Selfishly, for me...

I like gift guides, I’ve said so before. Lots of people do. I’m not going to write one though, because, first, whom am I? I barely shop… I’m a student on some kind of budget, whose money goes to piano lessons for the kids, their winter apparel and the occasional visit to Wing Or Tailor to fix the holes in my son’s pants, or shorten my daughter’s pyjama bottoms. I therefore cannot recommend anything more luxurious than a box of IKEA candle sticks for that hygge feeling.

I like the ideas, I like the possibilities, I like the voyeurism… Aren’t those suggestions a little window into a person’s pleasures and priorities?

So here, why not just write a gift guide for myself, little old me, in my tiny black car, on an ideal Saturday of endless hours in Winnipeg.

First, there’d be time for thrifting… I’d visit Signatures by Ellen in St. Boniface, or Redeemed on Academy or Corydon, or even Value Village where the thrill of the hunt is strongest and where time just looking through all the categories evaporate quickest. I’ve also really been meaning to go to Just Like New to You on Portage. 

Lunch at Crumb Queen. A stop at Market 26 for a Lamé fountain pen. 

Browsing at McNally Robinson and choice of recipe books: one for meals, one for baking. Kitchen implements from Happy Cooker. (I could use a bench scraper).

Now, if I were to really give in to fantasy, to the aspirational self in me, I’d take a woodworking class at Bronx Park Community Center. My aspirational self would then have the skills to build cabinetry for my own office in the basement.

Date night with my love at Thermea, because we both like it there. And a future reservation at Petit Socco so we know there’s something to look forward to in January.

The end!

April Fools'

April Fool’s in French is Poisson d’avril, and poisson means fish, and so, my pranks have been food-themed. In the past there has been miracle berry experiments, liquid-turned-to-gel, and squid-ink pasta. This year was bug themed:

I put them in their lunches, as snacks. “There’s no way I’m eating ants!” said one, who gave it to her friends. The other thought the packaging was a spoof, did not read the ingredient list and had a friend, anyway, who’d eaten fried earthworms. He said they were good. And the third put it back in his lunch box and ignored it.

That poor woman

That poor woman standing there behind the big black ballot machine, taking my folder with the paper and my inked-in choices for mayor and councillors.... she told me to wait and I didn't know why right away until she pointed to the tiny bright screen, and I looked at her because there was nothing else to do and took in her blond hair and crinkles around her eyes and polished long fingernails and jewelled finger and asked her if she'd got a papercut yet. She was friendly because she was a volunteer and said no and the machine we were exchanging over delivered a green checkmark and so I wished her luck and left.

Christian was at the door and said he'd asked her if the machine had jammed yet and that she'd said no and that he'd said you never know, it could happen, in that teasing way he delivers jokes with that giant million-watt smile that is nothing of a politician's, but just the nice way he is.

And so, reconvened on the way to the truck in the parking lot we laughed about how that poor woman must thing we had such a doomed outlook on life...

Miscellany

I don’t have a coherent thought about anything right now, the days when life forces me from my desk are what they are and so here is just everything… strewn about. I’m a boat dragging a net and picking up jetsam and hauling it up and having a look at it all… (As seen here.)

I’m listening to The Library Book by Susan Orlean and am totally captivated by the story. It has everything I like: books, history, interesting characters, masterful writing. The author’s mother would weekly bring her daughter to the library, like mine.

Previously, I was listening to My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. I appreciated her appraisal of the letters Eliot wrote in her youth. Rather than roll her eyes at their earnestness, Mead strikes an understanding tone, offering compassion for that youthful age where I often feel embarrassment. She writes:

Lacking in charm they may be, but they were not written to charm, and certainly they were not written to charm professors of English Literature at Yale. They were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation and her desire to discover what she was thinking by putting it on the page, which is to say, they are letters written by a young woman who is trying to work out who she is and where she’s going. (…) And if my teenage correspondence was much less learned than George Elliot’s, the letters I wrote were no less painfully self-exposing, filled with the enthusiasm and obliviousness and un-earned world-weariness of youth.

Rebecca Mead was recently interviewed on “Working” for her most recent book, Home/Land.

The weekend before this one was particularly productive. I buzzed about checking off tasks, decluttering, and getting ahead on things I often put off. Then Monday came and I felt drained of energy. Austin Kleon happened to put his finger on it in a Q and A in on Ask Polly.

That said, there’s some weird point at which if I make too much in one day, I don’t feel good at all. I sort of feel despondent. I think it has to do with doing so much and knowing there’s so much more to be done? My wife Meghan loves to garden, but if she spends too much time gardening, there’s some threshold at which she becomes depressed. I think there’s an ideal amount of work to be done every day — enough that you feel like you’ve done something, but not so much that you feel wrung out and existentially fried. I imagine setting a timer and stopping when time is up no matter what would help.

Life is strange. But let us pause in our befuddlement over the human condition for a study in contrast. Here I present:

BORING vs INTERESTING

Should I be chiming in here to criticize media? Probably not… Jesse Brown does a fine job of it and still I want to brew him a cup of tea and tell him to calm down. Yet here I am ready to provoke a poor time-crunched journalist with 20 questions. (Snowfall in Winnipeg varies how much from winter to winter? How does the city manage the range? Accidents? Number of complaints? Etc.) Were it left to historians, newspapers would never publish on time. I like reading news from the archives where it has acquired a funk, like cheese.

This miscellany began with a link to The Ocean Cleanup TikTok and will end with Joy Williams. The Subtle Manoeuvres newsletter prompted me to look up Joy Williams’ book The Florida Keys and skim the introduction. I liked how it ended:

“Keys” comes from the Spanish word cayos, for “little islands.” The Keys are little, and they cannot sustain any more “dream houses” or “dream resorts.” The sustaining dream is in the natural world - the world that each of us should respect, enjoy, and protect so that it may be enjoyed again - the world to which one can return and be refreshed.

Time passes. There are more of the many, and they want too much. The bill is coming. It’s not like the bill from a wonderful restaurant, Louie’s, for example. It’s not the bill for the lovely fresh snapper, the lovely wines, the lovely brownie with bourbon ice cream and caramel sauce at the lovely table beside the lovely sea. It’s the bill for all our environmental mistakes of the past. The big bill.

But I really must be off. Sporadic entries for the next while. Work bears down.

Ah... Winnipeg!

What a city you are! You transform dog-walking into an extreme sport. Your dog-owning inhabitants fall through ice-crusted snow, cut drifts with snow-pant scissor legs, and must carve their own paths when overnight winds have shuffled the landscape. Cheers, Winnipeg. Your winter so far has been epic.

Contact-tracing A-Z

I had a particularly sociable day yesterday. It began with a funeral.

Greeters A+B, seated at a table with a list of names, took ours. Person C ushered us to a hall where chairs were spread out in pairs like little islands on a sea of blue tile. We chatted with friends S+T and S(2) came and found us, in his suit. It was his dad’s death we were helping mourn so hugs were exchanged.

After the powerpoint of pictures to music, there was the funeral mass. At the exchange of peace, we waved gentle hand motions to strangers E, F, H. After the songs sung through masks, we exchanged happy hellos with Christian’s retired colleague, G.

We went home to get to eating lunch, where, having been locked out of the house and having been forced to spend time outside in the serendipitous weather, we reunited with our children and our daughter’s two friends, M + V.

Plans were drawn up for the afternoon. I took the girls back to V’s house and chatted with V’s mom, M(2). I dropped off a glass cake pan at J’s house where she made me a turmeric latte, where we drank it outside in the warmth of the sun-soaked deck on cool wicker chairs while her kids L+M(3) played around us in the yard. Her husband, D, came home. More chitchatting ensued before I left to bring my youngest to a birthday party.

Since I missed the turn onto a street called Beaverhill, I was four minutes late and only rushed greetings were exchanged with the organizing mom L(2). Then I went to pick up my daughter at her friend’s house where her dad, J and I talked about dog-ownership. If dogs counted in contact tracing, there would have been two to add to this list, besides my own… Midnight had a cone, Piper sniffed at my pant legs and purse.

When it was time to pick up the youngest from his festive activities at an indoor gym, I exchanged a few words with waiting mothers W and X and crinkle-eyes that now passes for a smile with Y.

Tuesday, barring any surprises, my contacts will extend only to people as they live on paper.

Transitions

I don’t especially like transitions. One day it’s summer and then 
Were you expecting me to write “and then the next day…”?
Well I wasn’t going to.

In fact, the whole point of this is to say that even though 
Well
You know
One day is one thing and the next day is another thing
When it comes to the first day of school,
The preceding days are a collection of little adjustments
Like
For example,
Buying school supplies
And shoes
Additionally,
Fall jackets.

Indeed,
Besides, 
My husband goes to school ahead of the students
Of course
To prepare the class
As it happens
To buy bookcases this year
And containers to fit in their shelf spaces.
Furthermore
He goes to have meetings with other teachers
While
Apart from
Us, at home. 

And so,
To sum up
Evidently
There are days when there is no school
And there are days when there is school
But also
There are days that aren’t school days but are still filled with school preoccupations
In my opinion,
In my view
As far as I know.

Googly-eyes

Googly-eyes are just fun. Affixing googly-eyes to pictures of people or objects isn’t a new idea… Someone did so in 1969, out of boredom and invented Weepuls. But the objective in our was less about lessening boredom and more exercising the opportunities unleashed by a bagful of googly-eyes bought at Gale’s Wholesale.

I’d noticed that my mother'-in-law’s condo had signs with eye-less mask wearers and asked the kids if I should outfit them with googly-eyes. The kids said yes. The kids also said to take photo evidence.

I learned a new word earlier this year, when Mary Karr described herself as occasionally puckish. Puckish? Here’s the OED: “Of the nature of or characteristic of Puck; impish, mischievous, capricious.” This small act of “eyebombing”? Very puckish.

“I did this thing,” I told my mother-in-law during our visit. I brought her to the elevator and showed her the sign.
”Those signs have been there forever!” she said, the new eyeballs looking so natural…
”I added the eyes!” I said.
She looked again and started to laugh.
”Want to do the sign on the floor above?” I offered. She did!
Walking along the hallway, I felt more happiness watching her stifle her giggles than I did actually affixing the eyes. But then, isn’t that the nature of a trick? The whole anticipation we feel just imagining what reactions might be? It’s a lot more fun steering the imagination that way than it is listening to it after watching the news.

Cocktails are more fun than wine

For Father’s Day, I bought Christian a cocktail shaker, muddler, stir-spoon and citrus juicer. I also bought Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Bar Book. You might suspect I bought the book for myself, and you’d be right. But one cannot prepare one’s husband some cocktail without proper technique, no? Morgenthaler talks about cocktails with the same kind of enthusiasm as cooks talk about recipes; I like his voice.

I still like wine. Short of becoming a sommelier, or tracking purchases, or reading reviews and finding out what oak and cherry means in your mouth and nose, wine will always be a little shrouded in fog as far as I’m concerned. Add to that the fact that wines change from year to year, that experts will declare that this label is priced at more than its value to encourage customers to buy it, or whatever, and see? Fog! Most rosés will taste refreshing on a summer’s evening. Most red wines will be fine with that piece of meat. Maybe one will be extraordinary, and that’s a treat, at a restaurant, on a date.

But you know what I imagine is even more satisfying? Preserving the strawberries you picked just the way Morgenthaler recommends you do, and making a shrub one evening, when the air is so warm that even in the darkness of nightfall, you take a careless stroll around the block with your husband and feel like the night is a gentle hug.

Don’t get me wrong… I like wine, but I think that mastering a cocktail here and there might be just plain fun. Wine is serious and sometimes makes me fall asleep, but the other day, when it was Father’s Day, I made mojitos for the first time. While my mother-in-law sat in the living room, I went outside with a bag of ice and used a rolling pin to pound it from cubes to crushed, as if I were a furious drummer: Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat-Tat... And the mojitos were a surprise! I thought they might be sweeter, but the mix of lime and mint and simple syrup and white rum was a bracing mouthful of flavour with each sip, refreshing in its own way. The glasses, served with straws and soda water, with their floating muddled greenery were their own pieces of art, the way a plate is, when you balance colours: caramelized sauce on charred meat, bright green salad and cubes of red tomatoes dressed in garlicky vinaigrette, the white sphere of potato with its earthy brown skin, and glazed carrots, like chopped orange firewood.

Sometimes I think our artistry is small and sensual. Look at this sky, for example. It’s huge and imposing and can’t fit into a glass.

Alcoholic drinks have always had, in my mind, an association with guilt and shame. Even writing about it here feels like a confession, feels like revealing a thing that should be hidden and I wonder why. I wonder why pleasures are classified like diamonds in a jeweller’s case: good, better, best. I feel like it’s necessary here to defend the happiness I take at the prospect of exploring cocktails. And yet, no one has to defend taking a road trip to see a new landscape even though people can pursue travel with just as much avidity. Why is it that I can take a picture of the sky and feel ownership of it and find that my admiration and sharing of nature is accepted on social media in a way that makes me seem more innocent than if I was to post a picture of a cocktail I made? But I no more own the sky or the praise I get for its capture than I own the recipe I follow and the disapproval it garners.

Friday!

It’s Friday… kids hang from hammocks, laundry gets folded, adults eat quiche while the kids have cheese-stuffed tortellini.

The lawn is in poor shape, but the installation of fibre-optics underneath it has made it a lawnmower maze of flags and even the dandelions feel outdone by the spray-painted lines everywhere. The Badger truck spent a day around our place, humming noisily. The men gave stickers to the boys and we googled the website written on their truck door. We looked at pictures of badgers and compared them to the logo. The lawn will wait for quieter days.

I crave the ability to draw and since this seems like as futile as wanting to be a sea urchin, I’ve taken to googling the benefits of art. So far, the results have only been gentle persuasions and not gale-force arguments. Perhaps that is the nature of art… it is gentle and it transforms slowly.

Visiting the U of M

Dear Diary,

Today I went to the University to pick up books from the library. It had been a long time since my last visit to the campus and the road driving in is still bumpy. The new apartment building called 30UC is complete, with inviting fresh pavement and benches near the entry. The Canada geese that were on campus last time I went have moved on. Instead, construction crews are busy rebuilding the stairs near the student centre.

In the gloomy interior of Elizabeth Dafoe, the book locker gleamed in other-worldly white. It was the first time I ever swiped my card as instructed, heard the click and witnessed the springing-open of a rectangular door where my books waited in a mauve glow of interior-lighting. Is there really an interior light? That’s how I remember it, a little startled by this futuristic interaction.

With my books under one arm, I loitered a little, looking through the glass to the darkened library. It felt a little ghostly, completely barren as it was, lines of yellow caution-tape running through.

Outside, it was sunny. Students walked here and there, purposefully, with backpacks on their shoulders. The campus is partially alive… it was a strange feeling.

Daily walks

There isn’t much to say about individual walks… we follow a path that meanders behind houses alongside the river, cuts through a meadow where there is a park where children don’t play at the early hour we walk past, and then follows a wood chip trail between rows of left-to-grow trees from an abandoned city nursery. Moods vary, both mine and Enzo’s. The weather varies and we bear it, no matter what the offering.

Often, when I think of the walks, I don’t think of any particular one… They take on a cumulative quality and so are appreciated like that. Few stand out on their own and yet, the practice of it, the way it marks the beginning of a day must somehow all accumulate for some barely perceptible benefit.

A girld named Rachel

This line, over here, reads: “it’s not cool, telling someone you haven’t seen in years that you still think about them…” and I think of so many someones’ from elementary school, a handful from highschool. The high school ones intimidate me still… were I to make an appearance, it would be full of "see-how I changed’s” and angst. But in elementary school, I feel a tenderness toward the few who’ve disappeared from my line of social-media sight… what about that girl who was a poet? One day, coming in possession of a small spiral-bound white-paged notebook full of the possibility of being filled, I handed it to her and asked her to write something while I swayed on a tire swing. She returned it to me with a poem about autumn, stanzas and rhymes included and I could not believe that such a page-filling miracle could occur with such seeming ease.

I hope that somewhere in this world, she is still writing poetry!

A poem about not debating

I wonder why
I feel this pull to opinion
To saying what I think 
On some big issue.
If writing were a canoe
An issue would be the current
And my weak arms
Could hardly protest its pull. 

The issue is very big.
Its size has grown by dint 
Of tiny injustices
Of hidden shames
Of secret experiences
Accumulating over time
Becoming
Conversations
Then homilies
Court cases
Then political platforms
Then sides taken.

It’s a morass of debate
And wading in
Vociferating from
Orifices where food is ingested
Where the tongue resides
Warm and wet
Its movement against white teeth
And pink skin and red muscle
Produce a spray of 
Airborne particles
That fall
And thus
Shards of experience
Broken-off bits of religious principle
Driftwood pieces of logical argument
And some statistics like fine gravel
Are lobbed through the air. 

Wearying and unsatisfactory
As the stand might be
It beckons like the call of a temptation;
A pretty chocolate egg
That says “come eat me”
And lends to the mouth
A momentary power of consumption
While enslaving the taste buds
And filling the gut with a brown empty mass
And throwing the hormones into chaotic activity
And giving the brain a sense of useless purposefulness.

I want to do you the kindness
Of not eating the egg.

About hair

Sometimes, when I blow-dry my hair, the loose strands form themselves into a ring around my thumb. I feel a tiny pang of regret when I slip the hair-ring off and throw it out. It’s like a wasted piece of tiny art.

But what would I do with it? And wouldn’t it be a little macabre to take a picture?

The Victorians used to transform their stray hair into pieces of art. I learned this when we visited the Dalnavert Museum and there was a hair wreath on display in the attic. (You might still be able to see it here.) I thought it was a sign of quaint olden-day thriftiness, where nothing, not even stray hair, is thrown away. Apparently, it has more to do with period sentimentality.

On an episode of “This Is Love,” the host Phoebe Judge includes this snippet of interview with Drew Lanham, a wildlife biologist on the podcast to talk about his passion for birdwatching:

Phoebe Judge: “Can I tell you something wild?”
Drew Lanham: “Sure”
P.J.: “And given your response to this we will or will not cut it from this interview…”
D. L.: “Ok!”
P.J.: “Do you know what I’ve been doing since I was a little girl?”
D. L.: “What’s that?”
P.J.: “I’ve been taking the hair from my hairbrush and putting it outside for the birds, for their nests…”
D. L.: “Perfect.”
P.J.: “And my grandmother did this her whole life and she had this wonderful white hair and she’d been doing it forever and right before she died, uh, she found a nest in a tree and it was completely covered inside with her white hair.”
D. L.: “Wow! What a gift! I mean…”
P.J.: “Is that something we should…”
D. L.: “Yes! Yes!”
P.J.: “…should we be putting… ok, because I really… it’s pretty crazy to catch me outside putting my hair around on all the bushes...”
D. L.: “Well that’s a really cool thing. (…) It’s sorta a way of giving back, right? It’s a way of giving back. And you talk about your grandmother having done it. Your grandmother probably watched those before her do it. And in a way that’s a legacy passed forward. And you can imagine that hair cradling, nurturing a nest of eggs. And then keeping those naked young warm.”

I have trouble imagining such a thing. I don’t know why. In fact, I envy those two their whimsy. Instead, my mind slants toward Victorian morbidity, and to the depressing fact that pigeons have amputated toes because of “waste human hair” as The New Scientist calls it. For them, it’s not a hair-ring but a hair-noose around their doomed digit.

Words

I’m not the kind of creative person that can invent a story. Even playing “two truths and a lie” requires some mental preparation. Inventing a recipe would stress me, and why bother, when the world is full of recipes already? I’m especially uninterested in reading lists of words-that-don’t-exist-but-should. I’ll tell you why…

The other day I was listening to John Le Carré’s memoir titled The Pigeon Tunnel. He reads with a sonorous voice, has an English accent, but also reads in the other languages he speaks: German, French and American. I might not catch the all the references but I’ve enjoyed listening. Perhaps because he loves writing: “I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a pokey desk, on a black-clouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the international New York Times doesn’t arrive till lunchtime.” So I listen with the kind of satisfaction one has for a well-prepared meal. I listen to the words he uses, like “exophthalmic” for a description of eyes.

I looked it up. It is an adjective to describe those eyes that protrude, and how many times have I not noticed people with such eyes, or heard my mother describe such a look. My mother always had a knack for describing people. She could mimic something of them until you understood who she was talking about, or had at least, a caricature in mind. She once described a nun with a toothy smile as a person with teeth like piano keys. But those eyes? There’s a word for them! It is a serious word that John Le Carré can deliver with effortless pronunciation, as if, my goodness, these exophthalmic-eyed people were just as common as the elderly rheumy-eyed ones.

We don’t need to invent new words! They exist already… it’s just a matter of reading to discover them.

Collage

I often get the feeling that I am just collaging ideas together here, scraps gathered from one area and then another, brought here, and taped together with a capital and a period. It’s not art, I keep thinking… but it’s fun.

Take Sam Anderson’s mini essay from his New Sentences series, this one on Nassar Hussain’s ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’. Anderson writes of Hussain’s poem: “It is powerful to see these foundational myths reconstituted out of bureaucratic mundanity — like a model of the human genome built out of Legos.”

And then look here: Jason Kottke’s: “Four Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish” includes, “This Lego bonsai tree is ‘a mindful build’ designed for adults.”

Is there a point to this assemblage? No. It’s like what the kids and I do sometimes after school… I didn’t notice this creativity was missing until I unrolled a filled-up roll of paper from an IKEA easel we’d set up last year at this time for school-at-home. The roll had journal sentences, announcements, explanatory drawings, and just-for-fun drawings. We stopped using it, and I’d regretfully put it away, until I realized, having unrolled the old roll, that the creativity inside was in fact a back-and-forth between the kids and I. We gave each other ideas and sparked artistic tangents for no other reason than because the white space invited us to.

A poem being described with a Lego metaphor - the Lego there being an allusion to what is clunky and heavy, versus the image, offered by the Lego company itself, of a use that aspires to lightness and intricacy - a bonsai tree, mindfulness - is delightful when paired together, don’t you think?

I didn’t have a single creative thought yesterday.

Not while walking the dog in the cold morning air.
Not while hurriedly brewing tea.
Not while advising a student to organize their thoughts like knives, forks and spoons for Kondo-style joy.
Not while delaying lunch to add up last month’s expenses.
Not while eating two eggs, basted, with toast.
Not while training the dog.
Not while grumpily answering the phone.
Not while following a recipe, or making broth.
Not while exercising on the stationary bike.
Not while eating Cheerios on the couch in front of Superstore on tv.
Not while back at my desk, finishing sums.
Not while washing my face and brushing my teeth.
Not while in bed, falling asleep.

Scratching sound

It was fall in Winnipeg, full of the delicious anticipation of the first snow and the rich smells of summer’s decay and there was a scratching sound in our wall. I’d heard it for the first time one morning during meditation. It was downstairs in the little room beneath the stairs. Our house is split and so our basement sits higher up and has large windows. All the exterior walls have a ledge two-thirds of the wall’s height because of the way the foundation was made. The scratching was in one of those spaces between the cement and the interior wall.    

When I mentioned that I heard a scratching sound to Christian, he dismissed it. So I tried to ignore what I thought I heard, even though, when I’d duck my head into that space which was cooler than the other spaces in our house, where we kept our potatoes and onions, suitcases and children’s toys, I’d keep an eye out for a mouse, or maybe a squirrel. But there was never any evidence of mice, or bugs. And then I would still hear the scratching sometimes.

One night, almost a week later, Christian heard the scratching. I had paused the television in the middle of the commentary following Justin Trudeau’s win. When I came back, the under-stairs light was on, and Christian was standing leaning toward the wall. 
    “You hear it?” I said.
    “Yes!” he answered.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “What are you gonna do?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he paused, “how did it get there, I wonder.” 
    It would seem that only a thin piece of drywall was separating us from this scratching source and neither of us felt like taking it down, tearing right through to see.
    So he turned off the light and I continued to watch the political commentary. 
    Before bed that night, I asked what he planned to do.
    “I don’t know.” He said.

I’ve grown asepticized to close encounters with wild life. We didn’t have any family pets besides the beta fish. Once, when I was washing my hair I came across a protuberance on my scalp and squeezed it off and as I found its round bead shape carried off in a stream of water I saw its six little legs confirm an innocent suspicion before it disappeared down the drain. The panicked surge of disgust mimicked anger and I punched the flimsy shower stall wall because it was the only thing I could think of doing. It wasn’t dissimilar to the time that I found myself weeding a space in the front yard, still an elementary school student when I unwittingly ended a small caterpillar’s life in a firm pinch. I sprang up from my crouched position and shook my arms until I was calm enough to think of washing my fingers. More recently, when fishing out tools and pails from an under-deck area in the backyard, I came across a drowned, bloated mouse. The scene was like the one in Anne of Green Gables when a slimy mouse is discovered at the bottom of a custard pot. I confess I was far less adroit at getting rid of the mouse than young Anne, even though my daughter was watching and I couldn’t give in to yelling, or shaking, or punching walls.
In the increasingly intermittent scratching sounds in the wall, I could imagine a small animal in distress, slowly dying, drying up, clawing around hopelessly surrounded by pink insulation. Maybe it fell through a crack in our foundation but we couldn’t check because that area was a corner under our front patio. Undoing a bunch of two by fours to get a good view felt like a lot of effort for a scratching sound. 

But what if it was some poor animal? It was that kind of thing that mixes pity and fear together so that the tug of war between the two leads to nothing. You stand there and do nothing because making a hole in the wall inside feels too close and inspecting a foundation outside feels too laborious.  
    “How long have you heard it?” Christian asked me.
    “A week?” I answer.
    He says his parents would sometimes hear scratching in the walls in their house and his dad would go up into the attic and drop poison into the walls and then the scratching would stop. I’m discomfited by the way having a dead rodent stuck in the wall is just fine, as if all walls everywhere would have the dried up, mummified remains of some un wary creatures. 

That was the conclusion, that our wall certainly had something dead in it. I was re-reading my work and read the first sentence to Christian who laughed at the memory. He said:
    “It’s gone away, eh, whatever it was.”
    I said that that wasn’t the conclusion I’d drawn. I said I thought the whatever-it-was was dead. 
    “No!” he said “If it was dead, it would have smelled!”
    I said I had no time to re-work the conclusion.

Matchmaker at large

So we’re at this wedding. We’re celebrating this couple, reminiscent of our own wedding ten years ago last summer. And we meet this guy. He’s really nice. I look at him with all the benevolence of a happily married person. He’s really smart. He has a PhD and works with computers. He might be a nerd, except he’s not the sitting-at-your desk kind geeking out about obscure films, he’s the kind of nerd with an awkward intelligence. He’s single. Christian and I go home and I’m depressed that he’s single.

She’s single too, this other friend of mine.

Maybe they could work together. Maybe I should alert someone. Maybe I should play matchmaker. 

Or not. They’re a bit different. Maybe a person with a PhD can’t relate a lot to a social worker. What was I thinking.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I’m becoming like those widowed old ladies who can’t stand to see people staying single. Those widowed old women who clasp your arm in a mix of affection and control and say, too close to your face, how beautiful your children are. 

But what if there was a chance? What if I was the element that was needed to trigger their getting together? What if it could work? What if these two people could come together, provinces be damned, and find similarities? Some couples are made up with seemingly opposite people. And what if holding back I was denying their chance at a happily-ever-after? And then one day at their wedding they would give a speech and say “Thanks Jacinta for this set-up that lead to our day today”. And the guests would applaud and I would blush, and kids would follow, and he would think he was so lucky to have her and she would think she was so lucky to have him. Maybe it could work, right?

Never mind. I didn’t say anything, don’t say anything. 

*Disclaimer: while the feeling is based on truth the details in this post have been all made up.