Guitar lessons

Caitlin's musical tastes are along the lines of American Idol and Taylor Swift, whereas mine are steeped in classical music (from childhood, whether I wanted it or not) and the folk craze of the mid-'60s. So who knows where this musical experiment will end up. I think she's a little young (7) to be starting, so I hope Mom doesn't Craigslist the guitar due to lack of storage space.

February, you may be little, but you're small!

"February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed."

Tom Robbins basically had it right, for in spite of its weeny meanness, this month can seem endless. But even March is a half-assed month, not really knowing what season it belongs to; and April is like an old bicycle seat: "just enough spring in it to give you a pain in the ass". (This one is from my father!).

But there are compensations, if fleeting ones. Yesterday my four grandchildren went bounding out into a rare late-February snowfall (rare because we basically live in a rain forest) and created like mad: snowmen, snow forts, snow girls, castles, angels, freeform sculptures, Easter eggs, hockey pucks. And their Grandma and Grandpa similarly frolicked, in up to their knees.

But the difference is, Monday brings preschool and kindergarten, which they like a lot, and for me. . . just Monday.

We've nearly broken February's back. That should be good news for me, and I guess it is. But it's the same old blues. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Like. . .to shut up?

It could be that I just don't know how to "work" my contacts. Do I seem too hungry? Not hungry enough? Whenever this particular rule book was passed out, I either didn't get one, or lost my copy somewhere.

It was noteworthy to me that Kevin Brownlow, with whom I recently/briefly exchanged emails, appeared on the Oscars last night, having received an honorary award for a lifetime of devotion to the then-nearly-lost cause of silent film. It was cool to see.

What wasn't so cool is that the four men receiving honorary Oscars for their lifelong contribution to the movies weren't actually presented with their statues, just trotted out (three of them, anyway) for a brief moment of applause, then whisked away. It was all done so briskly that it caused a bit of confusion.

Soooooooo. . . it's the last day of this interminable month, the snowmen are melting, the Oscar analyses are fulminating away, the best-and-worst-dressed lists dissected. Soon it'll all go away, as everything always goes away.

And I'll be left facing the glowing screen, and wondering what is next.

A living dyoll

Rah, old dolly.

Kathy from Consort

I confess I am a recovering k. d. lang addict. Recovering, because I'm starting to think she's falling into her own cliches: the little groan at the beginning of the phrase; the breathless/breathy passages, the upswoop like a coyote or a cowboy yell, and (less frequently) the half-yodel. When she sang Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver (a very big deal for us: we live there!), she was on a big pedestal and dressed in a baggy men's suit. My husband said, "She looks like Wayne Newton."

It was true. She looks sort of puffy, and she doesn't smile much. I never expected her to stay androgynously waiflike (if there is such a thing), boyish with knife-trimmed nails, and cheekbones to die for. But I never pictured her getting this bulky, stolid like a middle-aged businessman at a Shriner's convention, getting lost in her (always-ugly) clothes. Long ago she was in a Canadian-made movie called Salmonberries in which she appeared, for a split-second, in the nude, and everyone revelled in the fact that she looked like a woman. Well, she IS, folks, no matter how gay or lesbian or woman-loving she may be. The physiological underpinnings are the same.

So, how does this affect my feelings for her? I don't know when I started to get turned off. Nothing ever matched her breakout Ingenue album, which I listened to about a billion times. Still Thrives This Love was my fave (and I'll try to find it), though there were no duds in it at all.

She's not quite phoning it in now, but the lang cliches are wearing a deeper and deeper groove, so that something has fallen down in and gotten lost. I think. She still has that legendary flexible voice, but it doesn't seem to speak to me any more. She doesn't produce the overtones that make a voice jump alive, and God, that swooooooping up to every note. Once in a while, attack it head-on, will you?

Nevertheless, this one is pretty good.

Lotte Lenya: We've lost our good old Mama

The Doors - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

So. This Alabama song has nothing to do with Alabama, surprisingly, but is the best-known ditty from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's dark vision of social corruption, Mahagonny. It's not exactly the kind of tune you can tap yer toe to.

When I found out the Doors had done it, I nearly fell over. The Lotte Lenya version isn't exactly what I remember either, but it's close. See, when I was a kid, I was a misfit, an outcast, a square peg (as in another brilliant song by The Doors, "When you're Strange"). I was just odd. But my sister, thirteen years older than me, was odder.

She was always going off to Munich as an exchange student, spoke fluent German (why? No one in our connection was even remotely German or Teutonic or anything), and wrote her Master's thesis in German on this strange, incomprehensible Mahagonny. It was plenty weird, but no weirder than the brick-and-board bookcases in the den that groaned under the weight of Schiller, Goethe and Freud.

In those days, everybody who was anybody had a hi-fi, and you played your hi-fi extremely loud. The louder it was, the more the bass rattled your teeth, the better your hi-fi was. When I brought friends home from school, the Moon of Alabama song would be on the hi-fi, and I'd have to try to explain.

But I didn't understand it myself. There was a lot I didn't understand, because nobody explained it to me. So I concluded that everyone else in the world already understood these things, and I didn't because I was feeble-minded and intellectually inferior (even though I was in a special advanced educational stream, for which I received no family praise at all). As a result, in order to compensate, I became very entertaining.

Things got even more confusing when my sister's drunken married friends groped me at adult parties, at which my glass of gin was always kept topped up. I was fifteen years old and they were something like thirty and it was supposed to be all right. My parents were sure it was all right: my older siblings were looking after me! They were doing me a favor, giving me a social life which I could never have on my own, and I was supposed to be grateful. It nearly destroyed me, but I figured I didn't understand that, either, and kept silent. Just as well, because if they didn't listen to me then, they sure don't want to listen to me now.

Oh, don't ask why. Oh, don't ask why.

Words from the master

In making inquries about my Harold Lloyd novel (The Glass Character), I scraped up my nerve and sent an email to Kevin Brownlow, who is without a doubt the world's foremost authority on silent film. Not only that: he knew Harold Lloyd personally.

I was quite taken aback that he responded so quickly, and with such detailed commentary, which I can't help but share here.


Dear Margaret Gunning

I am fascinated that you are so keen on Harold Lloyd. Me too, but it’s strange how people repeat the old cliches about his being ‘mechanical’ You will love John Bengtson’s book – it tells you so much about the places in which he worked.
You are a good writer, and it was a pleasure to read your extract. I would take issue with you on one subject – did they use obscenity when they swore in those days? T E Lawrence, in his account of barrack room life THE MINT, had his book banned because he repeated the swear words, which he was finally compelled to reprint like this; ---
But in talking to scores of silent film veterans, I heard plenty of swearing, but it was all profanity – ‘Jesus Christ’ – or ‘God almighty’ - presumably because of the strong Irish Catholic tradition in Hollywood.. When they got worked up it was ‘Son of a bitch’ I notice you use both for Hal Roach – ‘Jesus, Harold! Do you want to be fucking killed?’ (Roach’s family was from Cork, by the way.) You may be right, but I would be interested to know if you have any evidence.
I noticed, when I researched a script about silent era Hollywood (never made) how many words they used that have fallen out of fashion. ‘Everything’s jake!’ ‘Twenty-three skidoo’
By the way, motion picture makeup was yellow, not white. (The cameramen hated white )
As for the money earned by the top comics, Chaplin made three comedies to Lloyd’s eleven in the 1920s, but Chaplin’s still made more money overall.
Did you know there was a film magazine publisher and producer called Wid Gunning? Are you any relation?
I have written a book about making THE THIRD GENIUS, but as the rights for the documentary have lapsed, it won’t be possible to bring the programme out on DVD with the book as I did with the Chaplin and as I planned with the Keaton book. What a shame,
I wish you the best of luck with the book.
Warmest wishes
Kevin Brownlow

Ryan's Fifth

You wouldn't believe how long it takes (and how much experimental printing it requires) to make one of these little "Grandmark" cards ("Made with Love"). I got into it a couple of years ago, and now do it four times a year. Ryan is obsessed with cars. That's all you need to know!

Found at the back of the file drawer (and scanned and enlarged and and - READ IT!!)

Haunted, haunted (and haunted: the trifecta)

I want it to stop, but it won't. Today I found out about the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Best in Show: a Scottish deerhound named Hickory. But that wasn't the thing that grabbed me. It was the owner's name.

Angela Lloyd.

This news came almost immediately after I watched a story on Dateline NBC about a young woman brutally murdered by a military hero gone mad. But it was her name that grabbed me:

(From the news story)

Hundreds of people filled a Belleville, Ont., funeral home Saturday afternoon as the community came together to honour Jessica Lloyd, the 27-year-old woman whose body was found on a rural road on Monday.
Before the service began, several members of the Canadian Forces entered the funeral home in uniform and wearing black armbands.
Small groups of people clustered outside the funeral home during the service, with one group of young women carrying a sign that said: "Rest in peace sweet angel."
Col. Russell Williams is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, Ont.
On Friday, long lines of people had waited patiently outside the funeral home to attend the visitation for Lloyd, one of the alleged victims of Col. Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton.
Lloyd's cousin and brother both spoke at the service Saturday, and her brother paused to thank local law enforcement officials for their work on the case.

(P.S.: Less than half an hour after I posted this, I was washing dishes with the TV on in the background. A newsmagazine show I almost never watch called W5 came on, and the host announced himself: "Hi, I'm Lloyd Robertson."

Three? Well, yesterday there were two. Only.

Tell me there are no coincidences.)

Vincent, you're getting paint all over everything!

How many times have I seen this thing? Like Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, it just seems to come around.

Except that this one grabs me, every time.

Kirk Douglas excels himself, does better than he knows how, in portraying the awful and sublime life of Vincent Van Gogh. We all know Van Gogh's paintings from the coffee mugs and post cards and tea towels and various fripperies that bear his images. We have all heard reports of the multimillion dollars even his smallest canvases now command.

I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it. I had recorded it on my PVR a few days or weeks earlier and it was sitting there. It was on TCM, so I knew it wouldn't be carved up. I thought, after a shitty week, oh what the hell.

My husband has been away all week. Normally I use this sabbatical as a time for reflection, quiet, and going out to restaurants for one meal at 3 pm. This week was just - oh I don't know, it bored the piss out of me. Things went around and around in circles and some days I didn't even get out due to the wretched house-shaking monsoon outside.

I made fudge and I ate too much of really bad things, like back ribs and fries. I just felt discontent, as if I didn't fit my skin. THEN, early yesterday morning, the power went out, and I felt helpless. Not only was it cold and dark, but my lovebird began to shiver, and I realized with a shock that he wasn't going to survive dramatically dipping temperatures.

I panicked. I moved the cage all over the house. Is this warmer? No. It's already 63 F and dropping (when his usual room temperature is 72). I dithered around. I covered the cage with a tablecloth, wondering if he could breathe. He clung to the pointy roof of his palatial cage, silent and not moving.

Then I thought: what's the warmest room in the house? Our bedroom! During our rare Vancouver heat waves, it's absolutely awful, and sometimes I have to sleep downstairs. So I lugged his huge cage upstairs and gained purchase of 3 degrees, but it was not enough.

My mind spun around and around. Did we have any source of heat left? Should I stick him in my pocket or something? Then I thought: of course! Hot water. But my idea was not quite on-target.

I put a bowl of hot water on the floor of his cage, covered with a sieve so the dumb bird wouldn't try to bathe in it and scald himself. It bought me a couple more degrees. But it still wasn't enough.

Depressed and isolated, not wanting to go out because I had to look after this incubator baby, I phoned my daughter-in-law to ask if she had power. She did. She also had, right to hand, a number to call for info on power outages.

"But it'll take me hours. They'll put me on hold."

"No they won't. Try it."

They didn't. I got the information I needed in 30 seconds. The power would be on no later than 4:00 (and it was 1:00: would we squeak through?) She also suggested, instead of bowls of water that got cold in 2 minutes, to fill the bathtub with a few inches of hot water and wheel the cage into the bathroom and shut the door.

Within 15 minutes, I had set up the ideal sauna, and Jasper was thawing out, singing and chirping and ringing his numerous bells and acting like a bird again.

Anyway, all this shit ended at 2 pm, after 6 hours of blackout. It could've gone all night, in which case my bird would have died of hypothermia.

So, completely unrelated to this, or not, I was exhausted by the evening, lonely, sugar-logged, and just wanting any old thing to distract me. Maybe I shouldn't have picked Lust for Life.

Vincente Minnelli strove to make this movie as faithful to Van Gogh's paintings and life as possible. He dragged trees in to fill holes where they had been cut down. He put up a false front for the yellow house Van Gogh lived in with Gaugin (a bravura performance by Anthony Quinn, who likes his women "fat and vicious and not too bright"). Stories circulated about old women from remote places in Provence who gasped on seeing Douglas in makeup and exclained, "He has returned!"

A companion movie, a "making of" was shown after the main feature, and in it Douglas spoke fluent French to one of these elderly keepers-of-the-memory (who are all gone now). Why did it surprise me to see Douglas speak fluent French? He was the Ragman's Son (I read his auto-bio years ago, and he came up from such dire poverty that the family sometimes had nothing to eat). I associate him with powerhouse roles, Spartacus and the like,and that exaggerated growling voice beloved of impressionists (not the painters!) like Frank Gorshin.

I don't know what happened here. Some kind of transubstantiation. He - became. He felt this man. He slipped into his skin, his uneasy incendiary brain. The thing is, Van Gogh painted innumerable self-portraits, and all of them had something of Kirk Douglas in them. In some cases he could have been the model.

I don't know what my point is here, and I guess I don't have one. Life is a mess, and right now I'm a mess, full of sugar, lonely, completely stalled and discouraged in my work, yet still blown away by a couple of things.

The sun is shining right now. Shining on the high cedar boughs that garland my upstairs office view. The light is dappled and various, a Gerard Manley Hopkins light.

The sun is out. I never thought I'd see it again.

I don't know why we keep on. Sometimes it's wretched. Ask any genius. We have a spark of life in us, like a candle inside a blubberous whale. Van Gogh had to paint quickly because he knew he didn't have much time. "You paint too fast!" Gaugain roared at him. "You look too fast!" he growled back.

I'm not even going to try to tie all this together because life, as it is, isn't tied together very well. It's sloppy and hard to navigate. For me, anyway. It's better and worse. Some suffer more than others.

But I'm glad my little bird made it back into the light.

A three-Lloyd day

I don't know how someone
can love across the ages
or even haunt

coz I guess in strict terms
you really are a ghost
or maybe just a friendly spirit
who's decided to come around for a while

When you came into my life,
I hardly knew
you'd be everywhere I looked:
on street signs
in magazines
on the radio
and especially on TV

like last night
with that stupid Stephen King movie
about the Pet Semetary
when the guy turned out to be named (you guessed it!)
Lloyd


and like most days, there were others too
that popped out at me from my readings
(even when I wasn't looking
but, stranger yet, even when I was)
I tried to mind my own business
but my heart had been stolen
Harold, listen
send me a signal flare:
are you really there?

I feel you
I know it's weird
I sense you like heat in the room
and if I had those night-vision glasses
I think I could even see you

because now you live fully
in that world you half-inhabited when you were here:
incandescent
surreal
full of shadow
and shine

it's said the stars
from the early screen
carried a spotlight around inside them
but the way you faced fame was different
you were just doing your job

doggedly
sometimes with grim obsession
creating someone new
who stood out from all the grotesques
just an ordinary
jaunty fellow
with a bruised heart
and unexpected courage
an ordinary soul
that people couldn't get enough of
because they saw him in the mirror

Harold, I
I don't know where to start
I tried to write about you
I tried to write a story, put you in a story
and now I don't know where it'll end
Maybe nowhere
the fate of my (usual) work

This howls within me
for I wish sometimes
I had not had this inspiration
if my story goes nowhere.

It needs to be
for if pictures can be silent,
words cannot be

and I can only make story
in words.

Weather it's funny or not. . .

JOAN BAEZ "The Greenwood Side"

Bear with me, here. There's method in my madness.

Today I got writing about Songcatcher, a haunting movie about a woman professor's attempts to collect and capture folk music from the Appalachians in the early 20th century. That got me going, of course, on folk music.

I thought of one that my sister used to do (my sister, my sister), a harsh, dissonant thing called Down by the Greenwood Side (i-o). This was the version Ian and Sylvia made popular, sung in fifths I think, harsh and shivery. But today I found another version that shone with wonder and grief, sung by Joan Baez. The essential story is the same, though much more drawn-out. The tune, however, couldn't be more different, and it reminded me of something else.

I puzzled over this. Then I remembered. In the early '60s there was a song by Ewan MacColl called The First Time Ever I Saw your Face, and Gordon Lightfoot recorded a memorable version of it. It's hard to recognize here because the Roberta Flack version that came out a few years later kind of drowned it. Hers was drawled and drawn-out, smokily sexual and completely different from this more compact, folky (but no less heartfelt) version.

But the resemblance between the two, between Lightfoot's version and Baez's Greenwood, was what made my skin prickle. I wonder if MacColl even thought about it as he wrote his paean to erotic love. But the melody, those magic intervals that make up a tune, are so much the same, so full of mystery and ache.

So, listen to these two, and you tell me: do they sound the same?

GORDON LIGHTFOOT ~ The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face ~

Frail wildwood flower

Certain things, movies, books, people, lovers, are somehow relegated to the back of your mind. Or perhaps they sneak back there, or roll like nuts on a tilted surface. . . or stones, or. . .

A long time ago, it seems, I saw a movie that totally enchanted me. But for some reason, very little of it stuck with me except the bare subject matter: a musicologist tramping around the backwoods of Appalachia in the early 20th century, lugging a Gramophone to record the ancient ballads passed down since time immemorial. This much I remembered. But, shockingly, the rest was lost. No title, no characters, no plot, no year: just that mountain music, that sere and strident singing that a critic once said "would make thin glass rattle".

It would pop into my head, then sort of disappear again. I'd say to myself, I'll try to look it up on Google. Then I'd forget. Then, today, for some reason, I pounced. I had no idea where to start, so I entered search terms like "movie with Appalachian folk music on gramophone" and things like that. I knew that if the title did pop up, I would recognize it immediately.

It didn't take too long (God bless the internet!) until the title did pop up: Songcatcher, a 2000 film about a woman professor collecting folk music while living in her sister's backwoods school.

I haven't seen it yet, have happily ordered it from Amazon and hope I'll enjoy it twice. We'll see. Movies have a way of changing, over the years.

Peeping into it on YouTube, I see a lesbian relationship I had forgotten all about. I was kind of shaken by the harshness of the singing, with a sharp yodelly end to each line. These felt like authentic singers to me, so they must still be around. Yes, we have heard such strident sounds in the voices of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and June Carter Cash, but somewhat watered down. Most of these mountain songs, often called Child Ballads for some reason (let me look that up!), were composed by Henry VIII or somebody like that: I mean, somebody had to write them, didn't they? They didn't come out of the thin air. But they have that feeling of always having been there.

This started a flood in my mind: memories of the folk boom of the early '60s, when my older brothers came home from university toting guitars. They sang such weird old numbers as Cape Breton Mines, Geordie, Down by the Greenwood Side (ee-oh), In the Hills of Shiloh, Corn Whisky ("you killed all my kinfolk and sent them to hell"), and a truly awful number my sister sang called Poor Old Horse, Poor Old Mare ("the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). She stuck to really morbid, hopeless things ("Wide and deep my grave shall be/With the wild-goose grasses growing over me") and seemed to relish them, singing them in an trained operatic soprano while plucking her guitar, which she held between her knees.

My brother Arthur, the one who died so young, was the best guitarist and the best at interpreting Cohen and Dylan. Especially Dylan, who could write songs that seemed like they were written generations ago: The Hour the Ship Comes In being my favorite.

What's the point of all this? There is no point. Music falls on the air, disappears. For millennia, none of it was recorded anywhere. An echo from some holler was the closest anyone came. Now we have it all, and most of it is lousy. It all sounds like that quasi-soul stuff made up of melismatic riffs and doorknob-rattling high notes rather than melody. Sucks.

Just let me hear some-more-that gram-o-phone music. . .

Songcatcher: at last I've found you!

80 years young(er)

These aren't representative of the whole clan, I'm afraid, but they did turn out nice. The occasion was my daughter-in-law's stepfather's 80th birthday (not as complicated as it sounds!). The pics of little Lauren came out the best. She's a gifted photographer at age three, and took that great shot of the other grandpa (in the grey shirt), Papa Gunning!
(P. S. The birthday boy, Aime Therrien, isn't really a Shriner. He just looks that way.)

I don't understand this at all: Harold Lloyd synchronicity

When I started this blog some months ago, I had a sort-of theme in mind.

I wanted it to be basically an ad for my fiction, so maybe, just maybe, somebody-out-there might see it and take some sort of an interest.

I mean, somebody who might be able to help.

This didn't happen. Instead, I became more close-mouthed than ever about the subject of my latest (unpublished) novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd.

You know: that Harold Lloyd. The ordinary fellow, looking a little geeky in his hornrimmed glasses, who ended up doing daredevil stunts such as hanging off the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up.

I can't get into the complex, often paradoxical life of Lloyd right now. Instead, I want to write about some (many!) examples of synchronicity I've experienced since I began to research and write about this man a couple of years ago.

Synchronicity being, as I understand it, coincidences that don't seem like coincidences because of their existential/emotional significance. Or, in this case, sheer numbers.

It started small. I'd see the name Lloyd on a street sign, on the side of a truck or train, on a realtor's sign, in movie credits, in novels, in magazine pieces, in - well, it could be anywhere.

This escalated over time. It became routine to get at least one Lloyd-sighting somewhere, every day. I mean, every day. Sometimes, there were two or three.

"Oh, you're just noticing it because that's what you're writing about," my friend claimed. Ahhhh, maybe. But when I watched an odd little British comedy called The Wrong Box, I counted, not one, not two, not three. . .

There were five references to the name Lloyd, in the credits (2), in the cast (2), and even in a list, the Tontine, which was the pivotal subject of the movie. When people got bumped off, their name was crossed off the list. One of those names was Lloyd.

Would it surprise you if I said I am still getting this, nearly two years later? The name Lloyd jumps out at me from a newspaper article (but never when I am looking for it!), a doctor's sign, a DOG'S name (yes, a dog!), or just about anywhere else. And in Googling "Lloyd synchronicity", I had to give up after only a few examples.

One blogger kept encountering the name Frank Lloyd Wright, over and over and over again. A Kathrine Lloyd had a display of art prints called Synchronicity. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a psychiatrist, contributed to a paper on synchronicity, a subject both acknowledged and discredited in the psychiatric realm. (Nobody wants to look that crazy, so everyone thinks they're the only one.) And so on, and on, and on, probably into the hundreds, if not the thousands.

Maybe I should tell you about the gold beads, or maybe I shouldn't, because I can't guarantee I didn't misinterpret this. Along with being a serious painter, dog breeder, amateur scientist, photographer, and Imperial Potentate of the Shriners, Harold Lloyd was a master magician, adept at sleight-of-hand (and this in spite of the fact that he lost the thumb, index finger and half the palm of his right hand in an accident early in his career). He made things appear. He made things disappear, then appear again. The coin behind your ear, or -

OK. Things started to disappear, but only in a certain spot in the house. It was in the centre of the bedroom upstairs. Watches went away. Rings. Gold pens. It was weird.

Then came the gold beads. Or, rather, the one. I have a necklace with four tiny charms, each representing one grandchild. I had these mounted on a gold hoop earring, and for some reason I wanted to unfasten it, perhaps to change the order of the charms.

The four were separated by small gold beads.

I unfastened the hoop, and, ta-poinggggg. One of the gold beads shot across the room and disappeared.

I was plenty miffed. I crawled all over the bedroom floor on my hands and knees. No gold bead. Vacuumed and vacuumed, then searched the gritty, fuzzy contents. No gold bead.

It maddened me. I looked for another gold bead, and could not find one just like it.

So I sort of gave up. Months went by. Maybe a year. I was walking around in my bare feet in the opposite side of the bedroom from the ta-poinggggg, then felt something sticking on the sole of my foot.

"Aha!" I cried. "Lloyd, you've done it again!"

I put the gold bead into a tiny drawer in my jewellery box.

More time went by, maybe months. I was walking barefoot in another part of the bedroom. I felt something stuck to the bottom of my foot.

Oh no.

Maybe, somehow, had the gold bead jumped out of the drawer? Or what? I knew I didn't have another one. I had already given up and replaced all the beads with shitty-looking ones, and glued the hoop shut. No more ta-poingggggs for me.

So I put the bead in the drawer with the other one. But you're not going to believe what happened after that.

I now have three perfect gold beads in the drawer. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the rather odd, not-terribly-common name Lloyd keeps popping up every day, sometimes two or three different times in different contexts?

What does it all mean? Lloyd always looks to me as if it spells something backwards. It almost spells "dolly".

It maddens me, because right now I have no prospects at all. I think The Glass Character is the best thing I've ever written, and at the moment it looks like it will die on the vine because agents and publishers won't even read my covering letter before firing it back at me with a (quite literal) rubber-stamped rejection that makes form letters look respectful.

Harold, either lay off, or help me here! I have enjoyed your presence immensely, but I can't believe it has no other purpose than to provide an odd but enjoyable experience, the kind you wouldn't want to relate at a psychiatric conference.

After all. . . they might think you're crazy.

Nephrologist: say it three times, backwards

The surprising thing about being, so help me, 57 years old (as of yesterday: happy birthday to me!), is that your insides age just like your outsides. Or maybe a bit more.

You can't see in there, and if you're not having any obvious problems, you can (wrongly) conclude that everything is chugging away normally.

I seemed to be chugging away normally, except that my doctor (not the one I complained about a few posts ago) noticed an elevation in something called creatinine. Oh dear. Creatinine isn't a good thing if it's elevated. It was, in fact, elevated just a tiny bit, but this particular doctor, being a specialist and a nitpicker, decided to refer me to another specialist who turned out to be an even bigger nitpicker.

This was Dr. Schachter, the nephrologist.

Nowadays, instead of doctoring the whole person, most docs choose one part of the body and study it furiously. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

The advantage is, these guys really know their stuff. Though I didn't know Dr. Schachter and didn't at all know what to expect, I was amazed at how thorough the exam was: far more thorough than the cursory open-the-mouth-and-look-at-the-horse's-teeth thing I have come to expect once a year from my family doctor.

The not-so-good thing is that, in focusing on only one body part, you can forget about all the rest, or not put it in the context of the whole person.

This guy, the nephrologist, had done a dizzying battery of tests on my blood and urine, stuff I'd never even heard of, but that didn't matter because he knew what it was. And he knew all the right questions to ask. He asked a lot of them. This might have got my back up, since some of it was pretty personal (I'm kind of attached to my kidneys), but for some reason it didn't.

Maybe it was bedside manner, a kind of professional concern that is missing from most medical care these days. It's as if doctors are afraid their patients will get attached to them or, even worse, trust them. This is why I often have that shoo'ed-out feeling with certain of my doctors. When you're feeling anxious about something and have it brushed off as hypochondria or sheer foolishness, it hurts.

When you hear horror stories of blatant misdiagnosis or doctors who overlook serious disease completely, it makes your hair stand on end.

This guy, however, well, for some reason I felt completely comfortable, and who knows why. For one thing, he was very (very very very) young. I swear these guys get younger every year. It could be that med schools are finally telling these guys and dolls to please, please consider the whole person while you're focusing so fiercely on those kidney-shaped organs on either side of the torso.

I noticed several other things about my visit. One was that the office, almost brand new, had been built so close to the exit of the Skytrain station that I blew right past it and couldn't find it. The hidden message seemed to be: don't rely on your cars so much, folks, it ain't healthy. Or maybe the property was cheaper, I don't know

Another thing: the waiting room was full, and the average age of the patients must have ranged from 85 - 90. Most of them looked in rough shape, as if they spent most of their time in waiting rooms. One very elderly woman had one of those oxygen thingies on a pole, and she had to wheel it around with her.

I was the blushing young flower of the group at 57. It was strange. Yet, in spite of how ill everyone looked, there was lots of joking and laughing going on, mostly about the indignities of the procedures. I saw this as a form of valour, of not just enduring serious illness but finding a way to transcend it.

After poking, prodding, listening to this and that, and tapping me all over, Dr. Schacter talked to me about my kidneys. They were in pretty good shape at this point, but pretty good didn't mean perfect. I was surprised to learn my blood pressure is somewhat elevated. Ye gods! My body is ageing. So what's happening to this piece of meat inside my skull?

Looks like I will be returning to this oddly-located office at intervals, but I don't mind. Dr. S. is a real sweetheart, the kind of person who makes older women proudly exclaim, "My son, the doctor!".

And the place has one other advantage. It makes me feel so young.

And a few more

Couldn't resist a few more comparisons of Cass Ole with the kind of Arabian I see on web sites today. Whew. Though he does have a tapered muzzle, the head is more substantial, not so "dished", and the neck well set on the body, not abnormally curved.

Obviously, like vain actors, these horses have a "good side"!

A horse is a horse is a. . .?

I don't know how many times I've seen this movie, but it always knocks me out. Almost brings me to tears with its beauty.

It's simple: a boy and a horse on an isolated beach, all wildness and sand and blistering sun. And a story, without words, of incredible bonding. The kid, Kelly Reno, was wonderful in this movie and looked as if he did much of his own riding. The horse, however, was the real star: a "superhorse" by the name of Cass Ole.

This horse, more of a dark chestnut than a true black stallion, could really act! He wheeled, and snorted, and raged on command, and burst forward with spurts of headreeling speed. He followed the boy around with the curiosity of a dog, his shining flanks reflecting the sun like black silk. He stepped and turned as delicately as a dancer. This was a horse among horses, and I don't remember ever seeing one more magnificent, not just because of his classic Arabian conformation but the way he moved, which was somehow mysteriously spiritual.

OK THEN: I have a beef! Why is it that when I see pics of Arabians now, some 30 years later, they look so weird? Something has happened to their heads, for sure, and the necks. . . long, skinny, high-crested, they're nothing like Cass Ole's powerful, almost Morgan-like neck. These are toy horses that look like bizarre china figurines, or, worse, My Little Pony.

This is what happens when breeders get carried away. You end up with a ridiculous-looking thing (with no acting ability either). I don't know what happens to temperament with this much inbreeding, but it can't be good.

I think these creech-ers must be bred specifically for the show ring, so that they can be draped in long fringey things while the owner tries to look like one-a-dem Arab guys. It's ridiculous.

I didn't have one of them, of course, but when I was a girl we all thought the Arabian (we called then Arabs then) was some kind of ultimate dream horse. I read King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry, a fictionalized story of the Godolphin Arabian, one of the main foundation sires of the racing Thoroughbred. Arabians were fiery yet gentle ("My beautiful! My beautiful! that standest meekly by," etc., etc.), not too tall so you could leap on to his back without stirrups, and all that girl-dreaming jazz. We didn't know that Arabs or Arabians or whatever they were farted and pooped and consumed prodigious amounts of food and had things go wrong with their feet and threw you off if they didn't like you. But they sure didn't look like this.

Myth has it that the Arabian should have a muzzle tiny enough to drink from a teacup. Nowadays it's more like a thimble. I feel a little sorry for these beasts, with their tubular noses and enormous round nostrils. They look weird.

I'm sorry, but they do. Come back, Cass Ole. We need you.

OK, I'll get off this topic now

No, this ain't the Playboy mansion (or a bath house somewhere in deepest Arkansas): it's Ted Haggard and his hapless family having a nice hot soak. Don't know where he got the funds for his own hot tub, given his supposedly impoverished state.

I found this quote on a site about Haggard. I hereby respectfully share it with you, because frankly it made my hair stand on end. This is after his wife spoke passionately to a crowd of still-loyal followers.

"I was actually looking forward to hearing from him too, but he turned out to be a total train wreck. Still very bitter and angry at his old church. Maybe he’s a little justified there, but then he tried to crack a joke. Jets were flying over the arena we were in so he made this brilliant crack: “I hope those aren’t angry Muslims coming to fly those planes into this building.” No exaggeration, that’s a direct quote.
He followed that up with this great pearl of wisdom. When they asked him what advice he’d give a pastor struggling with sin, he said: “I would tell them to find a licensed therapist…..because they are legally bound by law to keep your secrets, that way if you ever run for governor or become famous they can’t use it against you and blackmail you.”

No mention of God or faith or prayer anywhere. But Haggard doesn't know how to spell the word: it always comes out "prey".