, pre-merched, high-rise, pleated, wide-belted baggies turned into THIS mess. I cannot fathom how an article of clothing could go from one state to another. It is almost a work of science fiction. If she slept in them for a week without bathing, maybe? Or wore them out in the rain? Or are they just too goddamned tight in the crotch?

What truly astonishes me is what happened to the bottom hems. Suddenly the legs are two totally different lengths! I can't believe this is just her usual spraddle-legged way of posing, so that her crotch (always the most prominent feature of her stance) is thrust into our faces. One bottom hem is a good six inches longer than the other. The short hem is also a few inches narrower. It's a high-water look, but only on one side! 

I was unable to find it, unfortunately, but last night I saw a full-colour version of this mess, and beside it, the version that appeared in most of the media worldwide. All the wrinkles had been photoshopped out, so that the pants appeared much more like that merched version at the top.

I don't know where I heard this saying (like so many other random bits of effluvia that swim around in my consciousness), but it has been said by SOMEONE that "you have to be very rich to look that bad." Rich, maybe not. Bad - definitely YES. How can you spend that much and look so  horrendously awful? The wide, bulky elephant pants (which actually hark back to the '60s) have bottom hems that drag the ground and completely cover the nauseatingly pointy, tottering stilettos, and - in addition - the cherry on the shit sundae -  a back seam that is so taut it wrinkles on one side (??WTF) and rides up the ass.

To paraphrase another quote that rattles around in my brain: Some are born great, some attain greatness, and some marry Prince Harry, the dimmest bulb in the entire royal lineup. I can only think of one other example of a Hollywood princess marrying royalty - but  Grace Kelly never looked like this, not even on her worst day, with a hangover.

BONUS PHOTOS! Oy-vey, there's more.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

MORNINGSIDE MEMORIES: why here, why now?

So here I sit, a day or so after my Morningside flood of words, which I honestly didn’t know was going to happen until I sat down and wrote it. It poured out, or rather, gushed out under pressure. There was a lot to say. Why I would even go back so many years is anyone’s guess, unless my current health problems have brought mortality up so close it’s smacking me in the face.

I wrote the piece with the intent of doing more with it. I was actually intending to put it on Facebook, even knowing no one ever clicks on my links and actually READS what I write.  And if anyone follows my blog any more, it’s only to comment on things I wrote 10 years ago. So I do it for myself, or for that mythical discovery in ten more years, when, who knows, SOMEONE might happen upon it and have it speak to them, or maybe even sing to them.

So I wrote the piece, not knowing where it would take me, all eight pages or so, and it carried me along in a flood, so that I only needed a bit of tinkering and polishing. Then I posted a link on Facebook, but with a weird feeling.

Why now, exactly? It was an astonishingly long time ago.  But something clicked today that might explain at least a bit of it.

There’s all this stuff  coming out now about  Princess Diana, and the fact that 2027 is the 30^th anniversary of her death. Weirdly (and I just made this connection right now, this minute), Morningside ended in 1997, almost at the exact time of her death. Now the controversy is over whether people (her own brother, to be exact) should  still be “dining out” on her memory, bone-picking in other words, to make a cheap buck.

So has that Diana-stuff influenced me here? Could be, as I can’t help  but follow the wretched soap opera of the Royals, especially the lunacy of Harry and Meghan and their never-ending, ever-escalating melodrama (or “mello-drammer”, I should say, with a tinny piano playing). By 1997, when the show ended, I had pretty much moved on from  Morningside, though I was a huge fan of DiscDrive with Jurgen Gothe, a lovely man who became a good  friend (and died, like all my closest friends, a few years later). I think Morningside “petered” out, or just sort of gradually ran out of steam. It was an ‘80s sort of show with ‘80s sorts of interests, and it did not really provide anything a younger person would be interested in.

This means that any remaining fans of Morningside would have to be, at  very least, middle-aged. Or older. (Or dead?) But I felt almost compelled to post the link on Facebook, knowing it would go the way of all my other Facebook posts. Ignored. The one time I had a lot of response was when I told a silly little story about wearing casual pants to the mall, and having two old ladies titter at me, point to my bottoms and ask me if I was in my pajamas.

That’s it. I got 50+ comments, most of them gushing  with compassion for me for all I had to endure –such torture! The piece was written totally tongue-in-cheek – in truth, what these two old busybodies hissed at me struck  me as borderline comical. But as always, my dear friends on Facebook completely missed the point.

So now, when I could really use SOME sort of response, I won’t get any. I  don’t think  so, anyway. The original Morningside piece ran with the usual small, square image (Facebook crops these things for you, see), which was a  cut-down version of one of the book covers. If you don’t see a picture that totally encompasses everything that is in the article, then it doesn’t exist. It was hard for me to look  at all those covers of all those books, the endless series of recycled free material that was The  Morningside Papers. And I did something a bit daft, but I did it – I went on Amazon and ordered Gzowski’s The Morningside Years, basically to see if I’m in it (and if not, damn them anyway!), or if there’s anything more about Glen or Ralph Allen. Well, need I wonder? I KNOW they’ll be in there, along with a lot of twat-waffle from Gzowski about how magnificent they were.

After 30 years and a total revolution in human communication, Gzowski has been re-evaluated, along with the importance of his show. It really wasn’t much. It was a bit embarrassing, to tell the truth. I remember a few ludicrous features: Memorable  Meals (“I had pancakes on board a sinking ship!"), A Morningside Bestiary (“I saw a chipmunk this morning!”) and – my least favourite – a parody of  Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie poems. The one I remember is (get the sick bucket): “I’m sitting in the middle of a very messy kitchen.” No kidding, that was the featured poem, the winner of one of those innumerable little contests. (I won’t mention the others, as it’s kind of a sore  point for me. I  was told by one of the producers that my entry was by far and away the best, and that no, I wasn’t  going to be named the winner because Peter didn’t  like me. Not the piece I wrote. He didn’t  like ME. No specific reason was given.)

Well, listen, Peter-in-your-grave, the feeling is  mutual. You were no more the affable host than Ellen DeGeneres  was the purveyor of kindness and compassion, and Oprah Winfrey the shining goddess of self-help. All were revealed to be tin gods, mis-crowned by a deluded public. A lot of energy went into those facades, and in Gzowski’s case it was maintained by mobs of sycophants (including Glen Allen, the "courtly" writer who sucked up to the King) and lashings of alcohol and cigarettes, smoking being the pistol with which he eventually shot himself.

But I did notice, after writing that long blurt last night, that today I felt some sort of change. I’ve been struggling with a certain aspect of these memories, and trying very hard to somehow get back at the helm, to get back to myself, to know in my core that my feelings are my feelings and do not need to be justified to anyone. Self-possession, in other words, not possession by some  “demon”, as GA liked to call his worst habits.

So if I made this a series, would anyone bother? Likely not, but I do know, from how I feel right now, that this is doing ME some good. Yesterday was a horrible day for me, I felt really sick, I realized I am nowhere near finished with the intrusive medical tests that will eventually reveal whether or not I really do have cancer. That’s what is on the table. But this sort of writing is absorbing. The kids would say it’s my superpower. And by the time I went to bed, I felt more solid, less like I had been shot full of holes.

So it serves me.

Should I continue? Haven’t I always? You have to know when to get off the stage, but that may well be taken care of for me. The big cane may come out, latch on to me and pull me off before I am ready. So in the meantime, don’t I have the right to say what I need to say? 

I know the answer already. 

MORNINGSIDE: Memories, second thoughts, and why we shouldn’t have heroes

 

So what happens when your hero turns out to have feet of clay?

Well – is there any  other kind? Isn’t this realization a kind of punishment for the sin of having a hero in the first place?

This all goes back a long way, so bear with me, please. It was back in the 1980s, and I was living in Hinton, a small town in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies. Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan and rabid listener to Morningside, that folksy, down-home, ultra-Canadian radio program which ran for three hours every weekday (with a cornball ten-minute drama tacked on at the end, which now seems utterly cringeworthy, but there you go. This was CULTURE,  and the drama  even provided that all-important “Canadian content”.)

Of course, at the helm of Morningside was one Peter Gzowski, always presented as an avuncular nice-guy, friendly, down-to-earth, and only stirred to ire if anyone dared question his rabid Canadianism. He seemed to champion local stories, pride in your small-town community, tales of everyday heroism, people heroically struggling with serious health conditions, and predictably dull interviews with Literary Figures, the usual round of third-string Canadian novelists who were making a wee splash with their latest book.

Now it seems painfully parochial, awfully small-time, but  then, at least where I lived, it was a very big deal. I even began to send in some of my short pieces, and did backflips of  delight when some of them were actually being read on the air. It never occurred to me I was giving stuff away when I should have been asking for the dignity of some sort of recompense. This was MORNINGSIDE, the champion of the small-scale Canadian author! How crass were you to even think of - ? But the utter glory of hearing Gzowski cough and wheeze his way through the piece was supposed to be enough. Certainly, my small-town neighbors in Hinton were thrilled I was getting so  much national exposure.  At that point, I had a weekly column in my local paper, but back then, newspaper columns were read today, and used to wrap  fish tomorrow.

After a  while, a friend of mine began to get HER pieces read on the air, so we sort of banded together, keeping an eye on each other, of course, but mostly cheering each other on. Then there was The Morningside Papers,  a series of books made up of all those donated bits of folksy stories, thrill-packed adventures in tiny towns, and even a few moderately-more-serious topics. My first piece in the Papers was a  thrill, as was the second and third. My friend Amber also had quite a few of her own writings in the Papers, and at one point we had a champagne celebration that was covered in the  Hinton Parklander. Fame at last!

But the BIG one for me was being asked to  appear on the  show to respond  to a man who had written a rather lame folk song about the Great Hinton Train Crash.

It wasn’t that big a deal when it happened, but it was prime Gzowksi  material, small-towny, folksy, of the earth, of  the Common  (of course, Canadian) Man. So I got on there and talked  to the guy, who hummed and hawed  and  said  that, actually, no, he knew nothing at all about Hinton and only read about  the crash in the newspapers. I was especially incensed when he  referred to our  glorious community as “a sleepy little pulp-mill town”. I had  a few word s to say about THAT.

It made for good radio, or OK radio, though of course there was no recompense except the shining glory of being ON Morningside! My small-town friends were ecstatic, and I actually got a few gigs on Edmonton radio as a result (and by the holy, they PAID me, though not very much. At least they didn’t shame me for asking.).

At one point, a new producer came on-board, and I recognized him as Glen Allen, a man who wrote a truly hair-raising series for Morningside on getting sober. This was his Detox Diary, first-person, present-tense journal entries (Day One, Day Two, etc.), written in what now sounds like rather purplish prose, It was “You Are There” stuff, recounting his physical breakdown as a result of floods of booze, cigarettes and pills. “My liver is as big as a house” was one  memorable phrase, as was his insistence “I loved  booze  more than some people love each other. What a time it has been! The rye and  ginger years, the rum years, and then the discovery of Russian vodka, the Ultimate Weapon, the sweet sting of the steppes rising from the bottles with the strange-sounding names. Taken neat, it was strong enough to run a tractor.” If any of this seems creepily detached from the reality of vomiting blood in a detox ward, then you’re right, it IS creepy and actually irresponsibly dramatic. By the end of it, on Day 12 or whatever, he’s citing  a psychiatric nurse who described him as “superficial, infantile, and lost in life.”

I should have listened.

Because he was so honest and courageous (confessing he left little glasses of vodka all over the house, so that “passing from  room to room, travelling by the Stations of the Cross, I would never be far from good cheer”), he was deemed a hero. He was confessing all this on public radio - reading his pieces himself, of course, not in Gzowki’s wheezy baritone. Back then, before social media and reality TV exposed the public’s blatant schadenfreude, the myth was that the more you “shared” this harrowing stuff, the better for the public good. And, of course, it couldn’t help but help YOU in your “journey”. So  everyone thought.

So Glen landed the gig. He was “in” with Gzowski, and thus with Morningside, though, as was typical with him, he lasted less than a year.

I  was actually kind of riveted by his Detox Diaries, and when they appeared in the Morningside Papers, I  wanted to get in touch with him. Oh yes, and I also wanted to run some things by him for  the show, which worked after a  fashion. They used maybe ten per cent of what I sent in, and Glen let me in on the fact Gzowski thought I was  a nuisance and wished I would go away. But what I was to learn about Glen Allen should have turned some lights on.

He was the  son of Ralph Allen, whom I had  never heard of, but who was fabled as some sort of  founding father of Canadian journalism. And Gzowski  idolized him to the point of sainthood, if not godhood. The fact Allen died in his 50s from smoking  and drinking just added to his mythology. So here was his son Glen, fresh off those astonishingly self-revealing and unnecessarily graphic  pieces about booze (not a confessional, but "a last letter to a lost love", he called them) that he read on the  air – and Gzowksi began to rhapsodize about him, calling  him a “shy and courtly writer” and “one of the finest journalists in Canada”. He was a fine writer when he was able to  sit up and tap at a typewriter, but a lot of the time he was, by his own admission, face-down.

 It was a strange sort of bromance, with Gzowski constantly trying to pump Glen for stories – any stories, anything at all – about his hero. He didn’t want to play, making it clear his father was horribly cruel to him and they never got along. Gzowski  even claimed that trying to squeeze Ralph Allen stories out of his son was like “a tongue probing the exposed nerve of a tooth.”  He also described “the smile that ignites his face”, though he was disappointed that this odd facial blaze reminded Gzowski  of his mother rather than his hero Ralph.

As a producer, Glen Allen lasted barely one season, but by this  time he  was truly encouraging my writing  and even urging me to try to sell some of it. I eventually did get gigs with  the Edmonton Journal, and eventually wrote for papers all over the country, including the Montreal Gazette and the Globe  and  Mail. Would I have gone ahead with it without  Glen’s promptings? Yes, I would, but it was still kind of nice. In the fullness of time, I wrote five novels (well, five and a half)  and published three - with publishers, folks, real ones, not the other kind. If my timing had been different, who knows, I might have sat there inhaling all that toxic second-hand smoke.

Starting with me, of course, Glen and I began to write to each other, and this correspondence (pen to paper, with envelopes and stamps  - this was the old days) went on, on and off at least, for nearly ten years. We shared a lot about certain mutual struggles – I gave up drinking and joined AA when I was 36, realizing it was doing terrible  damage to my loved ones and my life. And like Glen, I had fallen down the mental illness rabbit hole when I was only in my teens.

You have to understand how people idolized Glen’s  writing. It was, as I was to realize later, writing that calls attention to itself, inciting “ooooohs” and “ahhhhhhs” from the audience, like watching a fireworks display. But it would have helped if he had stuck to facts and not resorted to so much embellishment and  florid storytelling, which I now see as unnecessarily manipulative. “Respect your readers” should be the first law of journalism.

I was to find out later that Gzowksi  had pulled a lot of the same shit, doing just about anything (including staging  disaster scenes  to boost his reputation as a reporter) to get famous. I  was also to find out later that he privately groused about me because I was only sending my pieces in  to  get exposure on the radio. Horrors! A writer wants people to hear them? And to even think about being paid was even more reprehensible.

But back to Glen, and the fact that his commitment to sobriety was shaky at best. I was also to  learn he had bipolar disorder and had crashed completely at the time of his detox diaries. To hear him talk  about it, his life at that time was a smoking ruin, he had no job, his family was hanging by a thread, and he was close to actual death, but here was Gzowski, idolizing his dead Dad and willing to do anything  to squeeze information out of him. 

So he was hired.

 A few years later, when Gzowski  retired from Morningside, Glen wrote a long newspaper piece about his ten-month stint on the show (which actually was about average for him sticking  at anything). The piece was called “In the Spirit of Eros” – “eros” as in “erotic”. I will try not to read too much into that, but added to the tongue probing at an aching tooth, you’ve  got to wonder.

Some of his letters were beautiful  in that  powerful storytelling  way he had, but there was always  a smokescreen, a sense he wasn’t  being very truthful and that it was all from some sort of strange arm’s length. He did land in detox again because he was swallowing  benzodiazepines like candy, and I never had the sense he really became a part of AA, just went to meetings, sat at the back, then bolted out the  door. He never had a home group and was "terrified" to get a sponsor, presumably because he wasn't putting too many sober days back-to-back.

In those ten years, he  worked at five different jobs in three provinces. Newspapers, magazines, radio. He even did a short stint at Macleans magazine, which his legendary father had founded. (Glen was totally obsessed with this man who had treated him so shabbily, and referred to him in almost all his letters.)  I could  not keep  track, and he never provided a  home address. I didn’t  pry, because he was supposedly intensely private in spite of his detox True Confessions. He had a  “companion”, but never gave a name. I did wonder sometimes if it was a man or a woman, though ultimately I don’t think it mattered, because nothing ever lasted with him.

Then the trail went cold. He stopped answering  me, perhaps taking off on another adventure somewhere – he constantly talked about “hitting the road again”, and “hiding out”. In the fullness of time I realized he had dragged his wife  and small children all over the world, each gig lasting  a year or two. Many of these countries, such as Chile and China, were not  even English-speaking, which makes me wonder if he really did care about his children and their wellbeing. It seemed utterly selfish to me that a man who was supposedly so lavishly gifted had to keep hopping  around as if his feet never touched the ground. 

Then it  stopped, the trail went cold, Morningside ended - but not after a final piece of  mine appeared in the last Morningside Papers. But there was something wrong at the end of it.  Something awful.

The name of my town was listed as KINRON, Alberta. Kinron. There IS no Kinron, such a place does not exist, and to make matters worse, I  had already been ON the show doing an interview from Hinton.  No one seemed to think this small gaffe meant anything. No, not to folksy, small-towny, parochial Morningside! Why should I be so  upset, when they were generous enough to select my writings for the show?

KINRON.

Ultimately, I heard Gzowski  had died of emphysema, after writing an astonishing detox diary of his own – claiming he was in rehab for smoking. I have never heard of such a thing, but to his last gasp  he never admitted to his alcoholism. He was as destructive a drinker as Glen, but much less honest about it. It was only later that I found out about his “secret son”, a child  he had fathered with an anonymous woman, only to keep paying him off to  keep his mouth shut.

Funny,  because the same thing happened with Glen. He told a harrowing story (to  me, anyway – to  him it was just reporting) about moving in with a woman he barely knew, fathering a child with her, then leaving when the baby was only six months old. He put all his things in a garbage bag and sneaked out, likely in the middle of the night, never to return.

Yes, he was an afflicted soul, but as he was to claim years later in another harrowing You Are There piece (about getting  shock treatments in a psych ward), this was one of those long stretches when he insisted he was perfectly well and totally functional. He claimed to only experience a bout of mental illness every ten years or so, with “eight or nine trouble-free years” in between, before "the demons came calling" again. When they finally did, the shock treatments he wrote about made him euphoric, and the newspaper piece he published made him seem positively giddy, enraptured by the sudden bright colors, the murmuring of friendly voices (psych nurses) and the pleasant ticking of a clock. To  someone who is bipolar, this is NOT good news.

By the time I read that piece, he was dead by his own hand. Hospitalized again, the fifth or sixth  time in three provinces in two years, he took  an overdose washed down with beer, wandered away from the psych ward into a freezing Toronto  winter, and froze to death by the railroad tracks. There was even a police report about  a “missing man”, showing someone who did not look like Glen at all, skeletal, with glazed eyes and a front  tooth knocked out.

I know how I am supposed to feel about all this. In fact, it seems horribly cruel to feel any other way. Compassion, even pity, and huge admiration for his courage in describing how the doctor glued electrodes to his skull and flipped the switch, sending a jolt of electricity through “the addled spheres of my brain”.

But the piece was written with a lot  of mythologizing  and glib phrasing that somehow held it all away  at a safe distance, while pulling the reader in, forcibly, with that inevitable first-person, present-tense style he loved to use.

I know it was an awful death, and I can kind of see why he needed to write about the shock treatments, but this idea that spilling your guts is always  a good thing has aged like milk. I am sure most people reading his psych ward diary were taken aback  - even I was, and I knew the man well enough to know this wasn’t the first time. Nor did he need to recount every single one of his bizarre manic episodes, in which he heard jabbering foreign voices in his head, hired a film crew for a non-story on corrupt bankers in Montreal, hallucinated seeing his dead father in elevators, went on  several wild hitchhiking trips in Northern Alberta, and believed the Mafia was after him.

This seemed a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia to me than bipolar, but maybe he was both. The weird dissociative thing pushed it all outside himself. When he wrote about an accident after a bad drunk, he said “an arm was paralyzed, and stayed that way for  a month.” AN arm, not HIS arm. Another time, he cut “an arm” with a broken bottle. And the poetic ramblings in between were what we writers call “making story”, We don’t ever let mere facts get in the way.

I don’t know why all this has come back to  me now, except I think I do. I am not at all sure the health problems I am struggling with now are going to be survivable. It’s not looking good. So is this bizarre death from 20 years ago  haunting  me because my  own death is imminent? And what will that be like? Can it be any worse than what happened to Glen?

Gzowski  wheezed out his last in a cardiac ward in 2002, and Glen lay down and died like a homeless man three years later, having literally run away from a psychiatric ward. I see him now as running and running, even during those long stretches of “trouble-free years” he claimed to have. He fathered a child during one of those stretches, then abandoned his daughter and a single mother with no means of support.

So  do I forgive all this because he was “mentally ill”? He was, but so am I, technically, living with bipolar  disorder which has come close to finishing me many times. When I tried to share some of my mental health struggles on Morningside, the pieces were treated like dead rats. You had to be the son of a hero to get away with that.

So I’ve done a lot of things to try to shake this off. Morningside now seems embarrassing to  me, not just small-time but totally hypocritical, willing to mangle the name of one of those quaint small towns we all were supposed to celebrate, even after featuring many of my writings and even an interview from  my home  town which was on the air.

KINRON.

Yes, Kinron, which is “nowhere”, and in a way Glen was Nowhere Man, but it seemed like self-exile to  me, and during those supposed (self-reported) long, long stretches of sobriety and stability, what was his  excuse for yanking his small children all over the globe, never letting them settle anywhere, and abandoning an infant daughter? The suicide attempts he so willingly recounted were all very public – he  jumped in front of a bus in Montreal, he took pills in New Brunswick and waited for the  tide to carry him out (resulting in a coma), then ended up in Toronto as the “missing man”, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks. These attempts all had something in common. They were extremely public, and were all geared towards finding his dead body in  a very public place. Being a newspaperman, he knew all about getting the story, and he knew in each case it would invariably  get into the papers (he was a public figure, after all), and his family would be approached for comment. As if they hadn’t gone through enough hell already.

 So I have a lot of anger mixed in with the pity and bafflement, and I now see his “diaries” as sensationalistic and far too graphic to be of any real help to  anyone. In the final analysis, I don't even think it helped him. We don’t need to hear about the technician “plunging a needle into a ready vein”, knocking him out, gluing electrodes to his skull, flipping the switch like something out of a Frankenstein movie. He even phrased it, “And out I am in this fourth of eight shock treatments at New Brunswick General Hospital.” Out I am? This takes his usual, attention-grabbing (if not lapel-grabbing) “you are there” to a  whole new, ghastly level. How can you SAY you’re “out” if you are indeed unconscious?

Someone should have blocked the publication of this piece, particularly when it was reprinted after he  died. At very least, he should have waited to write it after the course of treatment was finished he was only at the halfway mark) and he came back down to earth. Someone should have taken him aside, but no one did, because the writing was so impressive. He worked at that. He did die rather horribly, and I grieved, and kept all his letters for a long time, until I couldn’t  any more and decided I needed to dump  the whole subject, but since writing is my way of making SOME  sort of sense of my life, I’ve  needed to do this now. Morningside, with its faux-folksy host  (with the secret son) and Son of the Legend (with the secret daughter) now make me feel a little queasy. That was then, of course, and this is now, the only now I have.  There’s a Cole Porter song which keeps coming into my head: aptly, it’s called Every Time we Say Goodbye, and one of its more memorable lines is, “But how strange the change/From major  to minor.”

Yes, when the fog lifts and the lights come on and the Frankenstein scenario is finally over, things definitely slide into  a minor  key. If anyone actually reads this, and I am a fool to  think anyone will bother, no doubt I’ll get blasted for NOT having warm, fuzzy, folksy memories of Morningside and Peter Gzowski,  everyone’s jovial favourite uncle. But  Kinron. And all those pieces, when I did not  yet realize it was OK  for a  writer to actually try to  make  a living with their skills. For even thinking about being paid, I was roundly shamed  and branded an opportunist.

I  won’t do my usual thing and break this up with photos or  images or whatever, because I’m too tired right now, I’m exhausted from treatments of my own (though no  electrodes are glued to my skull). A lot of  time has passed, more than half my life, and an awful  lot of this stuff has aged very poorly. For  the most part, though there are likely a few diehards, Gzowski is no  longer seen as the folksy hero, his endless wheezy chain-smoking and equally-endless drinking starting to make him look kind of shabby. No doubt Ralph Allen was a nasty piece of work (smoking and drinking himself to death as well), a narcissist who made everyone think it was a privilege to  work for him. Glen - poor lost Glen - was doing himself in steadily through most of  his 65 years. Yes, he kept a record, but  though his writing was praised for its “oooooohh”, “ahhhhhhhh” factor, I see through all of those tricks now.

There’s a not very nice name for these attention-seekers in this  age of internet fame and infamy. Yes, those were different times, but not THAT different. Don’t pretend to be this shy, private person  who only spills his guts (FOR PAY, by the way – he was paid for everything he did on Morningside – son  of the Legend, after all!)  for the public good. What he wrote did not reduce the stigma or “raise awareness”. It had shock value, and as  a seasoned writer, he knew it did and chose it deliberately. But gut-lurching shock is not a public service. It’s a deliberate demand for attention, sympathy and even pity, and though he no doubt was treated like a hero for it, there was always something in it for him. If nothing else, it got him another job when he had crashed in flames once again.

So  don’t have heroes. They have feet of clay, as we  all do. I hope the public is at least a little more sophisticated now, a little more skeptical. I suppose when I heard my pieces read on the air, it did give  me a momentary thrill, and made me a teeny-tiny celebrity  in my sleepy  little  pulp mill town.

HINTON, folks. Not Kinron. Kinron does not exist.