The last words of John Lennon

Wait a minute. Am I being hoaxed?

I feel very uncomfortable doing this but a number of factors compel me to get on with it, so here goes. Without going into this too personally, due to events beyond my control, there are a fair number of threats, most indirect, but some quite direct, and many very specific (what exact kind of gun should be put to what exact part of my body) made against my life. Mostly just suggestions that I be killed, etc, (quite graphic etc, often) with motivation, sometimes a cost estimate.

While I try not to let this affect how I do things too much and I know that the internet (which I love and is mostly a net gain, in part because it is through the internet that I came to know many of you good people and how i have managed to do much of my work) I have for a few years now declined all invitations to do public events. Several people who have looked at these things have been advised me against doing all anyone-attends-posted-online affairs and if you see me say I am in a place, I am not there anymore.

It’s not a huge thing and I know most threats are empty but I believe the advice is correct, given the number and nature of these posts and messages.
Anyway, now I have this book coming out and a number of literary festivals have kindly invited me to attend and I can’t. This is a disappointment to my fine publisher and of course and I really enjoy meeting readers.

I will have an invitation-only book launch here in Toronto, late September, when the book comes out, and I very much hope many of you will come.
The point to this post is this, I did promise, contactually and otherwise, to promote my book, and attend a number of public events. I can’t, and a fair number of you are in media one way another, and so here’s my pitch, I will happily answer questions about my book, and work, write you a few lines about life in general, donate a recipe for your publication, pop in to your podcast, wander in to whatever it is you got going. You name it, I will do it.
So, please keep me in mind if you have a space of slot I might be able to fill and thanks very much for your time and interest if you read to the end of this.

  

This VERY strange statement appeared today, posted on a Facebook friend's page, so it got into my feed. A very big question mark immediately formed over my head. I didn't know much about this writer, whose name I will mask for now, and when I looked up her publisher, this is the description I saw about her (which, as an author myself, I know is traditionally written by the subject):

(Writer Under Threat) is smart, funny and very beautiful. She has the prettiest eyes. She describes her hair as iconic. That's how men think of her breasts. She is also a gifted writer. Elle Canada, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and Explore Magazine are four of the publications lucky enough to have her in their pages. She has a lovely laugh and has been nominated for ten National Magazine Awards. She is also an excellent cook, terrific in bed and weary of self-deprecating chick writers.

So I sort of got the fact that this was a humourist of sorts, but what about that statement about her life being in danger? And therein lies the dilemma of social media.

As a humorist, a satirist I assume, irony and exaggeration are her stock in trade. Fair enough; I expect that. But what do I make of this rather long and elaborate statement? Is there any truth in it at all, or is it just an irony-tinged way of saying, "Hey, guys, I don't feel like doing any book promotion this year"? If so, those who are in on the joke, her loyal readers/fans/"in-crowd", will probably immediately know what she is talking about, and perhaps are chuckling away to themselves right now - threats on her life! Right! That's a million laughs.

Certainly the way she expresses the threat ("what exact kind of gun should be put to what exact part of my body. . sometimes a cost estimate. . .") borders on the flip. Her statement a little later on that it's "not a huge thing" seems equally puzzling. Threats on her life are not a huge thing?

So I was left in a state of confusion that made me unaccountably angry. It's happening again, I thought. Happens every time I turn around. We don't know what to take seriously, and what to - not. The whole thing was confusing in the way only social media can be confusing, triggering a weird, irrational shame. It's because you don't know whether or not you're being hoodwinked, and you feel you should know. You should know what's going on, but everyone seems to be speaking in some sort of mysterious code.

My first reaction when I saw this was, good grief, why is my Facebook friend in so much trouble? Then I realized it wasn't my Facebook friend at all, but this author (unknown to me - I don't live in Toronto) whom my friend was quoting. So, who was she, and why (actually, really, I mean) was she not going to promote her book?

People just don't go around randomly shooting authors, or making threats against someone who is no threat to them. Not in Canada, anyway. But if it IS true, what the hell is going on? She is a lovely, laughing, iconic-breasted humour writer, is she not? I just can't see who'd want to gun her down in cold blood. It makes no sense.

The truth is, I have absolutely NO fucking clue what to make of this, and it makes me very very uneasy. Just doubting it is giving me doubts, although I find I'm doubting half of what I read these days.

What do we take seriously in this era of fake news? What/whom do we (mis)trust? I was all ready to accept this at face value, until that little voice (the one I generally trust) said, "Wait a minute."

Wait a minute. We have no proof at all that any of this is real. If it isn't, it's a great way to play on the paranoia that runs rampant these days, a way to tweak everyone's vulnerability and then suddenly say, "Hah! Had you going there, didn't I?"

HAS she got me going? For no reason, I mean? How big a fool am I, anyway? IS there anything to this? Yes, no, I don't know. I feel ridiculous for not knowing. If it's satire, after all (the way she makes her living), if she's not really going to be murdered in cold blood at a book signing, then perhaps the intended reaction really is a mixture of exasperation, bewilderment and baffling shame.

The Matt Paust Show: Killer Kids

This is the closest thing I'll ever have to The Matt Paust Show. It's about a hideous crime committed back in 1992, in Gloucester, Virginia, Matt's beat when he was a reporter. I think of him then as the old-school newsman, tirelessly tracking down clues, getting the story beneath the story, wearing out shoe leather. Probably with a hip flask in his pocket and a hound dog named Beauregard (oops, cancel that last detail). Wish I had a picture of him. Sometimes, rare times, you click with someone you've never met and you somehow keep an eye on each other, make each other laugh and know that you're friends. Such a one is Matt.

Portrait of the Reporter as a young dog.

The lonesome death of Margaret Gunning

Tonight, while looking for something else, I stumbled on a rather incredible recording: a podcast, the type of thing I never bother with.

It's a dark and dank and somewhat creepy story of a woman unjustly convicted of "murther", and publicly executed in 1832. I wasn't going to listen to all of this - it's nearly an hour long, after all, and wouldn't it be dull? Hell no. It's enthralling, for two reasons:

(a) it's hard not to be enthralled when you hear your own name every one or two minutes, as the accused perpetrator of a grisly murder;

(b) the accents are remarkable. There must be seven or eight varieties, from the softening and darkening of vowel sounds and hillocky lilt, to an almost nose-snorting sound, like a horse breathing, or rather a "harrrse". Impossible to reproduce here, almost an "iggerant" sound, or, as me sainted grandma used to put it, "rather common". 1832 comes out something like "aihhyt-tyeen toirrty-twoo". A "th" sound comes out more as "dh".  "Mother" sounds, weirdly, like "mudh-der", the consonant sound breathily drawn out.

If Ireland is anything like England, and any good Irishman would flatten me for even suggesting it, there is a plethora of accents and even dialects there, overlapping, layered, and bound up in things like heredity, geography, education, money and power, and (that awful thing that is not supposed to exist) "station" in life.  

Each voice, each person interviewed in this thing may have come from a different part of Ireland, but the variety of sound transcends mere location: it's as if this Ireland consists of showers of sparks or bubbles of radiant light, each expressing the soul of an individual, yet all from a common source.

It's a funny thing, too, that as the documentary attempts to piece together the sad, brief life of Margaret Gunning, nobody seems to know very much: "no idea" and "never heard of" keep popping up, as if she and her kin somehow just fell off the face of the earth. Most likely, because she was poor and powerless, few or no records were kept. 

Weirdly, some of her forbears were tinsmiths and tinkers, a trade that for some unknown reason was looked down-upon, even despised. I happen to know that, because my great-grandfather on my mother's side was one. We still had a few of his artifacts floating around the house when I was a child, cookie cutters mostly, one shaped like a greyhound.

I have pieced together a bit, mainly from sifting through meagre internet entries. Tinkers were often itinerant, went around in cluttery, rattly old wagons, and were lumped in with "gypsies" (also unfairly stigmatized), and who knows but that there was cross-marriage and a blurring of social barriers. The greyhound cookie cutter may well have symbolized something I didn't understand back then: perhaps the old man liked to go to the dog races, place a few bets with his meagre earnings, and if he came stumbling home drunk and broke after hours, it wouldn't reflect well on his already-low social status.

So I emerged from the incredibly weird experience of listening to a dozen different Irish voices talking about someone with my name, someone from 182 years ago who had murdered somebody and was executed for it. 

How in God's name did this information ever come to me?   How many ways is it possible to be Irish, to pronounce the language? And though it is unlikely that any of theses "Gonne-nings" were my own blood kin, it's possible they were related on my husband's side. . . which means my children, and their children, could also be blood kin. Go back the generations, hear the Irish sounds, realize with a start that two of my grandkids have Celtic Irish names (Caitlin and Ryan Patrick), picked for some reason, or not for a reason, just because of that low ancestral hum, the hum that registers below and beneath everything else.

Post-blog ruminations. It's the next morning, and I am wondering now about Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, and other black-Irish hunks I have known and loved. Yes, that term has hung around my family, but not directly. My mother's side, the Irish connection, all seemed to have the same black hair, slight swarthiness and green eyes. I never thought it strange until I realized that my mother, married to a very fair blue-eyed man, produced two sons with black hair and dark brown eyes.

There was this strange rumor of "Spanish blood" in the family, but this was supposed to be on my father's side. HIS father was swarthy (I never met the man, but he will live in infamy as a layabout and a violent drunk). But the dark brown eyes had to come from somewhere, didn't they? Was there Spanish blood, perhaps going all the way back to the Spanish Armada, on BOTH sides? 

And why did my sister and I end up fair and blue-eyed? My own kids were "darkening blondes", you know the type, but two of my grandgirls (Lauren in particular) look almost Scandinavian, with wheaten blonde hair and crystalline blue eyes.

Strange, since their mother is brunette.

It's all very weird, and the bit of researching I did led me to believe that whole books could be written about it. An article about how the Irish names changed over time, simplified and de-Celticized, fascinated me, because I read somewhere that Gunning used to be spelled O'Conaing.

So here's just a tidbit about DNA and the true origins of the Irish:

But where did the early Irish come from? For a long time the myth of Irish history has been that the Irish are Celts. Many people still refer to Irish, Scottish and Welsh as Celtic culture - and the assumption has been that they were Celts who migrated from central Europe around 500BCE. Keltoi was the name given by the Ancient Greeks to a 'barbaric' (in their eyes) people who lived to the north of them in central Europe. While early Irish art shows some similarities of style to central European art of the Keltoi, historians have also recognised many significant differences between the two cultures.

The latest research into Irish DNA has confirmed that the early inhabitants of Ireland were not directly descended from the Keltoi of central Europe. In fact the closest genetic relatives of the Irish in Europe are to be found in the north of Spain in the region known as the Basque Country. These same ancestors are shared to an extent with the people of Britain - especially the Scottish. 

DNA testing through the male Y chromosome has shown that Irish males have the highest incidence of the haplogroup 1 gene in Europe. While other parts of Europe have integrated continuous waves of new settlers from Asia, Ireland's remote geographical position has meant that the Irish gene-pool has been less susceptible to change. The same genes have been passed down from parents to children for thousands of years.

This is mirrored in genetic studies which have compared DNA analysis with Irish surnames. Many surnames in Irish are Gaelic surnames, suggesting that the holder of the surname is a descendant of people who lived in Ireland long before the English conquests of the Middle Ages. Men with Gaelic surnames, showed the highest incidences of Haplogroup 1 (or Rb1) gene. This means that those Irish whose ancestors pre-date English conquest of the island are direct descendants of early stone age settlers who migrated from Spain.

(Post-script. I had to bring Harold Lloyd in here, didn't I? But his coloring was a tad unusual, for one reason: freckles. His thick head of curly hair was jet black (not dark brown, like a lot of brunettes). All his life, from boyhood on, he was covered with freckles, so much so that his makeup had to be laid on with a trowel. The few glimpses of him shirtless show a massively freckled body. This is relatively rare except in redheads, whose freckles are so numerous they sometimes mass together like constellations in the night sky. With skin so fair it was almost white - he never seemed to get a tan, unlike his leathery Hollywood cohorts - and strikingly blue eyes, he seems a candidate for the black-Irish theory - except that he was Welsh. But hey, Welsh may well be included in that strange Gaelic/Celtic equation. That story I will leave for another day.)

If you want it

I don't know what to say about John Lennon. I don't know what to say about Christmas, except that it's coming at me like a freight train through a tunnel. I don't know what to say about any of it.

I'd like to be a joyful person. Sometimes I am a joyful person. But people who are joyful all the time - or at least never unhappy - or never seem unhappy - they seem to me to be -

Our emotional thermostats are set very differently, obviously. Is this something that's present at our birth, or even before that? Some genetic quirk? Can some people overlook the obvious more easily than others?

Or overlook pain, and even disaster, pretend it isn't there or doesn't hurt or doesn't matter?

The great Nobel-winning novelist Doris Lessing once wrote in her memoirs, "I was born minus several layers of skin." Though she seems tough and durable, life has never been easy for her. She is porous. She feels, turns like the weather vane she is.

Some "deal with" all this by drinking, drugging, gambling, overworking, oversexing, overshopping, or whatever other "over-" there is. In other words, they have trained themselves not to feel.

It goes down well. That's the general rule.

One can use pure logic. "Well, there's nothing I can do about these tragic situations. So why let it bother me?"

This is along the lines of saying to a person in agony, "Crying won't bring him back."

We live in a roll-up-your-sleeves, up-and-at-'em sort of culture. We don't stop to feel. We "move on". Sitting around and feeling things isn't acceptable. And it doesn't bring them back, does it?

John, I -

Outside the Dakota

when the bullets fell

a hail of salty hell

and Yoko screaming pain

and the horror-struck grief of the people that stood

in a pool of his blood

John, I -

War is over if you want it,

you said and somebody

went and shot you for your pains

as if that was the ultimate

subversive statement

(and you had to pay)

You had to get it sometime

You started life all over

You're not allowed to

are you

are you

oh John.

I see you

see you everywhere.
Hear your plangent voice forever saying

as if almost praying

So this is Christmas. And what have you done?

Thirty years have passed

in a kind of dream.

On the day you'd be seventy,

Sean turned 35

your beautiful boy

almost middle-aged
(like you when you died)

stamped all over with your face

and your greatness,

but never truly great.

John, I -

John,

John Ono: One

This is one of those experiences that is impossible to describe. Just a manifestation of my desire to connect with a meaningful God? You decide.

After much anticipation, I finally went and saw Nowhere Boy, the movie (drama, not documentary) about John Lennon's youth and his troubled relationship with his Aunt Mimi (who raised him) and his mother Julia, an unstable but charming woman who gave him up due to complicated circumstances. At the same time, the musical ferment that gave rise to the Beatles begins to bubble and seethe. John starts a crude, amateurish "skiffle" group (Liverpudlian folk/rock), of which he is definitely the leader, though his guitar skills are poor, and his classmates from art school are worse.
Then he meets a baby-faced 15-year-old named - well, do I need to tell you? Paul holds the guitar left-handed, and plays rings around everyone else. Jealous, John at first turns him away, but soon starts to work on his skills with him.

The movie was slow to start, and the actor who played John (not a name I'd heard of) was not very convincing at first, as he seemed sort of passive. But as the story unfolded, you bought him more and more. When he picked up a guitar, a fierceness came over him, and by the end I was thinking, that's John Lennon.

Of course we know what will happen. John's wayward Mum Julia dies at the end, hit by a car, just as she is making peace with the family. Paul has just lost his mother to cancer, so now they are brothers in nearly every sense.

The movie was powerful, and I was quite moved to see Yoko Ono listed as a consultant in the credits, which kept it honest. It was reviewed as a "kitchen-sink drama a la Coronation Street", and it did have elements of that. But Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi was spot-on perfect in establishing sympathy for an unsympathetic character. She deserves an Oscar for her courage and skill.

But the weird thing happened at the end. During the credits I started to cry unexpectedly, then I was really sobbing. Fortunately, nearly everyone had left. Then I felt this - I will try to describe it. A "presence" behind a sort of screen or very thin veil. It was slightly to the left, about halfway between me and the front of the theatre, and angled a little bit, slightly diagonal. Something like very thin gauze, or a translucent veil. I heard a voice without words that conveyed something very powerful. In essence it said, how can you not believe in me when I am right in front of you? You have stopped believing in a God, and yes, that God may not be in a church, but he's right here, Margaret, right here (indicating my chest) in your heart.

I was stunned and doubtful and electrified and wondered what it really meant, but I was not going to turn it away. It wasn't the first time I've had experiences that I can only describe as psychic, but I wondered what in the world this "voice" (undoubtedly his) would ever want with a nothing like me. The presence was so large it filled the whole theatre and extended past the walls. I can't really describe what it was like. Any words seem wrong or inadequate. I finally left and went to the ladies' room (fortunately empty) and just sobbed and sobbed, wondering if this was somehow connected to my brother Arthur's death in 1980, only two months before John Lennon was shot and killed.

I never expected this, didn't want or need or call for a lesson in theology or the true nature of God or whether or not we survive our bodies. In fact, I'd just about given it up. I was beginning to think we just die, get put under the ground, and that's it, it's all over. I was starting to really believe there's nothing there, nothing that loves or cares about us as individuals. For a former practicing Christian, this sort of spiritual abyss was agony, but I could not fix or change it. This presence, familiar yet strange, didn't really explain all that, but just manifested and asked me: I am right here, so how can you not believe?

I can try to worry this down to nothing, or intellectualize, or throw it out. I've had a bit of time to process it. I will accept it as valid, whatever it means. I have been told, apparently, that we DO survive our bodies and that that individual energy still exists very powerfully. As with all these things, I was afraid that If I told anyone they'd just scoff and say, why was it someone so famous? What makes you think - ? But why not? I'm receptive, and after that heartbreaking movie I was wide open, all defenses down.

Anyway, so many people want or desire or ask for psychic experiences and think they'd be really wonderful, when in fact they can be a bit of an ordeal, in that you question your sanity or at least ask yourself if it was merely a projection of your own desires or your imagination. So I share it with you, just as it was.

Unbearable!

U.S. woman cleared in husband's hunting death peels out of court, music blaring - 570News

This is the kind of story that will likely appear on Dateline sometime next year, with Keith Morrison (he of the earnest, wrinkled, sardonic face, silver hair and ageless blue jeans) grilling Mary Beth Harshbarger about shooting and killing a "black mass" in the wild woods of Newfoundland.

The black mass in question turned out to be a husband. Her husband. The big issue here is whether or not she knew the difference.

The "weapon"was a hunting rifle given to her by her late husband Mark. Certain family members smelled fish, claiming Mary Beth was a crack shot, not likely to confuse Mark with a black bear.

Unless she had grown tired of this. . .black bear. . . and wanted him out of the way.

Why would anyone suspect such a thing? Rumour has it that she was getting mighty cozy with Mark's brother Barry. ("Bear" for short. Just kidding.) The family is now as bitterly divided over this issue as the Hatfields and the McCoys.

The judge must have decided that Mark looked more like a "big black thing" than anyone realized. Cleared of all wrongdoing, Mary Beth whooped and hollered, tooling out of the courtroom parking lot in her lawyer's Mercedes like something out of the Dukes of Hazzard.

Mark was Caucasian and didn't really resemble anything big and black. But he forgot to wear that orange thingie hunters should-a-ought-a wear in the woods. So it was really all his fault.

The most bizarre element of this whole story was the testimony of family friend Ann White, whose husband had also been mistakenly shot in 1958 (for a porcupine or a gorilla or something). She claimed Mark Harshbarger had recently jacked up his insurance coverage and told Barry to look after his family if anything ever happened to him.

"That's just how responsible he was."

So tell me. Is Mary Beth Harshbarger equally responsible?