just be yourself, everyone else is taken….
Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
walking in the gentle snows of December,
I look for the the last sign
of the nearly completed gentrification
of the street
of our holy Notre Dame in St Henri.
Bye-bye Tin Flute
and my memories of the Dome Theatre at Dawson College
and my days on the boards.
The Egg Roll House gone,
the Three Wheel brasserie gone.
Miracle Pizza no more.
The ladies wear mannequins pointing thin fingers at me through the showroom windows of cheap shops selling a dream to the poorest of the poor.
Gone, bye-bye.
I walk along and remember
the scruffy kids I worked with
in the 60’s,
from cold water walk-ups
with no indoor toilets
in the centre of a large metropolis,
were vying and dreaming for a quiet life
amongst the parasitic gangs of the Dubois family and their minions.
Did these little boys and girls become gentlepersons
in large homes
in the cushy bushy suburbs
with a garden shed
in the fenced-in backyard
and not the stinking outhouses of Brewster Street.
I hope they became captains of industry
and not lieutenants in seedy crime syndicates.
I love the poorer neighbourhoods
because they look on the outside
how I feel on the inside
sometimes.
Most times.
This is my ancestry and my soul.
certain type of peace here in the ICU room, waiting for someone to die or to recover.
machines sounding the alarm, fans pumping air, clicking of drug regulating machines.
machines
machines
machines.
glassed in from the world, we sit and wait interminably,
or in anticipation of the terminal state.
death, that realm of poets, is in this room, but not poetic.
it is quiet, and loud, both at the same time.
not much happens when people die this way.
not much is said in the ICU, but tubes speak volumes into the nose and down the throat.
occasional cough from pneumonia.
pneumonia that can kill.
six-hour time slot for me to sit and wonder at the miraculous power of life in the body I see before me.
stripped down, life is all powerful.
it gets to decide the outcome.
we just roll the dice.
The man felt the water first. It was under his body and soaking into his clothes. Then he felt a warm liquid dribbling across his eyes; he wiped his face with his coat sleeve.
A rock tumbled next to his feet. He heard it. He could see nothing.
It was dark, but he could see the stars in the night sky, white holes in a fabric of blackness. No moon. No clouds. No sounds. The earth gave way, as he tried to steady his hand to move into a standing position; his arm sunk into the mud, up to his elbow.
Water glugged into the indentation he was making, as he pulled his arm up and out of the sludge. A bloody quicksand, he thought.
Pulling his legs up from under himself, he knelt, and then stood. One leg sunk in the bog, and he tumbled forwards onto his chest and face. He landed teeth first into a boulder, and he heard a tooth crack, but he steadied his body on the very same boulder. Thank God for that boulder, he thought.
One cautious movement after another. His boot stayed in the muck, as he pulled his leg free. He lost it.
Christ Almighty, where am I? he shouted to the pinholes in the dark sheet of sky above his head.
With one hand in front of him, and his feet taking ages to lift and descend forward, he stumbled and found there was a slope to the surface that he could touch. Vertical, he thought, the wall is sloped vertically. It was mud, studded with boulders and smaller shards of stone. This was not rock face, like a colliery. He was not at home, in Nine Mile Point, the colliery where the stone and the mud, falling, covered his father.
Killing his father.
No, he had fallen, down into the mud and the stone. It was a hole. He could see the stars above, but nothing else. With careful measure, scrambling slowly, slipping one time, and more. His hands gripped boulders, then muck, and with no anchor to hold, he slid back towards the bottom of this hole. Up again, try again; the count is not over for me, boyo, he thought.
His waterlogged trousers were wearing him out on this climb to the top, and his cap was sticking to his head with the coagulating blood from a gash on his crown.
With his next step, he found himself against a wall of steel, a bucket. Feeling along the edge, he traced the teeth of the excavator. Not a bucket to lift me, but a tool to bury me. His gallows humour raced ahead of his situation, but he grabbed it, cheering himself for a moment. Steadying himself on the slimy iron form, he stood straight upright, and followed the form with his hands, until he thought he had reached the top of his grave situation. It was a grappler. There must be a boom pole, he thought, feeling clever and satisfied with himself in this moment of lucidity. Grabbing blindly in the night, he found the pole and knew he would be out of this pit soon enough.
The man stumbled to solid ground, and took his cap off to clear the blood from his forehead. Looking around , he saw a light coming from a window. It was a school.
He had been a chaperone at the high school dance just ten minutes before, he started to recall. How he found this pit was beyond him. His head cleared and his equilibrium was nearly restored. There would be a few people clearing and locking up. He needed help to make his way home, just a couple of streets, but he was now afraid. His heart beat chaotically, and his stomach cramped.
Banging on the big glass doors of the locked school, he roused suspicion in the remaining staff and students, who curiously and carefully peered down the long, brightly lit lobby.
All they saw was a staggering man, frightened and frantic. Blood and mud streaked his face, and a look of terror engaged their eyes.
The police had already been telephoned before one of the younger students yelled out, “It’s Mr. Harding, that new English English teacher , who was here at the dance.”
The janitor unlocked the door, and Mr. English English was led into the school, to the gasps of two of the more sensitive girls.
“I tumbled into the hole being dug next to the schoolyard, where I take my shortcut home. What has happened to my head?” explained and asked Harding, all in one scramble of speech, explaining his situation and looking for an explanation for the hot blood still streaming down his face, dribbling into his mouth. The taste of lingering bloody meat.
A is for appetite. Your stomach growls, I need food; it sends a message to your brain that tells your hands and mouth to get crack-a-lacking.
B is for butter that comes from big farting cows. Who did that?
C is for cutting and cooking your food, so it is easier to eat.
D is for down the hatch. Open wide.
E is for eating the good munchable pieces that land on your plate.
F is for food and without food, you have no life. simple dimple!
G is for gastric juices that grab those great vitamins from all those wonderful morsels of food.
H is for halitosis. Stinky breath after eating garlic and onions.
I is for indigestion like when you eat something your tummy doesn’t like.
J is for jaws that munch and munch our food. Not the jaws of sharks.
K is for green vegetables that come as leaves and bring you a vitamin named K.
L is for laughter because I left out the letter L.
M is for messy foods. Fun to eat, BUT hard to clean up.
N is No. You can’t eat that!! Or, no, I won’t eat that!! Yuck.
O is for opening your mouth to tickle your tongue with a new food.
P is for the pee and poo that comes when all the vitamins are taken to help your body grow after drinking and eating healthy foods.
Q is the question you ask when you are hungry, is it snack time yet?
R is for running with the wind, and you need food in your tummy to keep up with that tricky wind.
S is for salty foods that are so nice on the tongue.
T is for teatime. Pick up your pinky when you drink tea from teacups.
U is for under the table where the dog finds your scraps falling from your plate.
V is for, mmm. I don’t know what V is for! Do you? Perhaps, vitamins, that give your body the power to run like a gazelle.
W is for I wonder what that food tastes like.
X is for that X-ray you had to have at the hospital when your digestive system was feeling poorly.
Y is for yawning that has nothing to do with eating, but maybe you are now bored with my little story.
Z is that last letter and I hope you have not fallen asleep. ZZZZZZ
We were beat, as we watched Mam sit on the bare wood stair and cry with her head buried in her hands. This was not what she thought it would be, after leaving my father’s mother’s house in South Wales, with her four young children, for London, after boarding a passenger airplane, with one baby crying, and the other children already exhausted from an early start and a dirty delayed train journey. Mam struggled on alone, yet kept her British composure and dignity. Dad had arrived in Canada a month before, to take up this new post. Terrible turbulence frightened us, and all night long it threw the lighter ones amongst us from side to side, and up and down. My sister and I tumbled head over heels down the aisle, after an early morning toilet run.
Dad met us off the plane and we dragged our entire life, and dirty nappies and half drunk milk, in the luggage, to a taxi, into which all six of our family struggled to squeeze, and the baby was moaning for comfort. In a comic battle against time, Dad would jump out of the taxi at every stoplight and run to the boot to rummage, in vain, for the baby’s bottle, and at every light, the baby would moan even louder.
This was a not a new country for us, we had been here before, before Dad got homesick and dragged us all back to Wales to settle us into the life he had once lost for us, yet still yearned for us. Twice we had traveled by passenger ship to Canada and then back to Wales, but his time Dad had to arrive in time to start the academic year. He traveled alone and unraveled alone, on the flight. His particular air force war had taught him in no uncertain terms that air travel was at the root of his nightmares and sweats. Dad could never share this weakness with us, so he flew alone.
On that first night in Montreal, we slept at the Cadillac Motel in the east end, at the junction of Sherbrooke and Cadillac Streets, and had our tea in the TicToc restaurant. For decades after this first night, these landmarks would excite a feeling of nostalgia in me. These were the beacons of my old life, proof that I was not from here, but somewhere else. I held a history, long before this banal suburban life, and a history longer than history has been able to recount, before myths were written down. My Welshness.
Pushing the pram with the baby, Dad led us on a long march the next morning, up a packed dirt road and past the school, where he had started to teach. On either side of the modern building, were farmhouses and open fields. We tried to stop by a stream in a wood, but Dad insisted on moving us along.
Looking around this flat and desolate suburbia, I slunk back in my mind to a place I knew days before. Gone was the gorse hillside and the long-settled villages. In the ancient grey, stone collier cottages by the Rhymney River, I left our aunts and uncles, Granny and Grancha, cousins and friends. Last visit, only last Sunday. I had not understood that that would be the last visit, as Mam and my brothers and sister were wending our way back home over the mountain with the rain, and the fairies dancing in the bluebells and the ghosts hiding amongst the gravestones. The coal and tips, the scent of sulphured smoke, the moss and the mist, the ever-constant mists on the mountains, and the collecting mists in the valleys, the rugby, and the violence of the working man’s village.
Dad spoke excitedly, as he rattled on about this new life in this “suburbia.” All the houses were separated from one another with large, unwalled gardens on all four sides, some bungalows. And some split-levels, Dad explained. Not like the levels of coalface that some men worked, but houses with only four steps between the floors, never mind, he prattled, you will all see soon enough.
Cows, from the remaining farms, wandered in behind the houses, causing panic and alarm in the newly-minted suburban mothers looking out on their unfenced yards.
I had no idea what he was talking about. There was no smoke coming from these houses, no smell of coal or damp. The houses were not brick, not old, and not at all what I wanted.
Mam, whatsa matta?
I’m crying because, this is the house that your father has bought and paid for, for us to live in for the rest of our lives. He couldn’t bloody wait long enough for us to come to Canada to have a good look about for ourselves. No, he had to go and buy it without me knowing.
I bloody well hate it, she muttered.
We have no choice, she continued, but to live here, and I did not know where “here” is.
is writing down my memories a fictive narrative, or a testament to the function of memory in my life.
after all, memory is my past. there is no substance to the past, except what I remember. fiction is all in the past, as once we commit the words to the page, it’s over, it is done and dusted, and it is ashes to ashes, buried in written memory.
a contributor on the Facebook page I administer asked for people to help to write down the stories of their past in the little village we commemorate together. nice thought, I thought. most people these days do not write. either for fear of looking stupid in this mass media epoch or simple laziness. or worried about the repercussions, if their memories are different to others in their family or in the village.
many people these days have only their little hand-held devices to watch the world go by on the world wide web, and it is cumbersome to type a tome with the index finger alone.
these days, many people are not required to actually write, as throughout history our education has not pushed us in these ways, to express freely. teachers have instilled the fear of the big red marking pencil, or the admonishments in the margins; we have lost generations of writers due to the fear of making mistakes.
there is hope for memoir. however, we must accept the spelling errors, the syntax issues, the messy sentences and open up our minds to the imperfection of memory; accept its expression as an act of creative fiction.
pacemaker number three.
L4-L5 spaced with sponge.
ankle filled with titanium rods and screws.
hip replaced with plastic and steel.
knee replaced with plastic and steel and sealing wax i think.
lense swapped out for god knows what. number two on its way.
thyroid demolished with radiation.
uterus munched up by a long thin tube. robotic assisted.
Coulda woulda shoulda lost my girl that day
that family had lost their son before that day
lost in the ways of the world
a bullet whizzed past her head
into her friend’s head
into many friends’ heads
many bullets and many bodies
bleeding on the street
bleeding on the floor of the school where she learned
for only two weeks in college
that life is miraculously short
like the sparrow flying through the mead hall
o venerable bede the poet of olden times
who designed the image of how life is so fleeting….
We find warmth in the hall before we enter the freeze outside
“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.”
cyborgurl