Can't Help Falling in Love (on a kalimba)

I had never heard of a kalimba before, but I sure recognized the sound. It's the tinny, plinky sound of my first toy, an old tin jack-in-the-box (old even when I inherited it from my older siblings).

It looked and sounded something like this:

POP goes the synapse! And memory that is no more than a nearly-invisible, hairlike trace among the neurons once again begins to sizzle.

Sense memories, mostly. I remember the jack-in-the-box and its rusty chipped paint, rubbery plunks and scary pop-up man, the pictures of clowns on the sides. I remember associating it with the smell of pee, or a urinous scent that makes no sense unless I wasn't potty trained yet. These are OLD memories, you must realize, as old as I am. I remember sitting in the middle of the living room floor alone, my fat little legs stuck out in front of me, watching a flickering blue screen, a magic box that had come in the door the same day my mother brought me home from the hospital (upstaging me so completely that no one paid any attention to the new baby). The surreal, dreamlike, smudgy black-and-white images somehow pushed the record button in my infant mind, so that I remember - very distinctly - a man with a moustache, twisting his face around this way, then that way:

Something like this.

Exactly like this, because this IS it, this IS the exact image I saw on TV in my infancy, one of my very first memories! I didn't know what it was, who it was (though of course I recognized it as a face), and it was years or even decades later before I realized it was the wildly innovative comedian my older brother always talked about - THE SAME MAN - Ernie Kovacs! Even later than that, in adulthood, I saw some rare kinescopes of Kovacs' TV show (most of the videos erased by the networks to record game shows like To Tell the Truth and What's My Line. Remember Bess Myerson? ). Even now it gives me a strange, not too comfortable feeling. Kovacs only seems to exist in this grey phantom world, scary, sometimes even off-putting  as it seems to have a mildewed, obsolete quality. But his madness seemed to keep pace with my own, with ideas and thinking that might have been original but were forever out of step.

Sputnik. I remember Sputnik, everyone talking about it, though I was three years old and had no idea what it was, what it was about. No one ever explained anything, but there was an uneasy feeling that I should know, that I shouldn't NEED it explained, because everyone else got it, didn't they? As usual, since I was the youngest by over a decade, everyone else towered over me. I do remember going up some spooky steps at the back of my father's store in pitch darkness to stand on the flat roof with a telescope, trying to see Sputnik. I always thought I imagined that part, that there was no way anyone could see a suitcase-sized sphere hurtling across space from a store roof, but just last night I was talking about it to my son and he said, "Oh, yes, it was visible in the night sky." Jesus Christ!

I remember moving. I hate moving, and maybe this is why. This one is even earlier than Sputnik: I was probably in my two's (toilet trained? Who knows) and being hauled around to look at a new house. A new house where we were going to live. What was wrong with the  old house? These thoughts weren't even verbal, just deep uneasy feelings. If we could move for no reason, then anything might happen.

I was trundled around this huge, empty, cavernous place while everyone murmured and talked. There was no furniture, not even any rugs. I assumed this was how we were going to live. No one told me otherwise. Waffling confusion like a cloud system, never quite clearing up. 

Debby Carey made me come into her playhouse (an awful tippy thing with a cracked linoleum floor) and dared me to pee on the floor. I think I did, and it was hot and the smell was disgusting, but we giggled.

Sandy, the neighbor's bad-tempered cocker spaniel, bit me behind my knee. I think I was four, as it was before kindergarten. When the dog pooped hugely on our front lawn, the kids made up a song to "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow": "Sandy went to the bathroom, Sandy went to the bathroom. . . "

They go back farther, more soft-bordered and woozy like the feeling just before you faint. Being in "the gulley" somewhere around my grandmother's house in Delhi. My sister towering over me as I lay in the weeds and saying, "Are you wounded?" I don't even know what the game was, though I was often (being the smallest, and powerless) taken prisoner.

The tent, being tied to the pole, a reek of canvas. Playing war. Eating sweet peas from the garden, war provisions. Summer noises, cicadas. Long, sizzly, tambourine-like arcs of hot summer sound.

And the skeezix bird, the night hawk that produced a weird booming noise that no one else seemed to hear, so that I assumed I was the only one, or was crazy like everyone told me. Some of them (not many) noticed the call, but not the strange noise that followed it, which my brother claimed was the sound waves bouncing off buildings. (This video finally explained it to me, some fifty years on.)

And just a hair of memory, something that came up in hypnosis, a disastrous session in which I felt I stood before God, but what led into it was a memory of  being newborn and in a crib, my mother opening the door of my dark room - a gigantic exploding rectangle of yellow light, then a figure fifty feet tall, looking down at me with indifference tinged with a certain grim sense of duty.

Why do books change?

In my long (long LONG long) stint as a book reviewer, I reviewed well over 300 titles for the likes of the Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Stampede and Victoria's Secret. When I got to the end of it, I was so tired I wanted to die.

"Don't you miss reviewing?" a former cohort (I've forgotten his name now) asked me. "Miss who?" I said.

A lot of people don't "get" reviewing. They ask if I just send in reviews of things I like (even if they came out ten years ago). Others, quite a few in fact, do not even know what I mean by a "review" and ask me to explain it, as if I had just told them I am a geophysicist.

But when you write for a publication, you don't get to read things you like. I was either handed a book, with a deadline, or presented with three or four books and allowed to choose one or two (a great concession, my editors believed). If these were not read, reviewed and published within two weeks, they'd be "killed" because they were already too stale and irrelevant. The kill fee amounted to ten per cent of the normal, paltry amount. Take it or leave it.

It became a mill. It really did. I've re-read some of them (just now, in fact) and I was surprised to find my reviews are generally quite well-written and cover the material to a depth I didn't expect. But I didn't get into this to write badly, did I? (When a writer says anything remotely positive about her own work, she is immediately branded a "narcissist"). 

And I remember how I sweated over these, and how they nearly ruined my unbridled joy in reading.

But a funny thing happened on the way to retirement.

The books changed.

Some of them changed so much that when I revisited some of my favourites, I couldn't get through them. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, one of my top-forever titles, fizzled out on page 36. I'm sorry, Junot Diaz, it just did. I had raved about it to "whoever", the Edmonton Journal I think. I don't know what happened to it, but something did.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt similarly fell like a failed souffle. Have I become a lot more critical in my literary dotage, or what?

And then there's food critic Ruth Reichl's memoir Comfort Me with Apples. I almost raved about it way-back-when, but now I find the story of her rise from waitress to editor of Gourmet Magazine almost tedious, not to mention full of purple prose. She doesn't just taste food; it "explodes" in her mouth. She tastes a cayenne-laced soup: "My head flew off." She goes to Paris, and "I felt as if I had all of France in my mouth".

First time around, that was OK. This time it's beyond lavender: it's deep purple, and as we all know, purple isn't good writing. It's writing that calls attention to itself.

When did these books change?

Movies, too. Few of my early favorites hold up. Midnight Cowboy makes me want to commit suicide. Easy Rider? Blecccchh. Even some of my beloved old black-and-white faves have gotten a bit tattered around the edges. Though I keep watching Now, Voyager whenever it comes on Turner Classics, I wonder honestly if I "like" it any more, particularly now that I fully realize what a total bastard Jerry is, keeping Charlotte on the hook like that in perpetual spinsterhood while he has a girl in every port. Too "noble" to divorce his wife? Not bloody likely!

Some classics do hold up, but does that say something about me, or the movies? Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is still a guilty pleasure: watching Bette Davis savagely kick Joan Crawford's head in or serve her a rat for lunch still sends shivers of delight down my sadistic spine. When it comes on TCM about once a month, I always get lassooed by Gone with the Wind, whether I want to or not, and basically it's pretty sound in its storytelling, though except for that incredible "I'll never be hungry again" scene (which never fails to make me weep), the acting is mostly workmanlike. Everyone looks so good, even in the throes of antebellum famine, that they all manage to get by (and Hattie McDaniel is the glue holding the whole glorious mess together).

I've seen Taxi Driver innumerable times, and its queasy-making portrait of a sociopath's evolution from antisocial jerk to lionized murderer is gripping: but I mainly watch it for that incredible Bernard Hermann score. The first time I heard it, I kept getting goosebumps on my arms. It was just so unexpected. Those harp-glisses were like having acid thrown in your face. I still come back to it, step into the trap, knowing I am in for a disturbing time and not wanting to get away from it.

I've tried to figure it out. No doubt some movies just become dated. I've really tried, I mean it, to like Charlie Chaplin, and I don't, I just don't. I still adore Harold Lloyd, but with his nerdy Everyman persona (which he nails like no one else, making comics like Woody Allen possible) he somehow stays contemporary, even fresh. Chaplin is a dustbin character, shambling around with a cane, his eyes too made-up to be convincing. In fact, his Little Tramp persona is more creepy than loveable. 

It took three or four tries for me to watch The Great Dictator all the way through (though I think I did make it through Modern Times, enjoying the automatic eating machine). I only broke through after seeing a superb documentary by Kevin Brownlow (and Kevin Brownlow was THE ONLY person who was nice to me through the whole wretched, soul-destroying process of trying to get The Glass Character noticed). It was called The Tramp and the Dictator, and I am sure it far surpasses the original movie which had the usual overblown quality of the Chaplin talkies.

But then I gave it one more chance, and at some point - maybe where Jack Oakie as Mussolini began to rant and rave in faux Italian - I began to laugh. Had the movie changed? I didn't exactly cry by the end, but I was moved. Maybe you've heard the speech at the end, a plea for mercy and sanity in the midst of a global meltdown. The speech is sentimental and antiquated to the point of being almost laughable - but not quite.

Now that I sit here, however, I realize something both surprising and not-surprising: Charlie Chaplin was the first silent film star I ever saw. There was a half-hour Charlie Chaplin TV show on Friday nights when I was ten. Just enough time for a couple of his early two-reelers. The kids at school actually talked about this show, though it was on the same night as The Addams Family. That must have meant something.

When books change, when movies change, they often seem to change for the worse - unless, rarely, like The Great Dictator, they redeem themselves. And actors. It happens to them, too. Robert Redford was just a pretty face (granted, pretty gorgeous) until I recently saw him in something called The Candidate. The way he conveyed cynicism hiding behind an ingratiating mask, the way that cynicism retreated and the mask ultimately became who he was - it was, if not masterful, then extremely subtle and worth watching. He gave himself to the character and then disappeared.

Is it possible some of these movies get better on television? The big screen maybe pumps up some actors to the point of explosion. If they're too histrionic to begin with - Chaplin? But Lloyd works either way, and so does Keaton with his more mechanistic, emotionally shut-down style. (Keaton, by the way, was the second silent film star I really spent time with. Once again, it was Kevin Brownlow who opened the door for me with his superb documentary, A Tough Act to Follow. Would it be an exaggeration to say Kevin IS silent film history, living and breathing and walking around? No, I don't think so.)

I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it! Or I hope I am: what all this says about me. Me, yes, the person sitting here eating Greek yogurt with apricot preserves, crushed walnuts, and fresh blueberries, which explode in my mouth. The secret is not to chop the nuts but to crush them in your fingers: it somehow presses out the oil and makes them tastier. But I digress.

The cliched way of looking at it is, "Well, now you've grown up and matured and your taste in books/films is different." Is this why my precious all-time favourite novel, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, now seems almost trite, or (much worse) gimmicky? I first read it in 1973, when I was 19 years old and just getting married. (Yes.) But it isn't just that. Maybe I've gone sour on some stuff. Maybe I AM more critical. I shone the spotlight on too many titles, and it got too bright, glaring. Did I lose the ability to truly enjoy a book?

I wonder, I wonder.

I just re-read Keith Maillard's The Clarinet Polka, another book I reviewed years ago, and kept thinking, "How does he do that?" The character was an alcoholic who treated women shabbily, and there was no way he could be called likeable. Yet we liked him. It's just that he wanted something better. He had this shining, idealistic crush on a girl so young he had to wait three years even to make a move on her - then he married her! Shouldn't we have groaned? Well, I did, but I still liked him, and her, and (needless to say) the novel.

But the point of fiction isn't to make us "like" characters, or even (necessarily) identify when them. We must see something real in them, something that rings true and human. A novel could be about Hitler, and I'd want to read it and give it a good review IF the author provided a convincing portrait. Chaplin leaves me cold (or cold-ish: when I finally got through The Great Dictator on about the fifth try, I said to myself, "I'm glad I watched it all at last"), but that's because he isn't real. Surrealism is great, but it has to hit closer to home. The sight of Mr. Everyman struggling to hold on to the hands of a clock 30 stories up still feels real to us. His terror feels real. So does his desire to please, which embarrasses us a little bit, because that's like us, too.

Doris Lessing once said (and I bailed on re-reading my former favorite Love, Again when it, too, went and changed on me) "a real book reads you". What we choose to step into, spend our time with, is certainly revealing. As the clock ticks away in my own life, I realize a lot of people my age are dying because they are considered "elderly". If I spend time reading a book, I am giving my time to it. Which means I am NOT giving my time to other things, like eating, sleeping, dancing, or playing on a swing. It's an introverted thing, isn't it? Movies aren't much better. Though I have no qualms about singing along with "Springtime for Hitler" for the twenty-seventh time, I wonder why, sometimes, I try to force myself to give up two hours of my life, one hundred and twenty minutes I can never have back, for something that isn't likely to make me happy. 

And sometimes, I admit, it is a kind of selling out. Come on, Margaret. Everyone raves about this movie! Like it, won't you? Or at least watch it. Then I watch it, feel dull and drained afterwards, and realize - or maybe I'm realizing just this minute - that the time I spent on it is gone and behind me and is two hours crossed off the total hours of my life. Whatever that total might be.

POST-POST. In looking around for images to illustrate this post, I wanted to try to convey the idea that memories change as our minds slip and slide and try to come to terms with "what was". 

When I tried to google terms that might bring up something interesting, I got one thing, and one thing only (though with many sappy backgrounds):

PEOPLE CHANGE. MEMORIES DON'T.

PEOPLE CHANGE. MEMORIES DON'T.

PEOPLE CHANGE. MEMORIES DON'T.

I honestly thought there would be some acknowledgement that "memory" is a slippery concept at best, a malleable thing, and that how we remember things changes with maturity and experience and shifting perception and even the time-altered, gradual slowing down of the brain.

But no.

Nowhere could I find any of that. Just sappy memes telling us (and who is "us" exactly?) to "never regret the past, because you can't change it! You can only change the future."

But you can't do that either. Can you?

Why don't people get it, or am I the crazy one (as I have often been told)? For no doubt, most of these people are far more successful in the eyes of the world than I. I guess total lack of imagination is a big help. Their imagination was sucked out of them by the school system, after which they breathed a great sigh of relief and got on with the business of exploiting as many people as possible.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Light comes from everywhere: the stone church

I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.

So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.

As orderly as Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach. 

Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.

Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.

I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.

We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there. 

But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.

I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.

But then.

Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.

It was a church.

It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.

The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.

What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget  

This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.

But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.

I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.

But I put my HAND on that rock!

It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.

This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.

I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.

Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.

I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more. 

So that is that.

This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.

One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.

Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light. 

I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.

This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.

I had a letter from my dad, hand-written in all-caps: NO! IT DID NOT HAPPEN! He had the document countersigned by a psychiatrist who used to treat me when I was fifteen years old. This doctor was certain it didn't happen, as if he had been there. One thing you can say about my family: they sure know how to discredit a person.

The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.

But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "

Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.

So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?

Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?

But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.

As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.

Project description

The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Up on the Housetop, safe from pain

There's backstory to this, sort of. My new computer, wonder of wonders, is fucking up royal in so many ways that I want to scream and just leave the house, I mean permanently. I can't attach photos to emails, I can't edit photos, I can't send a link to anyone of a YouTube video or anything else without great arabesques involving "hyperlinks" and all sorts of shit I don't want to know about.

My old computer KNEW how to do all this stuff and never gave me a bit of trouble. It realized I did not need a whole bunch of fancy shit to get in the way of basic, clear, easy function. I could do everything I needed with one or two clicks.

I will never get that back. My husband and I are at the sizzling point because he lumbers over to my computer, fucks around with it for half an hour, then tells me he can't do anything and I'll just have to live with it the way it is.

I don't understand why, when I try to email someone a photo, it is embedded, HUGE, in the body of the email, in a form I am certain they do not want. I don't understand, furthermore, why I must be humiliated over and over and over again for being stupid.

I wasn't supposed to be stupid. I started out with great promise.I took Grade 3 and 4 in one year, then was put in a super-advanced Grade 5 class in which I learned exactly nothing, but had great fun giving the teacher a nervous breakdown.

I had a very high IQ and my reading skills were at high school level, and great things were expected of me. NONE of it came true, I mean none.

I don't know what it is. I was the youngest, and all the disappointments of the other three siblings (who were much older) were somehow heaped on my shoulders. I remember my Dad once saying in his usual drunken state that every one of us had let him down in innumerable ways, especially me because I was the only one left to clean up all the wreckage. I was his last, most desperate hope.

I don't know why, because all of my three siblings became very competent professional musicians and were supersmart.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the video. I wandered in search of distraction, wondering if I could find a non-sticky/sugary version of a Christmas tune I like, Up on the Housetop. To be honest, I heard it on a commercial for Canadian Tire or something, played in a sparkly way with something like a banjo in the background.

This was the only non-sticky version I could find. I like the mellow tone of this dulcimer: some of them sound like garage doors opening (and don't get me started on the psaltery, a scream on strings). It has that relaxed banjo-y flavor to it. This isn't a professional player, but that's what I like about it: it's the sound of someone working on proficiency who obviously has musicality and plays with pleasure and enjoyment, the very thing that was forbidden to me while my Dad stood over me with a big stick.

I find myself deleting paragraphs these days, lots of them. I just can't put all that pain out there. Melancholy dogs me. This isn't the best time of year for me, though I love attending Christmas concerts with my grandchildren in them - could anything be more magical? - and some of the music, and looking at twinkly lights and things.

But, maybe because of my early experiences and all those failed expectations, life seems essentially melancholy and even tragic. I don't know how people walk around with smiles on their faces.

Hemingway in the henhouse

Scent is tied to memory: just ask Proust (my neighbor who lives across the street), who triggered a flood of childhood images by eating a whatever-it-is with stuff on it. He dunked it into his cup of tea like a doughnut (note: NOT a “donut”), and thus released memories of eating that same whatcha-ma-callit when he was just a tot.

I am sure this goes back to some primitive structure in the brain, something we evolved on top of (i.e., layers and layers of evolutionary upholstery over that reptilian core). But we still have it. I have it. You have it. Matt Paust has it.

It? What is it, you say? Keep reading.

Matt is someone I e-mail with every day, sometimes many times a day. We “met” in that strange non-meeting way people do through the internet, in this case through a blog I wrote on Open Salon called The Glass Character.

I used to think I had about six readers, and maybe I did, although if I got six comments they all seemed to be from Matt. This was somehow encouraging, because I didn’t expect any at all.  My current blog keeps telling me I’ve had 22,000 views or something like that, which seems highly improbable, but there it is. Quite possibly, all of them are Matt too.

We have almost nothing in common except a lifelong devotion to the word (meaning the written word, not the gospel). He goes by many aliases, which makes me wonder sometimes, it really does. Norm Hawthorne, Chicken Maaaaaa(aaaa)n, Clark Kent, and many others: every time I visit his blog(s), it has all changed. He’s an award-winning former newspaperman, though in his bio at the back of his new book of stories he calls himself “a former award-winning newspaperman”, implying that somehow or other those awards no longer apply. But I think they do.

Right now he lives in Virginia with his family and his chickens, and a more tender shepherd of chickens you never saw. He grew up in Wisconsin, middle America, which is maybe why I was thrown off by his accent on his YouTube videos, which to my ears sounds more urban than rural.  But some people lose their accent along the way, or take on a new one. Sort of like a blog identity, you know? Like a snowman being rolled (or a snowball rolling down a hill), we build up layers, yet the old ones remain inside, pure and untouched.

When he told me his new book was about (or at least was related to) the ownership of guns, I think I involuntarily yipped. I am a Canadian, and though Michael Moore’s stereotypes of us can be ludicrous (happy little beavers who don’t lock their doors), they’re right on the money about some things. Most people I know would approach a gun like a poisonous snake, or at least a museum piece under glass, untouchable by all except Mounties, hunters in red plaid jackets, and aboriginals.

It’s just different here. We don’t have “the right to bear arms” (which a friend of mine insists is actually “the right to bare arms”, meaning Americans can wear t shirts all year), nor do we “pledge allegiance”, to a flag or to anything else. Pledging allegiance feels foreign, strange, though I do remember standing up and singing God Save the Queen every morning in grade school, which is in itself pretty bizarre.

That’s not to say we aren’t patriotic or faithful to the True North Strong and Free (“with glowing hearts we see thee rise”!).  It’s just different. We stand on guard. And stand on guard. And stand. . . It’s repeated so many times in our national anthem that it must mean something. No rocket’s red glare, no bombs bursting in air, just. . . we stand on guard. For thee.

This issue of Canadians and Americans exists: it’s like sleeping next to an elephant and praying it never rolls over. Some believe we’re treated like a poor cousin, but I have another theory: it all comes down to population base. We have approximately 1/10 the population of the U. S, spread out over an even larger geographical space, with a fraction of borders or divisions, provinces instead of states (and somehow those two terms have a markedly different flavour).

Some still perceive us as one more state that will soon surrender its identity and join the Union. I remember some time ago, maybe decades, when someone – surely it must have been an American tourist – made the comment, “oh well, Canadians and Americans are pretty much the same, aren't they?" That’s like saying Italy’s the same as Switzerland. All on the same continent, aren’t they?

This arouses in me not so much the spirit of the beaver as the porcupine. It gets my back up. We evolved differently, we’re historically different (one great writer, hell if I remember his name – maybe Robertson Davies – said, “A Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution”: so in a sense, we seceded before there even was a Union).  The stereotypical Canadian is self-effacing and mild and doesn’t want to touch a gun or make any sort of trouble. 

According to humorist Will Ferguson (and the country produces more than its share of funny people: Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, and some really good dead ones like John Candy and Leslie Nielsen), a Canadian not only apologizes when someone bumps into him, he apologizes when he bumps into a chair. But guns, oh my. There are those guys in red plaid jackets, yes, and of course some Indians (as some people still call them) going after moose meat to make pemmican, and the RCMP, who have taken to using tasers in the last few years (sometimes with fatal results). But the rest of us? It’s like saying we have the right to bear light sabres or something.

So I have Matt’s new book in my hands, a handsome volume with a provocative cover: a young girl who looks like a Catholic schoolgirl, except that she’s packing heat. A Little Red Riding Hood who can definitely take care of herself. Thus the title of the book, If the Woodsman is Late: Tales of Growing Up in a Society that Respected Personal Ownership of Firearms.

Firearms! Whew, whoooo: let me blow the smoke off that one! But let us also take a deeper look.

Matt’s book is a mix of short fiction and memoir (and by the way, folks, I am NOT writing a formal review of this book because reviews take me bloody forever, literally weeks, and besides I charge for them).  Sometimes this works, other times it’s disconcerting. But disconcerting isn’t always a bad thing.

The more firearm-related stories can pack a wallop (i. e. there’s a piece of fiction where a man and his girl friend are ambushed by two murderous low-lifes, and in self-defense he fires: “The eyes opened very wide and very quickly as the copper-jacketed slug raced toward them at 860 feet per second about four feet away. It hit one of the eyes, creating a hydraulic effect that released a misty cloud of blood, brain fluid and bits of eye as my second bullet caught the robber just under his chin.”)

Is this neo-Spillane, or something out of a Scorsese movie like Raging Bull where the black-and-white blood explodes from Robert DeNiro’s face in slow-mo? I don’t see how one can remain detached from such a description: “the eyes”, indeed. Not his eyes. Objectifying the prey. The Canadian in me quails, but then I must ask myself: if I was standing next to a loved one and we were both about to die and I had a gun, what would I do?

I’ve thought about this already, for reasons that aren’t clear. Say, if I was babysitting my grandchildren and some menacing lowlife broke in, and he had a gun, and the kids were screaming, and he was stupid enough to drop it or I kicked it out of his hand. . . Yes, I know what I’d do if I absolutely had to, but only if I could get the goddamn thing to fire.

But here I was going to talk about smells. It’s strange, but some of the stuff he writes about, which seems about as far away from my own experience as it can be, triggers (pardon the expression) something deep in me. He talks almost lovingly about guns, it’s true, even names them sometimes (or someone else does). He confesses that his first boyhood gun inspired not so much love as lust. But then there’s the first time he experiences “the smell of a gun that had just been fired. A wild, acrid exotic smell, the likes of which I’d never tasted previously yet somehow knew to be authentic.”

For me, on some level, this was a Proustian/madeleine-dunked-in-chamomile-tea moment, because I do remember something like that smell. We didn’t have real guns around – oh wait, didn’t my older brother Walt have what we called a bb gun? Pellet gun. A Daisy? Air rifle, maybe. Not sure. I was very small, and a girl, who therefore wasn't supposed to understand. My brothers had fake Western guns that didn’t shoot anything, but that’s really not what I remember. I remember caps, rolls of paper that had bits of explosive in them that could be “let off” by being struck with a rock or hammer or something (never a gun). And there was that hot, sulphury, fire-and-brimstone smell.

They used to “let off” worse things. Back then, in about 1959, a boy of ten like my brother could walk into a corner store (in Canada!) and buy something called “four-inchers”: firecrackers that could do a lot of damage, particularly to anthills. Kids weren’t exactly frontiersmen then, but they could tinker with the symbols, Roy Rogers pistols in holsters, or they could “play war” with plastic hand grenades and tie me to the central pole of  the canvas tent we pitched in the summer, a “prisoner”.

There are lots of stories here that pertain, and some that don’t, to the topic of firearms, that uneasy subject which makes Canadians squirm. Reminiscences of an old-school newspaperman, of experiences in the army, even sports: and one very strange piece of fiction about a man who gets as disoriented and lost as Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond and has a kind of inexplicable religious experience. The football one I can’t relate to, as it’s a language I just don’t speak and probably never will. But then, I don’t speak gun either, yet some of these pieces (too short, many of them, I wanted more) got to me, shook me up.  (Note to author, you should’ve left out the one about trying not to pee, it’s a little over the top. Pee shows up in three or four of these. Once, I think, is enough.)

But I digress. I have a favourite:  Death in the Tall Grass, and it’s about Matt’s first experience as a hunter and the family’s insistence that they eat his kill for dinner. Unfortunately it’s a tough, stringy old rabbit imperfectly picked clean of lead shot, so that the boy bites down excruciatingly on a pellet: “The jolt shot across and up with a shriek from the right side of my face deep into the cerebral cortex, leaving me frightened and undone.” A clang that goes through the bones and into the floor. Does the gun shoot back?

I’m sure Hemingway never ventured into a henhouse, unless it was to pick off a few for lunch. Or maybe he liked his eggs fresh.  When I’m proofreading my work for glitches and it gets pretty close to finished, I always hear myself saying: OK, if I were Hemingway I could make this a lot better, but I’m not Hemingway, I’m Margaret Gunning, so this is the way it’s going to be. Maybe Matt does the same sort of thing. 

It’s strange to see this guy puttering around happily in his yard, a protective man to be sure, writing about guns. Some of the fiction, particularly a story where a blameless black man is shot by a fake white cop, is gory but does not strike me as “pro-gun”.  The subtitle of his collection strongly implies that society no longer respects personal ownership of firearms. The truth is, some societies are downright afraid of them.

As the saying goes, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But the homicide rate is lower here: by how much, I’d have to look up. If guns are around, if they are to hand and you can easily grab them, aren’t they more likely to be fired? Statistics seem to bear this out. If someone burst through the door and I shot him in the head and it turned out to be a neighbour whose house was on fire, well then. . . See, I could’ve thrown a stapler at him and it might have had the same effect.

It’s just a different way of thinking, of living. We’re leery of guns, sometimes very negative about them; Americans seem more comfortable with them, and it is written into their Constitution that they have the right to own them: no, not to own them but to “bear arms”, a very different thing. We can’t, but I don’t remember ever seeing a campaign to change that. 

And yet, and yet: implicit in that all-important “stand on guard” is having the means to protect that precious border from violent intrusion.

And let’s face it: you can’t do that with a stapler.

http://www.amazon.com/IF-WOODSMAN-LATE-Respected-Ownership/dp/161434499X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319481250&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/EXECUTIVE-PINK-Mathew-Paust/dp/1609105745/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319481280&sr=1-1

http://honest-food.net/2008/12/30/classic-civet-of-hare/

Margaret's links:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1