An almost normal life

A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through old magazines full of celebrity diets and recipes for lavish desserts, uninterested.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”

Into the throne room. The palace of no return. Or something like that. Since her bipolar diagnosis (and why is everyone suddenly bipolar? Wasn’t it multiple personality disorder a few years ago?), everything has been turned upside-down.

She is on five different medications, two of them to deal with side effects from the other three. These are (supposedly) working in tandem at relatively low levels which are (supposedly) easier on body and brain. Or at least that’s the theory, until the next one comes along.

“Sandra.”

“Dr. Turnstile.” (She has never quite gotten used to that name, which made her guffaw the first time she heard it.)

“So how are we doing these days.”

Not a question, but a statement, always in the plural.

“Oh, we’re. .  . just fine. But to tell you the truth, doctor, it could be better.”

“Feeling a touch of depression lately?” (He picks up his clipboard and begins to make notes.

“A touch. It’s been. . .I don’t know. Remember I told you about my brother?”

”The one who got married last year.”

“No, the other one. I mean. . .”

“Refresh my memory.”

“The one I’ve been talking about for the past five sessions.”

“I detect a note of irritability.” He makes another note.

“Yes, a note. He’s in jail now. Embezzlement. The guy is just too clever for his own good. He’s appealing, of course. I don’t mean that kind of appealing.”

“Explain.”

“Never mind, it’s just a lame joke.”

“So apart from your brother going to jail. . . “

“Oh, everything’s just hunky-dory.”

“I detect a note of sarcasm.”

“That’s because I’m lying. Everything isn’t hunky-dory. You remember my boy friend, Robert –“

“The accountant."

“Lawyer. We broke up. It was. . . I don’t know, pretty bad.”

“Are you taking your medication?

She blinks. “I wouldn’t dream of going off it.”

“Would you like me to raise the doseage on the Seroquel?”

"No.”

“The Lamotrigine?”

“No.”

“The lithium?”

“No.”

“Then let’s discuss non-medication-oriented strategies for managing the mild depression you seem to be experiencing right now.”

“Strategies.”

“Yes. You remember what I told you in our previous sessions. The principles of cognitive therapy indicate that feelings arise from thoughts. If thoughts are excessively negative, emotions will soon follow suit.”

“I always had a problem with that one.”

“Yes, I realize there has been some resistance to treatment. This must be overcome if you are to become truly well.”

“Can I be truly well if I’m bipolar?”

“Not in the usual sense. But in a relative sense, as opposed to experiencing severe episodes, then it’s possible for someone with bipolar disorder to live an almost normal life."

“Almost normal. I see. So nut cases can only get so much better before they hit a wall.”

"Sandra, that is a completely irresponsible statement.”

“But I’m just sayin’. There’s only so far a bipolar can go. The chain is pretty short.”

“That’s why it is so imperative for you to adhere strictly to the principles of cognitive therapy.”

“You see, there’s where I can’t follow you. I find it hard to believe that every emotion is just an offshoot of a thought, and that every thought can be controlled.”

“Maybe not every thought. But people have more control than they think.”

“Do they now. Then I wonder why we even need medication.”

“Sandra, you know why. You have inherited a chemical imbalance of the brain which tends to trigger extreme mood swings, which in turn skews your thoughts toward the negative.”

“But the thoughts lead to the mood swings, don't they? I'm confused."

“There is no need to twist my words around."

“OK then, cognitive therapy. That means I’m supposed to reframe negative events – “

"Now you’re on the right track.”

“. . . Reframe negative events so that they become positive. Let’s see. So breaking up with Robert was really a good thing.”

“Yes, yes – continue – “

“No matter how much I loved him, I – I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

“How about this for an alternate hypothesis. There is a possibility that this breakup will free you to explore other possibilities. You’re young. There are other fish in the sea.”

“Other fish.”

“Maybe even better fish. Have you thought of that? And how about your brother? Can we shed a more positive light on his situation, which is, after all, self-created?"

“Oh, maybe he’ll turn his life around in jail. Have a religious conversion, write a book, marry some woman on the outside who’s willing to wait fifteen years until he gets out.”

“Again, the note of sarcasm.”

“Yeah, but I just can’t do this. This cognitive therapy, it implies we can control just about every thought, and thus every feeling that we have. We can just decide.”

“Yes, more than most people realize.”

“Isn’t this creating your own reality? Isn’t that what crazy people do?”

“Sandra, you are deliberately poking holes in the therapeutic process.”

“Poking holes. Doctor, I wish it were as simple as deciding how to feel.”

“But to a large extent, Sandra, it is. Cognitive therapy is, after all, the primary mode of treatment in modern therapeutic practice.”

"Then why have they stopped saying that about being gay?”

He looks disconcerted, puts down his clipboard.

“You know. They used to say being gay was something you could change if you just decided to. You know, made up your mind.”

“That was many years ago.” He shifts in his chair.

“In other words: yes, you might be attracted to men, but that’s a choice. You can choose something else, a girl in other words, any time you want to.”

“That’s very simplistic.” He is turning a shade of pink.

“But according to the principles of cognitive therapy, it should work. You should be able to change your feelings of attraction to men just by changing your thoughts. Am I right?”

”The DSM specifically states – “

“Forget the DSM. Say you’re gay. You want to be straight, or your mother wants you to be straight. Hell, let’s face it, even with the progress we’ve made, it’s still easier to be straight than gay. You don’t have to explain yourself all the time.  So, just change your thoughts about the subject and you won’t have those feelings any more! Think about girls instead. Finito. Problem solved.”

“We aren’t discussing sexual orientation now, Sandra.”

“Yes we are. Haven’t you been listening?”

Dr. Turnstile has the look of a fish sliding down a chute and landing helplessly in the ocean. It is imperative that they change the subject before he loses any more ground.

Sandra fixes him with her incandescent blue eyes.

“It just comes down to a decision. Am I right? But the thing is, doctor – you haven’t made that decision yet. Have you?”

A young woman sits in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. She flips through an old magazine with screaming headlines about Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest on the cover, bored.

“OK, Sandra, you can go in now.”

She tosses the magazine on the table, gets up from her chair and walks into Dr. Turnstile’s office.

It's the great (great, great, great, great) pumpkin!

The most famous man in the giant pumpkin world

(from Macleans Magazine, Oct. 20/11)

The biggest pumpkin in the world this year weighed 1,807 lb. and came from Edinburg, Penn. But its story actually began in 1986 in Windsor, N.S.
Twenty-five years ago, a Windsor man named Howard Dill patented a pumpkin seed variety he named the Atlantic Giant. Dill was a full-time farmer and part-time mad scientist. Home from the evening’s chores, he’d work for hours at the kitchen table, doodling pumpkins and taking notes on his experiments. He spent years secretly perfecting a new line of super heavyweight pumpkins.


What started as a friendly rivalry with other local farmers at the Hants County Exhibition’s annual pumpkin weigh-off became a full-on obsession by 1980. Before the decade was out, Dill set two records for the world’s heaviest pumpkin. But it wasn’t his pumpkins that made Howard Dill the most famous man in the giant pumpkin world. It was the seeds inside them that, combined with his own genetic crossbreeding technique, sprouted the modern quest for the biggest pumpkin of all time.


Today, 20 generations of competitive pumpkins can trace their roots back to the first Atlantic Giants. This fall, more than 10,000 hobbyists in 14 countries entered giant pumpkin contests using seeds derived from Dill’s. “He is the father of the modern pumpkin weigh-off. There’s not one growing now that doesn’t go back to him,” says Dave Stelts, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, a nonprofit that sanctions over 80 pumpkin weigh-offs around the world.


Dill died in 2008, but he lived to witness the world’s first 1,600-lb. pumpkin. Now growers are closing in on the 2,000-lb. mark. “He just couldn’t imagine a 1,600-lb. pumpkin. It was beyond him,” says Howard’s son Danny Dill, who runs the Dill Farm with his sister, Diana MacDonald. Today, the farm draws 5,000 tourists a year and sells 2000 lb. of seeds—enough to grow 2.4 million pumpkin plants. Atlantic Giants are tipping the scales in Australia and Finland.


The prospect of a one-tonne pumpkin would have dumbfounded Howard Dill. A quiet and serious man with a seventh-grade education, Dill taught himself about plant genetics by reading gardening magazines. It occurred to him that he could isolate a male and female flower and perform his own pollination ritual to combine the most desirable characteristics of two plants—one with a nice orange colour and one heavy enough to break the back of his hay wagon. When he swept the weigh-offs for three years straight, he knew he had his own genetic imprint.


His real source of inspiration was the farm itself. “He was so particular about what kind of bull he would allow to breed with his cattle. He liked a quiet bull, not a bad bull. He just took it from that to the pumpkins,” says Danny Dill.


Championship pumpkin growers aren’t entering beauty contests. Their ideal pumpkins look more like mutant lumpen marshmallows, their skin a mass of hardened yellow-green scar tissue. The inner walls can be 30 cm thick, decidedly unfit for pumpkin pie—but perfect for a weigh-off.


Today, the Dill seed brand is better known for its pleasing orange hue than its girth. It’s a beginner’s seed, guaranteed to produce a supreme jack-o’-lantern. Like a parent who looks up one day and realizes his children have grown to be taller than him, Dill watched younger growers push their gourds into a different stratosphere using products and techniques he’d never dreamed of.


These growers have invented a few methods of their own, like garnishing plant compost with exotic amendments such as kelp extract and mycorrhizal fungi. No sacrifice is too great for the pumpkin elite, who spend thousands of hours pruning, heating, cooling and sheltering their pampered gourds. They spray the leaves with misted carbon dioxide, and treat them for root rot, fearful of disease. They mail leaf samples to far-off laboratories for analysis, and use the results to decide which additives—including calcium and phosphorous—to apply. Then they stand back and watch as their titanic fruits gain up to around 50 lb. a day.


As each generation of gourds surpasses the last, it produces seeds that form the basis for the following year’s mutant orbs. The seeds with the grandest lineage are much in demand within seed-trading circles and at online auctions. Someone paid US$1,600 for a seed from the 2010 world championship pumpkin, which weighed 1,810 lb. and was grown by a contractor named Chris Stevens in New Richmond, Wis.


Clad in blue jeans and a checked shirt, Dill transcended the role of small-town farmer and became the worldwide ambassador for his Atlantic Giants. He and his homegrown gourds appeared on The Martha Stewart Show, but he also gave his time to every visitor to his farm who wanted to talk pumpkins (or hockey, his other passion). When someone set a new world record, Dill sent a personal letter congratulating him or her on the achievement. He wrote those letters well into his seventies, right up until he died.


Iowa grower Don Young got one of Dill’s letters in 2007, after he grew the second-heaviest pumpkin in the world. He had invoked Dill’s name on Good Morning America, thanking him for his contribution to the hobby. “I should really frame this thing,” says Young, who got into growing giant pumpkins after buying, on a whim, a packet of Dill’s Atlantic Giant seeds at a local garden store. (The seeds are sold at Lowe’s stores in the U.S.)


In many ways, Dill was the last of a breed. Very few champion pumpkin growers are farmers today, but many see themselves as inventors on the land. Stelts, of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, grew an 1,801-lb. pumpkin in Pennsylvania this year—but he also grew an eight-foot-tall tomato plant and green beans as thick as carrots, with the same kinds of methods and products he used on his pumpkins. “I’ve got yields now that are just out of control,” he says. “If we can grow an 1,800-lb. pumpkin, imagine what you can do in your garden. To see that translate over to the dinner table is really exciting.”


Windsor has a carved wooden statue of Dill, smiling beneath his baseball cap. But few Canadians are aware of the legacy of the man who passed on his obsessive quest for the perfect seed. Fewer still have seen the family farm, which grows 30 pumpkin varieties and houses cattle in the same old barn, built in 1840, that Dill’s own father grew up working in.


Windsor triples in size over Thanksgiving weekend for the annual Pumpkin Regatta, as 10,000 spectators drive up to watch a few dozen locals row (awkwardly) across Lake Pesaquid in brightly painted, hollowed-out giant pumpkins. (There’s also a motorized competition.) “A couple of women approached Danny and said, ‘What can we do with these pumpkins other than grow them?’ and Danny said, ‘Let’s have a race with them,’ ” recalls Diana MacDonald. The regatta is now in its 13th year.
Danny Dill still has his father’s meticulously detailed notebooks, with their pumpkin snapshots, doodles and descriptions. “He made notes about the stem, the ribs on it,” he remembers. “The pumpkins themselves, he would just sit and look at them.”


http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/10/20/the-father-of-all-pumpkins/

Hemingway in the henhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My gift of. . . ?

On our way out of the supermarket today, we saw a solid wall of pink pledges: forms proclaiming the inevitable breast cancer donations wangled by hook, crook or guilt from shoppers already spending far too much for their groceries.

I squinted at them a little and said, "Hey Bill."

"What."

"What do you see if you. . . you know. . ."

"Oh, yeah. I see."

I did manipulate the second one just a little, but it surprised me how easy it was to go from one word. . . to the other.

Caitlin today!

To bring you up to date after The Day you were Born, these are shots of Caitlin from recent holidays at Disneyland and Parksville, Vancouver Island.

                                      "M, I, C. . . (see you real soon!)"

   Giant fish ride at Disneyland!

"I'd like to thank the entire Academy.. . . "

(Hollywood, for the first, but NOT the last time).

                                                                                      

  Parksville cement sculptures!

S'mores on the beach. . . what could be better?

Having your best bud with you!