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Poor Mad Peter's Journal
Blurty.com has been acting up again. A good friend has been timed out before he could post all week, and what's more, the last two postings have been twice-published each. There have been other incidents over time. I am tired of this.
Blurty.com has been my introduction to the world of blogging, and has by and large been a positive experience, but the cracks in the system are starting to show.
I will be porting the text blog over to the following blog, where you may also see photos ( a welcome addition!) along with straight text. It, too, is imperfect, but it is my blogging address for the foreseeable future:
http://anothercountry.blogspot.com
Please note my web sit URL as well:
http://my.tbaytel.net/fergs/fergs
If you follow me over to blogspot.com, wonderful, and be welcome. if not, it has been a pleasure, and best of luck to you.
Goodbye/Hello,
Peter
It is -32 degrees celsius. Doesn't sound quite so bad in the old fahrenheit scale, maybe -25, but there is also a wind chill warning which brings the temp to where both scales more or less agree: -40 or more. If I can, I'll post a few pics on my photo blog http://anothercountry.blogspot.com later on.
Dogface has a full bladder, and is waiting, ears erect though her body--and especially that tail--are quiet, in a resting position. But she is awaiting my getting up and the human sounds of skins being put on and perhaps a sigh or two. Her morning walk is imminent.
She wears a rather flashy plaid dog coat, which, being a short-hair (Lab mix) breed, she needs in this environment. I'll be suited like an astronaut. There are three walks scheduled for dogface. This is usually the coldest, the starkest, the most difficult.
She is waiting. It's time to go...
** This is the January Thunder Bay Seniors column; I ran it today online because of what I saw today on Renee Altson's blog http://www.ianua.org/weblog.php
Our daughter came home early from summer camp: an energetic go-getter of a young teen who now sat listlessly after a night of poor sleep and abdominal pain. At the Emergency area of the new hospital, we all wondered what the problem might be, our imaginations at times working overtime in guessing unfortunate possibilities.
For me, memories flooded in of another hospital stay, thousands of kilometres away and ten years past. We were holidaying near Havana, Cuba, hoping to meet again Cuban friends we had made years before. Our then-three-year-old girl was experiencing a different country and culture for the first time. She splashed in the ocean, saw and heard Cuban dance and music, played with kids without a common language, collected caracoles (seashells) on the beach. Then, one evening halfway through our two-week stay, Em was beset by terrifying, escalating dysentery-like symptoms.
This began an odyssey of some 60 kilometres and a few days in space and time; light years in anxiety for us, pain and fear for Em. Much of it is a blur to us now, but I remember the grizzled, blunt-spoken doctor at a district clinic at midnight who promptly arranged hospital admission as she descended to near delirium. He had been in Angola, and had seen much more than he wanted to tell about.
We remember the Clinica Cirra Garcia in downtown Havana, our small, clean room with a gurney for Em, and a cot beside it for us, where Joyce and I camped out beside our girl through the long days and nights of her slow recovery. We treasure the memory of the day when she told us our soup smelled good, that she was hungry, at last. We remember the Canadian flags on the mineral water labels in the hospital, how the staff interacted with la nina canadiense, the nearby park where Em played near the end of her stay.
But most of all, it was our old friends Gustavo and Caridad, with whom we had spent some time before this happened, who came to us in our fear and helplessness, offering not only friendship and badly needed visits, but on one occasion, gently inquiring as to whether we needed money for the hospital stay. We were insured, but their offer, given by people who had little themselves, touched us profoundly. A pastor with the Cuban Iglesia Methodista, Gustavo extended the prayers of his congregation for us all, and in that time, brought to life Jesus’ injunction in the 25th chapter of the book of Matthew about welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, even the least.
Em recovered then, a smiling, bouncy 3-year old flying home with us, and this year, her summer camp symptoms turned out to be nothing serious. May we all welcome the cold, fearful stranger, feed the hungry and offer friendship to the lonely this Christmas--as our family was supported those years ago.
--copyright 2004 Peter Fergus-Moore
Yesterday, I played a little bit of hookey, though not really. Fact is, I need and treat myself to an Artist Date (The Artist’s Way) once a week if possible, and don’t tie it to an errand or anything--just go. Wednesday also meant free admission at the Art Gallery, courtesy the local phone company.
It was good to be back. I had once haunted the Gallery when I had been writing all sorts of art reviews and articles, but over the past two years for one reason and another, had been mostly a stranger. TBAG, as it affectionately known in the arts community, is one of those, well, “elite” sort of galleries which take pains to appeal to an upscale crowd while at the same time getting as many baseball-cap people to come as they possibly can. I don’t have a problem with TBAG, especially since we have an in-your-face, cutting edge, alt. gallery here as well (known affectionately as Deaf Soup).
One of TBAG’s cachets is that it has a huge collection of aboriginal art, probably one of the largest in the country, and when I went this time, Jane Ash Poitras had an exhibition. Ash Poitras consciously jacked up the traditional, native (mostly Ojibwa) cultural level of the art by including a lot of medicine plants with installations explaining their significance and importance to native people. She also had a great deal on the destruction of the native way of life by Europeans--it’s fair to say that these two threads do go hand in hand, but that’s not the point of this posting.
Ash Poitras had a lot of replica items that, say 30 years ago, would have been a no-no to display. Boxes used by pipe carriers (those entrusted with a sacred pipe) with their contents of the pipes themselves, eagle and partridge feathers, braids of sweetgrass, pouches of ceremonial tobacco not ready for use in a specific situation, but in glass cases and beside labels on walls, and so forth. Times change, only that which is dead does not evolve. Native spirituality is not dead, and it is evolving.
As I rounded one glass case, I peered in at a couple of what Ash Poitras called “shaman’s boxes”. I’ve already described their contents, but as I looked at one pipe in particular, the flat hollowed out wooden stem, the high, cylindrical red-brown pipestone bowl, I was spoken to.
Not in words. There were only a couple of gallery goers commenting on the displays to one another across the room. But the pipe brought me back to where I was 30+ years ago, as a believer within the Midewiwin tradition, a non-Indian who had abandoned nearly everything he was to follow that path. It took me back to the smell (and taste) of the pipe smoke, the smell of sweetgrass, of hide moccasins, of acrid cedar smoke, to the long nights of pipe- and spirit-ceremonies. To a time when I did things that to this day have me shaking my head (though I have a much better idea why I did them), to years of obsessive spiritual journeying, for which I and my young family paid a huge personal price. It is perhaps also fair to say that we reaped much from those years, but I’ll let the others tell their own story; I can only say that that decade transformed who I was, and left me with both the burden and the gift of having been in a spiritual milieu completely separate from my white-bread, Anglo Saxon, protestant upbringing. It informed so much of where I have been since. And continues to do so.
And still the pipe spoke. Not in words. But in a sensation of a corner having been turned, calling for new responses, a change in direction perhaps. Maybe it is time to honour those years even though I have journeyed so far (and at the time, so abruptly) away from them. Maybe it’s time to listen again to the not-words of that time. Maybe it is time to reconnect, here and now, with the Ojibwa spirituality, with the ways, with the Spirit that is here, with the people that are here.
I know how things work, if not why. I have real qualms about doing this, even though I have been sympathetic in my writing--it is someone else’s path. What are the not-words telling me? As so often happens, I will pray without knowing.
"I saw your posting--ever sad, dad!"
My 2nd daughter had phoned for any number of other reasons and inserted this into the conversation at some point.
Well, it is sad. I refuse to accept the "human condition" argument, although it's probably a sensible one. But it doesn't answer our situation at all, and i think I know what does.
Each of our stories is a novel, if you will. One could be made from them. I have one. But I think for the longest time, I was "frozen" in the facts and recollections, and couldn't write that novel and be free of this for that reason. But now, I think this is changing, and I am writing these out on Blurty because once "out there", I am less burdened by them somehow and freer to write what must become the redemptive novel.
It's Advent, and soon Christmas, and eventually Easter. But for the first time in my life, I felt a fellow feeling with the apostles at the Passion. I felt what they must have felt in watching someone they loved deeply, who seemed (and probably was) beyond the surly bonds of earth and humanity and showed them a glimpse of God in the flesh, tortured to death. And how all that beauty and all that wonder and that glimpse of paradise was snuffed out. Gone. In their suffering, they responded first in grief and confusion, then by rallying and going forth, energized, first telling the stories and then eventually writing the redemptive novels we call the Synoptic Gospels. I know I would have. I would have wanted to tell the story as i experienced it and felt it and what it meant and the Romans be damned. This is not in the least a commentary on the accuracy of the Gospels--that's completely beside the point--it is a tribute to these poor, beautiful flawed men that they wrenched light and love out of their grief. I understand, guys...
May I someday tell the redemptive story, write the redemptive novel, God asks of me.
A birthday phone call to my younger brother, and a much longer conversation than I thought might take place, given that the last of any such took place some three years ago. Although we share many of the same genes, lived in the same houses until we were both in our late teens, called the same people “mom” and “dad”, we’re strangers to one another.
I grieve this. I feel utterly helpless to do anything about it, and have had more than one attempt at building a bridge swatted aside.
Much of this is my doing, unfortunately. He has made the point in a couple of our rare arguments and even rarer communications, that I never showed him a sense of being his brother--I’d say I showed more a sense of rivalry and before anyone leaps in with the “sibling rivalry” card, ours was never mitigated with a sibling solidarity--or, lest I exaggerate, rarely so. Our rivalry, I think, was for affirmation, perhaps for love--somehow, neither of us, as I’ve discovered in those rare conversations, got the message that we were truly loved, or at least securely so. Sounds harsh: it felt profoundly lonely, and I say that knowing that our parents did the best they could with who they were accomplishes only the transmutation of anger to sorrow. Maybe that’s something, after all...
He is very quick, and I could not shake the feeling that I was a part of performance on his part, a deliberate distance-keeping exercise while seeming to speak frankly and inviting sharing. I know my brother to be brilliantly talented, a wonderful teacher (one whose students will name him years hence as a foundational positive influence on their lives even as they lead their communities), obsessively private. I also notice that the three of us have each bought into our family’s values, both stated and unstated, and rebelled against same in our different ways. My brother has bought deeply into the Protestant work ethic and has yielded much in his life as a result--that he judges others harshly by this same ethic is the darkness of his choice.
In fact, cynicism and judgementalism are deeply a part of his makeup, something I alluded to about our family in general in an earlier posting. A cousin refused to invite him to her wedding a few years ago for the express reason that she did not want him there curling his lip and rolling his eyes at the proceedings, and the people.
He feels, part and parcel perhaps with his work ethic, that he should try to make the world a better place, and one of the many ways in which he tries to do this is a relatively simple one: he consciously smiles as he drives around a corner so that people encountering him will see a face that is not worried, angry, sad, preoccupied; in so seeing, people might actually try to pass that on. It’s a form of changing the world one action at a time, and there is validity in that.
But as my wife pointed out when I spoke with her about the conversation--one which invariably leaves me feeling deadened and sad--he smiles at strangers, at the world at large.
Not within his family.
And that is the tragedy of all three of us.
I have had a busy two weeks.
One of the items of busy-ness was our neighbour, Victor, who has had car trouble (it's a K-Car, which my wife's cousin Kenny once described as having been designed to go exactly 100,000 km and then literally collapse--Victor's has probably a few more kliks than that...) and who works out of town at a tree nursery.
So, I have chauffered Victor to and from his work (a half hour each way) perhaps a half dozen times. Often, a phone call some 15 minutes ahead of the fact is my notice. Sometimes, the night before. He needs. I try to help. A half hour each way is ample time to talk, if that's going to happen. It usually does.
It's fair to say that Victor lives almost a hand-to-mouth existence. It is also fair to say that he is a divorced father (the teen-aged kids live with their mother not far away) who is trying hard to stay in meaningful contact with his children. It is eminently fair to say that he is prodigiously talented, and, sad to say, probably difficult to work with. His inability to keep steady work over a decade is partly a testimony to this last, as much perhaps as it is to the hard times here. I hunch that Victor tries hard not to show his vulnerability or his pain to most people, and he does this by being hail-fellow-well-met and a fascinating conversationalist.
So while I felt very honoured that Victor eventually opened up to me with some of the more painful aspects of his life (not reproduced here), I also felt very sad on his behalf. It's a particular sadness--one that I often feel when I literally cannot for the life of me come up with a magic-wand solution to someone's problems--even if the wand had all the powers of the world and beyond.
Sometimes, the wand might conjure an infusion of money (I know at least one family that that would greatly help, enabling them to do the rest themselves), or a plane ticket to a certain destination, or a job. Or, God knows, a mate. But the reality in all cases is that things are always more complex than that. And with situations like Victor's, they are much more readily so than others.
The complexity defeats my fond wish. And perhaps my hope. A part of me soberly understands that the last thing in the world I ought to have is such a device because of the havoc I would undoubtedly wreak. Another part sighs and still wishes. Both pray. To a God none of us understand, or glimpse, but who somehow understands all this better than any of us. And grieves as much as we do that Victor is where he is, how he is.
The phone rang: it was my eldest daughter Bee, who was returning my call. We chatted about this and that, as adult parent and child (?) will do, when I happened to mention the CBC’s Greatest Canadian series. (NB: for our American friends, the following web site may prove helpful: http://www.cbc.ca/greatest)
“I’m not following it, dad,” she said.
“Oh. Why?” I was curious.
“The list,” she answered. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Especially, she added shortly thereafter, Sir John A. McDonald. His position at all on the list is a personal affront to her. When I mentioned such people as Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky, she retorted,
“I’d sooner vote for Wayne Gretzky than John A. McDonald!”
Later that evening, after we watched Rex Murphy’s take on Pierre Elliot Trudeau, my wife Joyce remarked,
“You know, that whole show was an exercise in masculine values and outlook! There wasn’t a bit of the feminine in it!”
I agreed with both of them.
Bee is a woman of mixed race, if you will: not exactly Metis, because although she has been Roman Catholic, she is not French. But her mother is Ojibwa, and her dad (moi) is Anglo. It is fair to say that her people (the people she identifies with) fared poorly under the regime of Sir John A. McDonald, and that their leader, Louis Riel, would have stayed happily teaching school and raising his children in the US if by 1885, the Metis situation in Saskatchewan weren’t in a critical state and his resistence leadership needed. It was, he came north, there was an armed resistence against McDonald’s Canada, and the Metis were routed at Batoche.
Murphy’s intellectual assessment of Trudeau reminded me of what my professor of Russian history once said: Russia was a society of ideas. Trudeau (like Murphy) was a person of ideas and I submit that as lofty and wonderful as they were in many cases, the ideas were not and never are more important than the people they are intended to serve. Listening to Murphy, I felt cold. I felt that while Trudeau was a man whose ideas were larger than his life, he was also less what I would call “human” because of them. Furthermore, Murphy’s constant “he was a fighter” refrain in the episode began to grate after a while--competitiveness of and for itself as a lifestyle has worn threadbare to me, and is in no way automatically a virtue unless it can be proven that it has a certain situational use. I think these were what Joyce was referring to in her statement about the absence of the feminine in that episode.
I am left wondering, now. I started watching a number of these episodes learning a great deal about people such as Frederick Banting and Alexander Graham Bell and how much I personally owe at least Dr. Banting. I felt good and not a little proud of the contributions all had made--well, I should point out that I missed both Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky, but I can’t bring myself to feel the slightest loss, there. But now that the 10 finalists have had their day in the court of video resort, I am left seeing the cracks and split seams of the concept itself.
Why one greatest Canadian? You’ve already seen that question raised. How about, why these ten? How was this arrived at? Ratings? A legit survey? That the series has undergone extensive preparation is a given, and I am grateful for the attempt, but especially after watching Murphy’s paean to the intensely individualist Trudeau, I’m wondering where is our Canadian sense of collective greatness? I reiterate my question as to why we aren’t looking at least half a dozen greatest Canadians. I want to know why there are no women, anywhere, within sniffing distance of the top ten. Why only one ethnic (Wayne G.). Excuse me, but First Nations (including Metis)?
I felt that, in balance, we were learning as much about the presenters as we were about their chosen. Evan Solomon the techno-pundit (Alexander G. Bell), and Rex Murphy, the competitive debater (Trudeau), for example. Actually, all the presenters were talking about what excited and galvanized them about their choices, and I have no argument with that. But what does this list itself tell us about Canada itself? Somehow, in the finals, we’re all singing “Give me some men, some stout-hearted men...” To quote another song, Is that all there is?
On a visit we seldom make to my home town (for a variety of reasons), Joyce and Em and I were feted by my family at a buffet-style Chinese restaurant, and all-you-can-eat place that is to be avoided for dietary reasons, but whose food is not only delicious but in unimaginable quantities.
Our server, who incidentally was studying for his MBA, was quick, efficient, personable. Somehow, the topic of Martha Stewart's prison term came up (it was summer 2004). My aunt (mother's youngest sister) piped up that Martha hadn't done anything wrong, essentially just got caught. Some near-heated discussion followed. Even our server got into it, which was courageous of him.
To my aunt , my step-father and to a lesser extent my mother, the "real" villain those days was Svend Robinson, who had pocketed a ring worth a tiny fraction of what Stewart had illegally and unethically earned, and who, unlike Ms Stewart, had owned up to it and had his day in court. Once on the subject of Svend, they hung on like bulldogs, and neither Joyce nor I, long experienced in these "discussions", bothered to rebut--a pointless waste of energy. Svend's real "crime" was firstly being gay, and secondly, socialist.
Much more recently, I was on the phone with my youngest brother and the topic came up of school or church or whatever. It is fair to say that we both in our ways suffered greatly in our younger years in school. But I was making the point that there was good as well as bad in the system, and while our experiences were largely negative, it wasn't the whole story.
He chortled, the audio version of a smirk, and dismissed my attempts at balance outright. School to him was, as I've often heard from people, simply a conformity factory.
It dawned on me that my family of origin has a streak of cynicism in it a kilometre wide--even my father had a streak of it but by no means as pronounced as my other relatives. Something very sour has permeated their lives and warped something in them. Why? What?
How did I avoid it? How am I able to give some things (like church) a chance when so many others have either kicked it over completely or submerged themselves into its values?
I don't know, but I remember being told once by my father when I was in mid-teens: "You just don't see the evil in people, Pete. It's not a bad way to be--I wish we all were like that--but you'll have a very rough time of it." Well, he was right on both counts, but I do see the evil in people: it's just that somehow, I also see the good, and what's more, they're intermingled somehow in people and events in a way that neither is "pure"--at least, not on our planet.
Maybe it's because I've been blessed with a good marriage and had so many second and third chances, I can't count them by now. Maybe I understand that mercy, like sobriety (as my friends who are friends of Bill W. put it), is a gift, and the best way to accept that gift is as openly and gratefully as you can.
Cynicism: from the Greek Kynos, or Dog Star (Sirius).
A quiet evening, Joyce reading in the bedroom, Em downstairs with the TV, and I catching up on blogging in the office next door to the bedroom. It’s dark, the dog is sleeping off another sleepy day, the mood is meditative.
Suddenly a crack like a pistol shot at close range. Joyce whoops. The bedroom light goes out. I start up from the computer and dash into our bedroom to find the halogen reading lamp out and Joyce, in her chair, shaking.
Turns out the halogen bulb had exploded without warning, spitting hot glass shrapnel onto the floor and her nightstand. The hood of the lamp had been aimed downward, not at the papers she had been reading, otherwise things might have been far worse than just the startle of the noise.
The lamp is unplugged. In trying to pick up the glass bits, I find they’re too hot to the touch. A few minutes later, I vacuum them up.
We look at each other: halogen lamps are history in our family--as of now.