Lyrics for sale

I should title this post, "Wanted: one composer." For you see, the following poems were originally song lyrics. Song lyrics without tunes are a bit sad: they kind of wander around in the desert like orphans. It's yet another example of "gee, Margaret, you sure have a lot of talent," with the fruits of that talent disappearing forever into a sinkhole ten miles deep.

Well, can you blame me for being a little frustrated? Of everything I've written, maybe 10% has been published or even looked at. Most of it just kind of fizzled away. I don't know why this is. There are two explanations I hear all the time :

(a) I don't try hard enough, and
(b) I try too hard.

I want it too much, I guess. Meantime, here are quite a lot of orphan song lyrics. At one point I was semi-collaborating with a very talented jazz musician who had problems trying to get a tune together. One of them, SILLY BOY I think, was almost performed at a jazz concert. I say "almost" because after the first two lines, the female singer forgot the rest of the words.

 

Years later I rather stupidly showed what I thought were some of my best lyrics to the choir leader at the church I then attended. This man made a great show of being a professional musician and a serious composer and played a grand piano thunderously at every service. He didn't say anything at all about the songs. I waited and waited, feeling more and more humiliated. But that was nothing to what happened when I got down on my belly like a spaniel and begged him to tell me what he thought.

"Song lyrics have to have the same number of syllables in each line," he said.

And that's all.

Not meant to happen! Not meant to happen, my friend. I think I know how a stillborn baby feels, if it feels anything at all. But because a friend of mine begged me, I'm posting these. The unicorn fantasy is that Some Great Composer, or, even better, Some Great Performer Like Tony Bennett Or Diana Krall Or Somebody, will find these and want to use them.


(Note about the line spacing. These were originally in 28 separate Word files. Getting them into this form was torture, and it still looks kind of weird. They won't single-space, so I will leave them as is.)


A NEW KIND OF SONG



The stars are aligning like jewels in the sky

The world is all juicy, like cherry pie

I feel such a rapture, at last I belong

For this is a new kind of song



And the bees in the trees make a buzzy old hum

My heart is dancing to a different drum

The door is more open than ever before

And there’s more -

More joy than I’ve tasted before



My life was a planet deserted and dry

And troubles came knocking, don’t ask me why

But something is changing, it cannot be wrong

And I’m singing a new kind of song



A song that speaks of a love that lifts me high

A song that proclaims a hope that will not die



For the tide’s rushing in, and the desert will bloom

And the saints are all chasing those prophets of doom

And the wheel is a-spinning, it pulls me along

For this is a new kind of song



And the bees in the trees make a buzzy old hum

My heart is dancing to a different drum

The door is more open than ever before

‘Cause there’s more -

More blessings than I’ve ever known before

A SLICE OF THE PIE



You got to know

When to roll out that dough

Don’t touch it too much

And such –



Catch my eye

Get a slice of the pie



You got to know

When to pluck those cherries ripe

The big juicy type

So ripe -



Look, say hi

Get a slice of the pie



If you wanna bake

Or maybe make some good love with me

Baby, let’s try

To scramble or fry

Our destiny



You got to smell

When it’s coming so well

Come taste the sweet

It’s nearly complete -

Good enough to eat



Come and dig in

It’s a sweet kind of sin

Got to live ‘til you die

Make some love on the sly



Get a slice of the pie

A SONG UNSUNG




“I love you” can never be unsaid

And what’s done is done -

Then why do you run



I took the greatest risk with you

One soul can take with another

Forsaking all others

So why is it all so unstrung



And a song unsung

Is no kind of song at all

The music undone

Dark horses running towards a fall

The words pulled loose like thread

Unbinding the fine tapestry

Is this hollow feeling

What it really means to be free

Giving your all

Is such an irrational act

A pledge, and a fact



I gave you more than I had

And my heart was glad

To make the sacrifice

More than once, more than twice



And a song unsung

Is no kind of song at all

Our plans undone

Dark forces pushing us to the wall

The love pulled loose like thread

Unbinding the fine tapestry

Is this hungry feeling

What it really means to be free



Then give me slavery –

This kind of free

Is the last thing I ever

Want to be

CRAZY HORSE



Oh why you running after me

When I have no strength to run

I’ve told you I’m not interested

In your kind of fun



If you don’t hold your horses

You’re going to lose this race

You must be plain addicted

To the thrill of the chase



And you’ve got to

Get down off that crazy horse

Right now before I burn

Those letters that you sent me

You know it’s not your turn

If you don’t stop we’ll soon be at

The point of no return

Get off that pony, rider

You’re smart, but you don’t learn



Oh why you keep on chasing me

When my race is almost run

Keep up the pace, and my resolve

Will quickly come undone



Don’t want to get my hopes up

I’ll get to see your face

So run right by before I go

Commit some great disgrace


And you’ve got to

Get down off that crazy horse

Right now while I return

All those presents that you sent me

This tide will never turn



If you don’t slow down to a walk

I’ll start to crash and burn

Get off your high horse, rider

You’re smart but you don’t learn

Jump off that horse and hit the dirt

You’re smart, but you don’t learn





DAY BY DAY



Since you’ve gone

I have to take things


Day by day

Can’t make plans

Can’t see ahead to

some other way



And I know

I’m looking backwards into


yesterday

I have to take things

Day by day

Day by day

It takes a lot of work to

Get me through

And I sigh

My watercolor’s

All one shade of blue



You were joy

But now my dream has

All come untrue

I have to take things

Day by day



And why

When we were planning something

That we thought would stay

Oh why

When I revealed my soul to you

Did you decide to stray



These days

Hang long and heavy

and my heart is sore

I try

to find the sunlight

and an open door



You’ve gone

but no one else can

love you more

day by day

Because there is no other way –

I have to take things

day by day day by day

DIRTY MOON


The Moon is not so very sweet

In fact it’s down and dirty

You’re sweet, but kind of salty too

Mercurial and flirty

For in the sky, I see the why

Of how our love got started

We’re moonstruck fools, don’t know the rules

Tomorrow’s all uncharted



And that ol’ Moon Man is dirty

We better wash his face

We’ll shine up all the galaxies

As if we own the place

You’ll blaze just like a shooting star

Across the midnight sky

I’ll chase you ‘round the nebulae

So far, so wide, so high



The Moon’s not so romantic

It’s a great big hunk of stone

But rock can roll, and in your soul

You hate to be alone

We’re balls of cosmic fire

Colliding in the night

A beautiful disaster

Blindsided by the light



And that ol’ Moon Man is dirty

We better wash his face

And tip the constellations

Until they fall from grace

You’ll blaze just like a shooting star

Across the midnight sky

And I’ll chase you ‘round the nebulae

Until we feel so high

We’ll both go supernova. . .

So far, so wide, so high

FORGIVING



To err is human

Your sins can’t be much worse than mine

And though I’m no saint, I won’t keep score

For love is a thing divine



A part of all that’s holy

A tender mystery

Glowing through the shadows we can see


And forgiving

Is the thing that lets us start our lives anew

Releasing

The anguish and the shame that we once knew

Forgive me

And I do promise I’ll forgive you too

Then please forgive yourself

It’s the hardest and the best thing you can do





To stray is weakness

Temptation a powerful spell

And when you gave in, said yes to her

It took us straight to hell





The things I said were slashing

They cut you to the soul

There’s only one thing that will make us whole





Forgiving

Is the key to letting all this heartbreak go

For living

Takes more compassion than most people know

I love you

Embrace me and this cup will overflow

Forgiving

Is God’s own wish -




Let’s make amends, and let our feelings show



GALAXIES


When we walked at midnight

Your eyes threw back the light

I took your hand

And we rode the starry night. . .

Galaxies

Twinkling celestial, and coaxing in the dawn

Catch the purple glow before it’s gone

Galaxies

I see galaxies





The long black skirt of night-time

Blows around you like the sway of midnight trees

Stirred by soft breeze

And in your eyes reflected

A treasure-chest of jewels that could be stars

I see Jupiter I see Mars



The Twins hang cool and sparkling

In a misty pool of deep and darkening skies

My heart’s unwise

And your long shadow shelters

My darlingmost desires in reverie

(when you whisper, come with me)



The mere revere of being here

All tangled in the forest of your hair

My soul aware

The sweet shock of your laughter

Like bells that peal and wake the sleeping night

All sorrow will take flight



And in my dreams, the firefly streams

Will trace the shining pathway of your soul

To make me whole

The future is unwritten

But something says we’re reaching for the moon

I know we’ll be there soon

GOD AND THE DEVIL



The sun shone

For so blazing long

I almost forgot about the rain

I loved you

And it was so strong

I couldn’t remember feeling pain



But when clouds came

And the sky was dark

I couldn’t recollect the sun

Now I hang on

To that shining time

When God and the devil were one




And you were a mistake

I needed to make

A wrong turn I just had to take

A bad habit difficult to break

A road to nowhere. . .




When it’s so wrong

Yet so strong

Then reason abandons the scene

And I wasted

So much precious time

Just waiting for Fate to intervene

When you hurt me

With your hard words

My life came completely undone

Now I hang on

To that shining time

When God and the devil were one





And you were a mistake

I just had to make

A bad road I wanted to take

A habit impossible to break

A road to nowhere

That led me somewhere

A place of heartbreak

And ache. . .







I CAN’T HAVE YOU




It’s sunny and fine here, I’m sipping the wine

Of far-flung places,

But in the blank spaces, still there are tracings of you.

Where we walked, and spoke to each other

You joked, and all the lies of love came true

It seems I can have everything, but I can’t have you.





I can have headaches,

I can have heartaches,

But I can’t have you.

And what good are kisses,

And smiles and near-misses,

When it all turns blue




It seems that the farther I travel

The nearer I come to you,

I can lose myself in cocktails and find myself in pain,

I can run down the drain with the rain

But I can’t have you.




I’m feeling so well here, the boys are all tanned

And the water’s fine

And when I get restless, there’s always the haze

Of another glass of wine

And I’m sick of roses, and insincere poses

So it’s good that you’re gone

But one thing I don’t understand –

How will I go on?





For I can have headaches,

And I can have heartaches,

But I can’t have you.

It seems that I missed you

From the moment I kissed you

One and one did not make two.

And why is it the farther I travel

The nearer I come to you

I can lose myself in cocktails and find myself in pain

I can run down the drain with the rain

But I can’t have you.

I can run down the drain with the rain

But I can’t have you.

IT'S AN ART



It scares me so much to hear you tell the truth

You’re making too much sense when you say

It’s time for our goodbyes

These agonizing whys

Will only make us lose our way





When you’ve tried for all those years

And hidden all your tears

The cost is just too much to pay

I gave you so much of my time

But this poem will not rhyme

And it’s time for us to part, and seize the day. . .





For no matter what was holding us together

The signs say we have to come apart

A will is not a way, that’s why I cannot stay

For love is not a science – it’s an art





And lately I feel like a boat that’s cast adrift

Like an angel that has only one wing

It’s a new pair of shoes

I’ve got nothing to lose

But this freedom is a lonely sort of thing




And no matter why fate tossed us together

The time has come for us to come apart

A will is not a way, that’s why I cannot stay

Though love’s an artless thing

It still is art. . .

For love is not a science – it’s an art





LET’S JUST TALK





So much of life is taken up

With things we don’t want to do

With boredom and chores

And locked-up doors

And people that irritate you





I don’t want to chase you

Distract or embrace you

But wouldn’t it be a delight

To sit next to you

Admiring the view

And just shoot the breeze half the night





Let’s just talk

I’m tired of games and complication

Have a go

I think we’re due some

Sparkling conversation





Let’s just talk

I’m too old to tease and too wise to try

Please ignore me if I

Accidentally

Breathe a sigh





I know what you think about politics

It isn’t worth anyone’s while

I know what makes you furious

And I know what makes you smile





But I don’t know what you think of me

It’s none of my business, I know

So let’s just sit and visit a while

And take things very slow





Let’s just talk

I’m tired of all the old manipulation

I like you

You’re a source of mental stimulation

Let’s just talk

I’m too old to tease and too wise to try

Please forgive me if I

Accidentally

Breathe a sigh

ONLY A GAME




You act like you have no idea

You’ve blown my cool

Set my heart to flame

An afternoon’s amusement

A way to kill some time

To you, it’s only a game




And when I see you, how my heart howls

You don’t even hear the sound

With that smile of yours that would melt a stone

I can’t stand to have you around

You dangle my heart on a watch-chain

To please yourself

It’s cruel, this thing

And I can’t believe

How I sit here and wait

For the goddamned phone to ring





And when I see you, how my hope soars

Until it crashes in flame

You’re the devil in jeans, a demon in blue

A man with no sense of shame

Because for you, this wild thing’s

Just a game –

For you, it’s only a game.







SALTY SWEET





In blessings there are curses

So my Mama said to me

And just like that, your lucky streak

Can turn to misery

But do not be discouraged

Or lose your sense of cool

The biggest curse could be much worse

So listen to my rule:



You’ve got to take the salty with the sweet

Life is never so complete

You’re down but never out, my friend – repeat:

You’ve got to

Take the salty with the sweet.

The nasty turns of fortune

We’ll never understand

The sweetest jelly-babies

Turn to bullets in your hand

That great big fat bonanza

Is disaster in disguise

Rub the belly of the genie

And smoke gets in your eyes


So. . .you’ve. . . got. . .to. . .





Take the salty with the sweet, my friend

Life will never be complete, oh no it won’t!

You’re gone but not forgot, my friend,

Repeat:

Take the salty with the sweet.




When Pedro lost his girl friend

His burro was so sad

He wouldn’t run no more, and it

Made Pedro very mad.

Until he hung a carrot

Before that burro’s nose

And now he runs, and when he’ll stop

Poor Pedro never knows!

Take the salty with the sweet

Life ain’t always such a treat (and here is why):

You die just as it’s getting good – repeat!:

Take the salty with the sweet!

SILLY BOY





You walked into my life

And left your footprints on my skin

I could never tell if loving you

Was joy, or sin

It seems that if I touch you, I fall right in

And so I stay away. . .





Silly boy

I never should have

Set my heart on you

You’re a dream

That has no hope of coming true

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy





I thought you meant it when

You said you’d be with me a while

But staying close to someone

Is not your style

It seems I have a habit of self-denial

And so I stay away. . .





Silly boy

I never should have

Lost my mind for you

You’re a dream

That bathes my heart in shades of blue

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy





And when you left without me

All my plans just blew away

I knew that my composure

Wouldn’t last the day





It seems it doesn’t matter if I try to pray

And so, I say:





Silly boy

You never should have

Played games with my soul

I’m a fool

Who has no hope of feeling whole

Now you’re gone

My heart’s an empty, aching hole

You stole my joy

You silly boy

Silly boy . . .

SO ADDICTIVE





I don’t know what’s worse for me

Chocolate or gin

These cravings I fight

Want to pull me right in

I’m addicted to things

That are bad for my skin

And my heart –





I don’t know why love’s

Such a powerful drug

So cunning and baffling

It pulls out the plug

And though I’m resisting

I’ve still got the bug -

Not too smart!





And you’re

So addictive

A passion I’m trying way too hard to control

So addictive

A poison invading my sanity and my soul

So addictive

I’d better seek help for it soon

Or I’ll break

And start howling at the moon





I’m twelve steps away from you

Trying to stay

On the straight narrow path

Though I’m losing my way

And I’m striving for faith

While I’m longing to stray

To your door





I’m feeling so powerless

Knowing it’s wrong

And why is recovery

Taking so long

Who knew that a poison

Could look like a man

I adore





Because you’re

So addictive,

A cocktail so potent I dare not take one drink

So addictive

I’m too buzzed to reason or even try to think

So addictive

That soon I fear I’ll slip

And take

Just a sip

Let me raise this glass

To my lip. . .

You’re so addictive.

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