Noel. . . Noel!

I have a history with this piece. My father had a large and eclectic collection of recordings - we'd call them vinyl LPs now - representing various facets of classical music. He liked compilations, and one of the best was called Pastorales: small woodwind pieces by a diverse group of composers such as Haydn, Stravinsky, Grainger - and Jolivet.

That name doesn't ring many bells, does it - and it didn't then, either. I kept this one with me, however, in some bubble at the back of my brain. Sometimes it would replay there, or parts of it, hauntingly, and it made me want to cry. Couldn't remember the title of it, the composer, anything, and decades went by before I was able to track it down. All I knew was that it had the word "Noel" in it, and was meant to represent four small scenes, musical miniatures from the Nativity.

On the internet, the merest wisp of thread can lead you all the way back to the treasure. Eventually I found a recording of Jolivet's Pastorales de Noel on CD, but it was a disappointment: by then, the original had become deeply recorded and I was stuck on it. The playing was good, but a glaring flaw made me unable to stand it: the flautist took a gasping breath right in the middle of the dramatic sustained trill at the end of the first movement, ruining it.

I found another CD version, but the bassoon sounded thin and the flute less than convincing. By then I was tired of trying to find anything like a match.

I am sure I hunted for a performance of this on YouTube for several years and didn't find it, so it was a nice surprise to discover this. Overall I like this version, though I am driven nearly mad by the way the harpist fusses and fidgets with her music, her stand, her chair. At one point the flautist seems to mimic or even send her up a bit with a little "wait, wait, guys" fidget of her own. Really, this sort of thing should be unnecessary. The harpist's music appears to be approximately three feet wide, the pages impossible to manage. If pianists can use page-turners, why can't harpists?

May I suggest an alternate solution? Opera singers manage to memorize five to six hours of music for Tannhauser and other Wagnerian tortures, so it's obviously doable. Would fourteen minutes really be such a strain?

That said, she does look great up there, her dress matching her instrument, and she sounds even better, the notes golden and sparkling. The weak link is the bassoon, which lacks depth of tone and expression. But he still provides a solid backdrop which allows the flute to really shine.

One glitch - and I'm sorry, but this is the ear I was given genetically - she misses a delectable bit of flutter-tonguing right near the end of the piece, a decoration that turns a plain flute line into a blur of ascending wings. Either she chose not to do it, or it's optional (but I've heard it in every other version), or, at the last minute, like the figure-skater deciding not to risk the quadruple-jump, she shied away.

Never mind, it's a live performance, not to mention a piece of music I was sure I would never hear again.


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Bird sex orgy

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Birds do the nasty

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Bird sex: not all it's cracked up to be

It all started with wanting a bird. Wanting a bird sort of came out of the blue, except that it didn’t. Our cat had just died at age 17, leaving a bit of a hole in the family.

“No more cats,” my husband said, and I had to agree with him. From a 22-pound, majestic miniature lynx, Murphy had dwindled to a sad near-skeleton, clinging to us as his major organs slowly shut down. He left puddles of pee everywhere, barely able to make it to the litterbox (which I was tired of: litterboxes STINK, no matter what you do to deodorize them).

I didn’t even think about a bird, or consider having one, until I visited my sister-in-law in Ontario and discovered she had acquired a parrotlet. A cute little pocket parrot, only about four inches long. She held it in her hand and scratched its neck and it laid its tiny avian head down and blinked its filmy little eyes in bliss. OH GOD, it was cute!  It didn’t do much else, and didn’t even make much noise, but I thought it was adorable.

I HAD to have one. “No impulse buys,” Bill begged. “One bird. ONE bird,” he pleaded, probably afraid I’d come home with an Amazon parrot or a whole aviary of shrieking cockatoos. I went away and did nine months of research before deciding what I wanted.

I found a pet store that believed in carefully socializing a bird before bringing it home. I made a down payment on a newly-hatched lovebird that was barely fledged (a disgusting naked pile of skin), and then when he was being weaned, I came into the store for an hour a day, put a towel on my lap and let him crawl around and explore.

By the time I took Jasper home several weeks later, he was “socialized”, meaning he could scream at me for seeds, come out of the cage and chew on me for seeds, or peep at me adorably (for seeds).

At the same time, he began to do something really weird. He’d open his mouth and sort of pump his head  up and down and emit this sickening sound, a sort of gasping noise like birdie asthma. Sometimes he’d actually throw up on me, this awful viscous seed gunk.

I read on a bird site that I was supposed to be flattered. It meant he was trying to mate with me. Birds regurgitate in each other’s mouths as a courtship ritual, with the males being more vigorous than the females.

I didn’t know how to take it, but I was generally satisfied with the cute little devil. Then a few months ago, for no reason that I could figure out, he began to shriek and scream almost non-stop. I mean, he could keep it up for six hours at a clip. This noise was so shrill that it speared through two closed doors and a set of industrial-strength earplugs.

 I tried everything: turning out the lights; covering the cage; varying his diet; changing the cage around (which he hated; birds are creatures of habit), putting a life-sized plastic budgie that chirped electronically in his cage (I couldn’t find a plastic lovebird). Instead the shrieking only escalated.

Then the other day, I put some of his favourite toys on the floor of the cage. I didn’t want to do this before, because the cage floor is nasty at best, even with daily cleaning and changing the paper. I knew those toys would get pooped upon.

What I didn’t know is that they would get raped.

I mean, raped! Straddled and humped, almost every hour of the day that he wasn’t sleeping. He’d shove a toy up against the corner (the half-eggshell that used to belong to a plastic egg-carton toy seemed to be his favourite, as he can brace the other toys up against it for stability) and go at it. And at it. And AT it.

At the same time, a funny, unexpected and very welcome thing happened: he stopped shrieking. My eardrums, assaulted for months, suddenly and gratefully popped out again. But every time I go in his room now (yes, he has his own room, just like a fractious infant), I don’t see him up on his swings or perches.

No, he’s down on the bottom of the cage doing the dirty deed.

All day. Every day.

This bird is maybe six years old now, and they live to fifteen at the most. He’s fifty years old, for Christ’s sake, acting like some horny middle-aged businessman with an expense account. Birds often drop dead for no apparent reason, and maybe he’s just trying to die with a smile on his beak.

He now has a harem of about six toys, mostly cat toys because they’re small and easy to manipulate (and they jingle). He has a smaller plastic budgie that lies miserably on its side, covered in shit. In fact, all the toys are covered in shit, even though I take them out of the cage and scrub them down each day. He is obviously using that half-eggshell as a toilet.

Funnily enough, it’s kind of hard to find any good pictures of birds mating, except maybe roosters ravishing hens. There are a few out-of-focus budgie pictures, a sort of avian Kama Sutra, but we all know what we think about budgies. A dime a dozen, and they squawk and screech all day. Jasper has two of them, for God’s sake, concubines who are slaves to his birdie will. Obviously, he doesn’t care if his girl friends are real or inanimate. But then, isn’t that true of some humans (see my Pardon me, Miss post of Dec. 1/11)?

He acts very strangely when he mounts his girlfriends, aside from the macho wing-displays and scaly little trampling feet : his beak begins to rattle alarmingly, sounding like bird castanets. I can’t find anything about this on the internet. It’s purely instinctive, some sort of reflex.

And to a human, creepy.

I’m glad I didn’t buy a pair of lovebirds, which some people say is necessary to keep them happy (except that they will bond exclusively with each other and won’t want much to do with you ,except for SEEDS). They would have produced several dozen clutches by now, and I wouldn’t know where to put them all. Or else the female just would have expired from exhaustion.

My bird’s a rapist! Good thing those toys are waterproof.

But at least the house is quieter now, save for the castanet-like rattling of a tiny, horny beak.

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Come on, eat that fruitcake!

It's that time again, and I'm wondering WHY it is that no one seems to like fruitcake.

Fruitcake is festive. Fruitcake is friendly.

Fruitcake has such fine and wholesome ingredients.

Nice ingredients like. . . whatever this is.

To make this whole exercise a lot more palatable, so we don't have to bury the annual 25-pound brick under the tree in the back yard, I'm going to introduce you to some of the star players on the fruitcake team.

Let's say hello to. . . Peter Pineapple! Peter once used to be fruit, but it was so long ago he can hardly remember it (nor can we). Some transformative process turned him into a crystalline substance resembling igneous rock.

Peter even comes in festive colours! Now, wouldn't you just love to hang these little suckers on the tree?

Now, let me introduce you to Cornelius Currant. No one eats Cornelius except at this time of year, but in spite of his bullet-like, wrinkled black appearance, he is considered every bit as festive as all that embalmed pineapple. 

The miraculous thing about Cornelius is that only five pounds of currants can produce up to six pounds of grit. This lodges itself permanently between your teeth and sands away all the plaque. Neat, eh?

I don't know who'd ever eat the peels off fruit - it'd be kind of bitter, wouldn't it - but in December, a Christmas miracle transforms all this acidy stuff into a translucent, sticky-sweet and violently-coloured confection, just waiting to be sucked down into the batter.

It's kind of hard to justify Marty Molasses, but hey, he's just one of the gang, and a necessary ingredient to the whole mess, a glue to keep all that former fruit from exploding into the stratosphere. 

And you gotta have this stuff,  lots of it. Start your fruitcake experiment in September, hide it in the basement, then every two weeks or so take it out and saturate it with as much of this stuff as it will take.

I swear to you, the results will be eater-friendly! People will just love it - they won't jam it down into the corner of the freezer in the garage and cover it with Eggo Waffles and frozen hot dogs.

All it takes is a little understanding of the process.

With friendly ingredients like this, drowning under the soupy sludge of bitter molasses and gut-rotting rum, how could you go wrong?

(Like this, maybe?)

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Ride 'em reindeer

Can't find good Christmas gifs no-how: I have a whole file of Mad Men, another of Anthony Perkins (the good kind like a small video), and I think another of Harold Lloyd and silent film and - But no Christmas, except this one. Not too bad however.

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The Muppets: nothing new

Nobody believes me, but this is where the Muppets got started: in commercials. They did two-or-three-second ads
for some kind of coffee, very violent, and these. This is either a prototype for Big Bird or Mr. Snufalopagus. The voice sounds familiar. I remember those La Choy noodles! You could blend them with melted chocolate and miniature marshmallows to make a sort of no-bake drop cookie. I did look for them years later and they weren't there.

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Blue Christmas: necrophilia for the season

This started off as a search for snow globe gifs. They all looked cheesy, and for some reason Elvis kept coming up. So the search was on for Elvis snow globe gifs. That didn't yield a whole lot either, but some of the non-gif/non-snow-globe ones were interesting. Kind of reflects what the season is all about.

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Wake up, it's Christmas!

I do try to get into the season. Not always easy, for there's something in me that resists. It's not just the Charlie Brown feeling that Christmas has become too "commercial" (and this was a sentiment first expressed in 1964!). I feel swept up in something I don't want to be swept up in, at least not all the time.

But I do try. I made shortbread yesterday, and if I must say it myself, it was melt-in-the-mouth heavenly. But full of butter, and not much good for my resolve to lose weight (for I need to lose a lot of weight, again).

I don't know why exactly this ad grabs me, but it does, and I was glad to see it on YouTube. I remember that rambunctious "wake up, it's Christmas" feeling when I was a kid. And yes, a lot of it was about "things".

All these gifts are supposed to be, what? A remnant of the Magi and their gold, frankincense (sp.??) and myrrh? We're getting farther and farther away from such symbolism, unless we happen to be churchgoers (talk about remnants!). Or is it Santa, his insistence on flying over us and landing on each rooftop to give just the right gift to the right child, but ONLY IF THEY'VE BEEN GOOD ALL YEAR??

Talk about a tool for parental manipulation.

So if it isn't about the Christ Child, isn't even about Santa and his explosions of toys in particular, then what IS it about?'

I'm tired of it, kind of. No, not kind of, definitely. We're scaling down gifts now, in fact attempting to do away with gifts for the adults altogether. It's hard, because there's this entrenched custom for them to give to us, and if you don't reciprocate you somehow feel chintzy.

You know the feeling.

I'm trying to start a new tradition, and I've done it twice so far, of making charitable donations in the person's or family's name. Myself, I'd love receiving this, the feeling that the money that might have gone into yet another blender or Body Shop gift set will actually do some good. The Body Shop stuff doesn't even get used, and the blender is likely to be shoved in the very back of the cupboard along with the waffle iron that you used maybe twice.

The kids, well, we're still giving them stuff, but the emphasis is changing, we hope. We're giving them tickets to activities they might enjoy, science lab kits (for Caitlin), things they can DO rather than "play with" (i.e. ignore). I've knitted things, made things for them. I'm giving a ream of paper to Erica so she can build more stately mansions with it (and I wish we had photographed the Parthenon she built with rolled-up paper and tape). They don't need more Barbies or Matchbox cars or train tracks. They've got all that stuff, too much of it.

For all that, I don't feel well today, and it occurs to me I have the same acid stomach I always have in December. I just have to get through it. Not that January will be a sweet time, necessarily, but at least all this pressure will be over.

Pressure? Yes. To go along with it, so you won't look Scrooge-y or Grinch-y. Spend, spend, spend: and not just money, but time, decorating, baking, doing all those things that I guess we should be enjoying more than we actually do.

So I don't know exactly why I like this ad so much. I think it's the bouncy energy of it, the song and the swift half-second montage of shots. Some ad people are genuises at putting it all together. I loathe almost all TV ads, but once in a while one comes along (like the Glade one with the animated cookie reindeer) that delights me.

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ANGRY BIRDS: when turkeys attack!

  Kung Fu Fighting, chicken style

When good turkeys turn bad. . .

Stereophonic suit poop.

At last. . . a happy bird.

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Tiny angels, Christmas angels

Oh my, oh my. Went to my granddaughter Erica's Christmas concert this afternoon - she appeared, grave and serious, in a gorgeous black-and-tartan dress worn several times by the girls in our family (a sort of heirloom now), singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town with graceful gestures that seemed almost Polynesian. She looked shockingly beautiful up there, and grown up.

So afterwards I went for coffee with my son's Mum-in-law, which I haven't for a while and enjoyed immensely. She insisted on giving us a beautiful potted poinsettia-and-white-flowers mix that will probably bloom lavishly in a day or two. Then came home to make chili, which I had planned to do yesterday and just ran out of time.

I don't enjoy cooking, even if I love the result, so I wondered what would make it go down better (besides that fizzy grapefruit drink I am so addicted to now, Dole Sparklers they're called). I thought, hmmm, let's put some Christmas music on! I haven't intentionally listened to a Christmas album yet this year. My hand just gravitated to Roger Whittaker, though my rational self was saying, "Margaret, NOT that sentimental old thing again."


Oh yes.

This was, in fact, a sort of test. I've tried to write about the spiritual meltdown I've experienced over the past several years, the fact that my entire belief system seems to have been blown to bits. Do I still believe in, well - God, or something like God?

Might it be a bit of a test to listen to this song, this song that always made me cry when my children were small?

This song that still made me cry last year? Was I so dried up, so hard-hearted, had I turned my face away from Love and Grace and all those things that used to hold my life together so much that my tears had turned as hard and crystalline as Lot's wife?

Friends, I cried. Did I cry! I bawled. It was wonderful, soul-rocking. I don't know what it is, perhaps just the way he sings it, and the deep truth of this: the only gifts that I could want are you. My darlings.

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Christmas blues: the gaiety of grief

Dylan Thomas was once quoted as saying, “There is no gaiety so gay as the gaiety of grief.”

Somehow I sort of know what that means, though I can’t explain it.

Yesterday I was making gingerbread cookies with the grandkids (having had to throw out the entire first attempt at dough, so stinking horrible from the molasses that we ended up throwing it at the wall), and more or less feeling OK, but it was an effort. I had to pull myself up for it. For the first few days after my mother-in-law’s passing, I was laden with memories, great waves of memory breaking on the sand, so deep that they went back to when I was a girl of eighteen.

I said to someone I am close to, I have no bad memories of her, and she said to me, that’s because you didn’t see her that often. This is the way we “deal with” grief now. A kind of slamming of the door. Put up or shut up, she was 96 and had her life and a peaceful death, so just forget about it and get on with the cookies.

It’s hard.

Hard this time of year, which is hard already, for reasons I can’t even begin to probe.  Of course the child in me loves the sparkle and twinkling lights and angels and good food and having the family around. But I don’t know of a family that is universally loveable.

A family without tensions and trouble.

I feel over-grandma’d these days. It’s not that I don’t love it. I feel stretched thin sometimes, and I’m not even supposed to feel it, let alone acknowledge it. Everything I do seems to disappear into a black hole, leaving no trace.

I suppose my line of work is a factor. People don’t see me as “working”, in spite of writing six novels, 350-some book reviews, thousands of newspaper columns, dozens of published poems (and two anthologies), essays in text books, and serving as a juror in several competitions. It all just kind of vaporizes as it happens, and I know I am seen as “not working”.  In fact, people’s attitude probably mirrors that of a woman I knew (hardly a friend) who said, once my kids were both in school, “Goodness, Margaret, what on earth are you going to do with yourself all day?” (I was writing a novel.)

On the other hand, why should I expect them to understand? Margaret Atwood was once famously quoted as saying, “I can’t be fired because I don’t have a job.” I don’t either, though I have work. I even have paid work, the steady if not too thick income from my beloved alma mater, the Edmonton Journal. I’ve been reviewing more or less steadily since 1984, starting with the Journal and continuing with at least a dozen other publications. Most of these gigs were paid.

So if you’re paid for it, even if only an honorarium (meaning, a chintzy cheque), doesn’t that make you a professional?

YES. But it’s so much more than that.

This post was once another post, and I cut the second half because it was becoming just too bleak. Having a death in the family right at Christmas is hard. Already you’re assaulted by waves of memory that are beyond your control. But these layers run very deep and no doubt stir up my complete estrangement from my family of origin.

Okay, the “Sisters” post was me. No one saw it anyway, or only a few. And as usual, the person who needed to see it didn’t, or wouldn’t have cared even if she did.

So I had a sort of adoptive family when I got married, but didn’t really realize it for years and years. It grew slowly and without my awareness. Alliances have surged and faded, beyond my power to choose. (Do we choose to love? “Gee, I think I’ll love this person now. Stand back.”) There has been a sort of evolution. Now the lynch-pin has been withdrawn by the natural course of things. We will have to regroup. It remains to be seen who the new matriarch will be.


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Coronet Blue: Candy and David and Jon and Frank

This is an odd little clip. I can't find out much about Coronet Blue because there are only fragments on YouTube. I probably never even watched it, but I do remember that catchy theme song. And Frank Converse, pretty dishy, wasn't he? How old would he be now, or is he even alive? These actors, so fresh-faced, so pretentious in putting on those unplaceable hey-man accents, are now either dead, or all shrivelled up with age.

No doubt, like me, they thought youth would go on forever. No doubt, like me, they thought that the '60s had changed things, really changed things forever, and that it would never go back.

Hey, man. We tried.


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CORONET BLUE: no, I didn't dream this!

This is one of those TV shows that I thought I'd made up or dreamed about. Turns out it was on for one season or something. I'll have to dredge up a clip I found with a whole lot of famous people in it, like Candace Bergen, who weren't famous yet. Oh those summers in Chatham - not such a remarkable place, but I look back on it with such sweetness, the choking humidity, the ferocious thunderstorms at dusk, sleeping over at my girl friend's, or sleeping in the pullout bed in the den watching old reruns of Topper and Love That Bob.

Coronet Blue came at the crest of the cool wave of '60s spy shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Secret Agent, and even Get Smart. (I also found T. H. E. Cat, which I was SURE I had dreamed up.) I don't remember much of it except I think there was an English guy in it, some kind of sidekick. And something about going to a concert, and at the intermission having "one of those insipid orange drinks". Why do we remember such useless fragments?

And whatever happened to Frank Converse, Mr. Dishy himself? He was such a long tall glass of intoxicating water. Then he sort of disappeared. T. H. E., whom I didn't remember was Robert Loggia, sort of disappeared too, into character acting, but by then he was a different person altogether.

And why such nostalgia for such an ordinary town? Why do I remember the living room, the drab carpeting and maroon cherries on the heavy beige drapes? We'd walk to Tecumseh Park in the summer and dredge around in what passed for a pool, and be perfectly happy. Elm trees, cicadas buzzing their long lazy hot and dusty song, happiness.

Nostalgia refers to a sort of pain, an ache, like neuralgia. Not sure what the "nost" is, probably the past. I think I just want to get away from the present, start all over again, be a skinny 12-year-old and maybe do it all differently this time.

But I am almost certain I'd just make different mistakes.


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T.H.E. Cat Robert Loggia

I confess I never watched a single episode of T. H. E. Cat. I think I heard my brother refer to it once, so I knew about it. "Oh boy. T. H. E. Cat." His friend Grahame would say, "Choice or what." "Yeah." "T. H. E. Cat." It was so cool, it hurt. When I watch the opening titles, *I* hurt, it's so cool. There was never a time, and will never ever BE a time, like the '60s.

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Kathleen Wilhelmina Gunning: a great lady,and sadly missed

Kathleen Wilhelmina Gunning

GUNNING, Kathleen Wilhelmina (nee Hitching) - Peacefully in her sleep on Thursday, December 1, 2011, surrounded by family. Kathleen was in her 97th year. Beloved wife of George Clifford Gunning, who predeceased her in April 2005. They were married for 63 years. Mother of Bill (wife Margaret), Port Coquitlam, BC; Judith (husband Wayne), Oakville, ON; Ronald (wife Joanne), Kingston, ON; Alan (wife Janet), Caledonia, ON. Lovingly remembered and now sadly missed by her six grandchildren Shannon (Jeff), Jeffrey (Crystal), Christopher (Melanie), Cory (Keri), Kyle and Lauren. Kay was also richly blessed with nine great-grandchildren whose photographs adorned her home at The Village of Wentworth Heights in Hamilton, ON. The family wish to extend heartfelt thanks to the Scotsdale home area caregivers who lovingly attended to her needs throughout her ten year residency. Kay will be fondly remembered by her nieces, nephews and all friends and family who knew her. A private family interment will be held at a future date. If desired, donations made to the Canadian Cancer Society or the Hospital for Sick Children would be appreciated by the family.                                                                            

Published in the Toronto Star on December 3, 2011

I guess we knew it was coming, when my husband's brother called from Ontario to say she was getting weaker, not eating much, not able to rouse herself from bed.

To that point, her appreciation for life was a gift to everyone around her.

In forty years of knowing her, of having the privilege of being her daughter-in-law, I have too many memories to share here. Mostly I remember her kindness, her rather peppery humor, her straightforwardness. As an army nurse in World War II, she never lost the nurse's keen diagnostic eye, and if you didn't feel well she scanned that eye over you and told you what you should do. Like, go to bed, now!

I remember when my daughter was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, back in 1977, and she flew out from Ontario to help me. She'd never been alone on a plane before in her life, and I didn't ask, but she offered, and we could not refuse.

While I nursed a fractious, difficult baby, she did everything else, cooked, cleaned, kept my 18-month-old son amused. I just didn't have anything left for him, but Nana saved the day, and I will never forget it.

She made the best, and the most, of everything she had. She lived through the Great Depression, then dealt with many lean years while raising four kids by somehow stretching the resources, so that no one ever felt "poor".

My husband is the science nerd on the right. Looks like someone out of The Big Bang Theory, doesn't he? But his parents were extremely proud of the fact that he was the first Gunning to go to university (at age 16, ending up with a Masters in biochemistry. Sheldon, are you there?). This doesn't happen by accident.

Note Mum reflected in the background. I don't remember my Dad-in-law cutting up like this! Bill probably took the photo.

Going steady.

This is what Christmas looked like in 1947. Little Billy in Dad's lap is now 65!

My personal favorite. Surreal, misty, full of love. "Billy + Mummy, 5/6 months."

Lovely bride (1945).

Dedicated nurse.

Beautiful soul.

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