051-Trends

It is silly, isn't it? To take pride in bucking trends? It's this illusion of standing apart from the crowd when such distinctions are, yes, a little narcissistic. It's like saying, "I win!" to no one, for nothing. It all started with toilet paper.

Toilet paper

I went to Costco and did regular shopping just as the Coronavirus loomed on the horizon. I pretended not to care. I looked down my nose at the gentleman in a jean jacket and silver white hair who had a cart full of toilet paper and nothing else. I did not buy toilet paper. It wasn't on the list, and I wasn't going to panic. Two days later, my mother-in-law needed toilet paper. I hadn't checked with her before going to Costco and now Costco had lines that circled the parking lot and the weather was cold and I refused to stand in line like that. We haven't been to Costco except recently, for dog food. 

Bread-making

I haven't made bread yet. I kind of wanted to join in on this one, but also, I'm realistic about the commitment and plan to only make bread when I have less things to do: i.e. when the children are teens or the dog is trained, or school starts with attendance.

Hobbies

I love puzzles and complete thousand-piece ones in the matter of a week. Buying puzzles would get expensive. Besides, our dining room table was being used for school-at-home. I got back in to crochet. I made a blanket and started a second. The weather turned warm and this second blanket is progressing more slowly because there are weeds to pull instead of stitches to count. I started blogging, daily, as an exercise. I have a hundred-and-a-half-day streak of learning German on two apps. Learning German was intended to crowd out other iPhone distractions.

Dog-owning

We got a puppy, but to anyone who mentions that everyone has got a dog, we offer this useless précis: we hatched the plan to get a puppy last year. It wasn't a last-minute Covid-related decision. Nonetheless, we realize, we were lucky... puppies were in high demand this year.

Potatoes

We plant a garden every year: beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peas, potatoes. These are the things that grow well in our yard. This year, there are no potatoes. The greenhouse had a shortage of seed potatoes. It feels a little strange: potatoes are in our ancestry, both sides.

I wonder about that need for distinction, apartness. I'm pretty sure, writing this now, that it is an illusion. Or maybe more of a game really. Have you ever been in front of a door as it was closing, and successfully judged that you could slip through without getting caught in the handle? Gauging your life against the trends feels like that.

050-Maria Goretti

Mom used to say that because of my prayers to Maria Goretti, I got a brother. As proof, she would point out that he was born on July 6th, the saint’s feast day in the Catholic calendar.

When I was three, my parents took me on a pilgrimage through shrines in Italy. If I can trust the memories that stamped themselves into my mind at that time, the shrine to Maria Goretti is there among them, and I am held in an Italian bus driver’s arms, he has a gold bracelet, and I can peer down at the bronze statue of a young girl on the floor, an iron fence around her. 

There are six years between my brother and I. Boredom might have prompted my unthinking request for a sibling. Who knows. I don't remember asking. These things fade. 

My birth was hard on my mom. The labour was very long before the doctors finally conceded and gave her a Caesarian. After one Caesarian, mom was automatically of the group of women who were offered Caesarians on subsequent pregnancies. At least, I think that's how it worked then, in the eighties. It was clouded in mystery as far as I was concerned. There were appointments at clinics because I remember walking to them with my mom. At these appointments, you could schedule your Caesarian, like you could schedule a manicure. 

As a young adult I used to schedule manicures and pedicures before important dates. Then, out with my husband on that evening, my nails would shine, and I had the conceited satisfaction of having organized myself well to be the attractive wife who proved her love right down to her nails.

049-Narcissism

Annie Dillard says that there are things you circle back to, drawn to the subject because you have a contribution to make, because you haven't found the answer out there, in the world. For me, narcissism is one of those subjects. It both repels me and draws me in. It's like a hobby fascination. I'm at the beginning of the research on the subject. It's a vulnerable time because I can't claim expertise. I can say something from experience, but I haven't read the books to back me up... I don't have confident conclusions quite yet. I'm only just beginning to articulate my own ideas. 

For reading, I started with academic research. While the university libraries are closed, some publishers have made things available online. One of these is the Handbook of Trait Narcissism: Key Advances, Research Methods, and Controversies. It was published recently, in 2018. In the preface, it states that according to one site "there have been over 1600 peer-reviewed journal articles published on the subject of narcissism since January of 2011, a more than 50% increase from all those published since the Narcissistic Personality Inventory was published in 1979!" The authors say that it is an explosion.

In spite of the academic researchers who say that narcissism is on the rise, it is something I struggle to define in the course of casual conversations. Narcissism is trivialized in that old fable of the king who could not leave his reflection, as if it were a mere problem with vanity. There is so much more to it than that. I wonder if the author of that fable wasn't trying to convey instead a broken self-image, that the king was dogged with being unable to know himself and therefore took to staring obsessively at a reflection. For now, that is how I describe it - narcissism is a kind of disease wherein the person suffers from a broken self-image and has employed a variety of defenses and coping mechanisms to survive. The research is divided on the subject of the origins of narcissism. Some say that, yes, it is a compensation “for deprivation in their bonds with parents, and specifically, when their parents are cold or indifferent toward them.” Others argue it comes from parents who “cultivate narcissism in their children by seeing them as more special or more entitled than others and treating them accordingly - a phenomenon labeled parental overvaluation.” To me, these are two sides of the same coin, so to speak, because they feature parents who have distorted reality for their children. Perhaps they have done so unknowingly as narcissists themselves. Narcissism, according to research, can be inherited.

I’m not interested in clinical psychology, but I am interested in phenomenon. I’m interested in how difficult it is to define narcissism. I'm interested in its manifest rise in society, and whether that is true or not. I am especially interested in the nuance of our definitions of the “I”: ego, self-esteem, self-image, pride and confidence. Narcissism is more than pride and selfishness... it's a profound disorder in the way a person understands themselves. It has serious consequences. I think these consequences could be mitigated if narcissism was better understood.

Understanding, it should be clarified, doesn't mean labelling. People seem reluctant to use labels because they suppose a kind of confinement; a dismissal. However, I would argue that the label is a kind of first step. A person, once they are recognized as a narcissist, should be allowed to express, in a way, all the peculiarities of their disease, like any other disease with varying but still recognizable symptoms. The people who fall within the sphere of the narcissist should be allowed anger, but also, with time, the tools they need for a generous disarming of the narcissist’s power. Because narcissists do have power! They are leaders, bosses, spouses, parents and members of religious communities. Because of unfortunate circumstances in their youth, they have built around themselves an impenetrable armour and it isn't society's job to smash it, but rather, society’s job to learn how to flourish around them. In a way, a narcissist is a profound challenge to a regular person’s sense of self. This too is fascinating.

If this website is under my name and this blog an expression of my interests, then I admit, even prematurely, that narcissism is one of them.

048-Terminal patient

I'm struck by that quote of Annie Dillard's meant to motivate writers to do their best work... write as if you are addressing a terminal patient...

When my dad was dying, I was struck by how procedural it was; consciously his efforts went to relinquishing life and even as he knew this and we knew this, still, there were days when carried up on a draught of feeling incrementally better than the day before, hope could sneak in and whisper lies about miracles. I don't know if there was anything I could have written for him then. I was, then, even younger than I am now. I felt, very much like V. S. Naipaul, that I was a writer, but that I had a “writing blankness inside me.” So I could only tell my father, whom I called Pa, that I would dedicate my first book to him. (I have a vague idea it will be about agriculture.)

For now, all I can imagine offering terminal patients is silence. Maybe a view of the sunsets: look how beautifully the day flames as it dies.

3 things

Three things I’d talk to you about:

1) What you like doing (work/not work)
2) What you like eating (or reading, or watching) 
3) What we have in common (or better: not)

046-McClung

There are a handful of biographies about Nellie McClung, including her own two volume biography. McClung was born in 1873 and is considered a Manitoban hero for her involvement in the suffragist movement. In 1914, Winnipeg held a mock parliament as a fundraising event. This had been done in other cities, as early as in 1893, and it consisted of a role reversal in which Parliamentarians were women deciding the fate of men. It was a lot of fun. On this particular occasion, in Winnipeg, a delegation of women had been to the Parliament to demand the vote, and then staged their play the next day. McClung had been particularly attentive to the premier Roblin’s arguments and mannerisms, this not having been her first political encounter with the premier, and her impression of him made the play’s renown. 

The fact that McClung was such a prolific writer overshadows her talents as a speaker, and it is a pity that only a measly recording of her voice is left, a few seconds of an acceptance speech many years after this period. Writing gave her the authority of being a published author, and therefore a ticket to being a public speaker, but it wasn’t her talent. The fact that she is so often singled out for credit in getting the women’s vote to pass in Manitoba is unfair to the other women who were also involved, but attests to the popularity of her speeches. She made people laugh, and she passed a message while doing so. This was instrumental to the women’s cause and it made her name recognizable. In turn, this helped the sale of her books, 16 all told. 

She wasn’t a woman of great depth though and nothing illustrates this quite like the 1919 Winnipeg Strike. By that time, McClung was living in Alberta, but she continued to receive speaking engagements across Canada and the United States. The Strike which ran from May 15th to June 21st was peaceful when McClung decided to stop in Winnipeg on June 6th. McClung attempted to understand the issue at stake, interviewed a striker, took notes for a manuscript that was never published and left with an unfavourable view of the whole thing. In fact, she tended to agree with a conspiracy that posited the laborers were being directed by Russia. 

James Shaver Woodsworth’s attitude and actions are an informative contrast. Woodsworth and McClung were both Methodists, were born within a year of each other, and had both been involved to greater and lesser degrees with their church’s social movement, most prominently embodied at the All People’s mission in Winnipeg’s North End. Woodsworth left Methodist ministry and subsequent a very public stand in favour of pacifism in 1916, he lost his job, moved to Vancouver, and could only find work as a longshoreman. Notwithstanding the humiliation, the wage of a laborer was, he discovered, insufficient to support a family. His own wife and children could barely afford necessities in food, clothing and school supplies. He eventually joined a union and began advocating changes to the economic system. His understanding of the problems at stake earned him an invitation to speak across Canada in favour of the labour movement. He was scheduled to speak in Winnipeg on June 9th. According to Woodsworth’s biographers, the Winnipeg Strike made an impact on his life. Not only did he become personally involved in its events (he was briefly jailed as a result), he worked for years to undo two legislative amendments (one allowing for the deportation of immigrants, and the other involving free speech) enacted at the time that were unfair, successfully repealing one in 1927 and the other in 1936. Woodsworth, having lived the experience of a labourer understood their situation in a way that McClung could not.

McClung was a mediocre writer. For a long time this bothered me. How do you explain this woman’s renown against her bland literary legacy? For this, Simone de Beauvoir provided an answer I can’t help but quote at length. These authors “very often remain divided between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. Not being able to forget oneself is a failure that will weigh on them more heavily than in any other career; if their essential goal is an abstract self-affirmation, the formal satisfaction of success, they will not abandon themselves to the contemplation of the world: they will be incapable of creating it anew.” And: “instead of enriching the woman, her narcissism impoverishes her; involved in nothing but self-contemplation, she eliminates herself; even the love she bestows on herself becomes stereotyped: she does not discover in her writings her authentic experience but an imaginary idol constructed from clichés.” In Nellie McClung’s case, her writing was a springboard into an essential role in the women’s movement. 

She should be forgiven for her shortcomings, but we should not fall into the trap of singling her out based on a lazy familiarity with her name. This happened for example when in 2016 Premier Pallister argued against the Bank of Canada’s decision to cut her name from the women shortlisted for a banknote. What we need now are more historians who can take on the job of finding long-lost actors to diversify our pantheon. 

045-Puppy diaries

I was telling my sister about how I was disappointed in myself for not immediately falling in love with our new puppy. 

The older I get, the more I realize what a grouch I am about transitions. What’s wrong with me, I sobbed. There couldn’t be a cuter puppy...

“This is how you are” she said. “You always love things gradually!” And she listed examples.

I remember in elementary school, my classmates who were popular girls, would become infatuated with members of a band, or, the name I remember in particular, Dennis Rodman. Me? I fell in love with Mr. Bhaer of Little Women. 

Loving someone, some place, some thing, has, over and over again, always required effort. The effort of care and time spent together. 

I need to be patient with myself. I need to call this “The Process” like Sam Presti “the architect of OKC’s basketball success.” I only know about “The Process” because I’ve just finished reading Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town.

044-Puppy diaries

I want the puppy to like me and I’m annoyed at such base need for approval. Also, puppy training videos make puppy training look easy. Zak George has a lot of enthusiasm.

043-Puppy diaries

Our puppy’s name is Enzo. He only cried a few times in the night, on that first night, and Christian brought him out twice between our bedtime and morning, to pee outside, which he did, like a pro.

Interrupted sleep reminds me of when we had a newborn. The feeling is one of being stretched, like everything in my being becomes shallow: virtue, thought, breathing. It’s a frantic, “what’s next, what’s next, what’s next” state of mind.

042-Puppy diaries

On a hot day at the end of June we travelled to St. Laurent to pick up our puppy. Puppies, as it happens, are not conducive to writing. I am overwhelmed by feelings and have no distance between them and myself. If I pry a little spot, this is what rushes in: I marvel at our good luck - the breeders are an extraordinary couple with decades of experience and so many awards for their beagles that they’ve donated a portion (by the bagful, he tells me) to a center requesting award-décor. 

The puppies in their cages yelp eagerly and wag their tails. Their parents are outside, relaxed and lean, the bitches in one fenced-area, the studs in another. There is our puppy’s mom, there is his aunt. There is his dad.

There is a trend online with the hashtag “adopt, don’t shop” and I understand this well-meant admonition. I feel guilty about our pure-bread, about not nobly stepping in for a rescue. Conversely, I’m very relieved to be able to rest on the fact that our puppy’s breeder is top-notch, that their kennel of beagles is an ideal one.

041-Detail

There are many guilty pleasures I'd rather not talk about here and watching the British thriller series Marcella is one of them. However, the conclusion of the third season, in which there is a shocking amount of deaths that might not surprise a regular viewer of the Marcella series, had one niggling detail I can’t let go of.

I might just be kibitzing here, but while disbelief is suspended most of the time, the final scenes are concluded with such haste that disbelief, hung in a balloon, is punctured by the blast of events. 

I'll not summarize the events, but there's this: Rory Maguire lies dead on the floor and while Marcella is telling his stroke-muted mother about this, she opens his laptop and holds his eyeball up to the camera for an eye-scan that allows her access to his financial accounts. It’s this eyeball bit that bothers me because the eyeball, and the suspiciously long nerve attached to it, is a prop Marcella neatly pulls from her pocket, wrapped in a piece of paper towel. It's completely rigid, as if Marcella pulled it out of Rory's head and let it cure a few days on the counter, except for the inconvenience of the rapid-fire timeline. How did this eyeball held by a cord of vein or nerve, like a marshmallow on a stick, become so solid and maintain the necessary preservation for an iris scan? Liquid nitrogen? What is worse is that when Marcella leaves the house, walking past Rory, his eye sockets look perfectly undisturbed. 

It's not that I would have wanted things more gruesome, it's that I would have wanted the writers to pick a side. If we are to have gruesome deaths, why not have a gruesome eyeball? If we are to have not-too-gruesome, then give me a scene where Marcella uses her phone to take a picture of his iris and an app to properly reverse it so that the iris-recognition could be fooled and the viewer along with it.

I like detail. Big plans are fine, big plots too, but platters of detail are my delight.

40-Interior junk (or a story about being a train-bearer in the time of canker worms)

In an essay titled “Eclipse” Annie Dillard writes about a painting she regrets to have seen: “It was an image of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go.” It’s the “complex interior junk” I want to talk about, and for me, it’s not a painting, it’s this adolescent event that forms a memory that simply won't go away. 

When I was 15 or 16 and my organ teacher asked me to be a part of her bridal party as train bearer. We weren't related, but we’d developed some kind of friendship over the course of a few years of organ lessons and I would spy the dark-haired guy who would wait for her after my lessons. They were to be married in the spring and after that wedding she was no longer to be my teacher and the teacher who replaced her, I decided in advance, would not be my friend because I was through with caring for the intricacies of student-teacher friendships and so I stayed distant and didn’t make excuses for not practicing the organ. 

Being in a bridal party felt like a momentous honour and I was totally unable to put things into any perspective at the time. I thought I was her favourite student, but she'd also invited another of her students to be a train-bearer. Although I had no train-bearing experience and was a teenager with teenage clumsiness and occasionally stepped on the underskirts that poofed out her bridal dress, I was determined to be the better train bearer of the two. I also hoped I was the prettier train bearer even though my mom didn’t allow me to participate in the pre-wedding bridal activities like the visit to the hair salon or the spa for manicures. Instead, mom, with every good intention and some desire to allow me to participate, painted my nails pink and curled my hair. My hair went limp by the end of the ceremony and looked like a cat had draped its tail across my forehead no matter how much I tried primping it back into place, out of my face. It was not for nothing that my mom had given me the nickname “fluffy” at home.

The bridal party wore emerald-green dresses made out of sateen material. There were pictures taken on the university grounds and the elm trees we posed under were besieged that year with worms. One of the bridesmaids kept going on about the worms and I thought she was silly, so I made the kind of joke, I realize now, that my dad would have made. I said “Oh look! There's one on your shoulder!” But I was too naive to understand that her silliness was an actual phobia, and my desire to lighten the mood had the exact opposite effect: I made her cry. I hadn’t rushed to say it was a joke but because everyone reacted so dramatically I immediately realized my mistake. When they couldn’t find the worm, I eked out a lame, half-devastated, “It was a joke…” 

It is well-understood at weddings that mothers can cry, but people in the bridal party should not be brought to tears on a day entirely immortalized in pictures, for which people are hired to apply makeup professionally. I understood then that there was no chance I would be the best train-bearer. The groom even shot me a severe look.

I think it was after the pictures that we trooped into an A&W for a snack, and my spirits revived a little at the commotion we caused. At the reception, I had no place at the bridal table, I wasn't friends with the other organ student, and in fact, I knew no one but the bride. Eventually I called my dad and said goodbye to the bride and left the room and waited for him to deliver me from the whole day. 

Although I feel a great amount of shame about that day, I also have pity for that 15-year-old girl who knew so little of the world. Sometimes the shame is stronger though, and as a defense, I wonder what that bride was thinking to have asked me to be one of two train-bearers.

39-Worry Muffins

Today I made muffins. 

I say that I've made muffins because it was a small thing I could do, on the list of things to do, while the kids did projects in the dining room. Baking supposes cheerfulness, and while it seems impossible to feel gloomy while the scent of cinnamon wafted through the house, these actions can sometimes only just barely stretch enough to simulate normalcy in what feels like pervasive worry. But people have faced worry before! Look! In December of 2006 Nora Ephron wrote: “The morning talk shows will remind me (not that I need to be reminded) that the world is currently in the midst of a total meltdown, that we have the worst president in current history, that the elation of the recent election has passed  to a numbing foreboding that nothing is going to change and that innocent people will continue to die in this hateful, violent episode we've unleashed.” And although I'm not sure which election she's talking about, and suspect the violence is about war and not racism, still, I kind of hope she was being sarcastic? Because this year’s meltdown feels like the meltdown of all meltdowns. Sometimes I feel silly for reading Nora Ephron. I picked up her book from the library on the last day it was open. It was a fat book titled The Most of Nora Ephron and I thought it could be the light reading alongside Harold Brodkey. Instead, Ephron's humour feels outdated. I’m partly to blame... I don’t get all the references. I do get the recipes though! That part is still pertinent. 

(I’m editing this two weeks later, and that criticism about Ephron’s humour makes me feel guilty. Especially since I read the essay she wrote titled “Revision and Life: Take it From the Top – Again” and realize how much work she put into “a way of writing that looked chatty and informal” by her own description. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that her writing highlights the ways in which the conversation has changed, and I crave depth.)

I baked muffins. They’re breakfast muffins for my mother-in-law and I’m happy to make them because they are a small thing I can still do. I’m happy to drop them off so they’re ready for breakfast next morning even though we greet each other under separate clouds of worry. Hers are the worries of an 80 year old. Mine are the worries of motherhood. In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie writes a scene wherein the children meet Captain Hook who enjoins them to become pirates. One of the lost boys’ name is Tootles. “‘Don't irritate him unnecessarily’ had been Wendy’s instruction in the hold; so Tootles stepped forward politely. Tootles hated the idea of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be the buffer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for it, but make constant use of it.” 

Mothers as buffers! Isn’t that so? I imagine myself providing for our home precisely that kind of buffer with enough realism and hope to guide them through this passage. I’m acutely aware that it’s not a game of pretend, that to provide a buffer for my children, I need to be a good example. When “How a Traumatized Nation Can Recover” offers advice like this: “Make sure that we disconnect and we turn our attention to our own wellbeing and stay connected to activities that feed us. Make sure you’re resourcing yourself like a plant. Watering and feeding yourself and engaging in activities that really do give you energy.” I agree, and come here to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I try to describe what I’m doing and what I’m thinking. 

039-Hummingbird moth

We saw this remarkable thing about a week ago when we took a hike in Manitoba's Spirit Sands park. At first I thought it was a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower except that it was tiny and beige coloured and it had two long black antennae. At the restaurant that evening I googled descriptions for clues and discovered we’d seen a type of moth.

That was all I was going to write about that, except that later the same day I read the New York Times article titled “How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases” and went to bed disheartened. I know about climate change, systemic racism, and the growing income inequality and yet what seems to be happening right now is that these things are coming into clearer and clearer focus. If previously it had been fine to move through life with only a vague, even somewhat dismissive, sense of these things it is no longer the case. Surviving the pandemic will be a minor detail compared to the uncertainties that will reach tendril-like into our homes.

That is why, taking a hike as a family into a landscape that can still be enjoyable feels like a limited pleasure, a thing slipped under the wire.

038-Rip

A year ago thereabouts, I went to the downtown library to browse books. It so happened a wedding was occurring in the library's courtyard and I left to go home at the same time as one of the guests, who like me, was taking the elevator to underground parking. She was wearing a dress and high heels and had a date. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened, I waited for them to go first, but she said, “No you! It looks like your arms are going to rip off!”

I like words. I like making a game of choosing the right ones and play at that with the children sometimes, providing them synonyms and nuance. The word rip seemed particularly violent. Rip sounds like flesh tearing, like jagged dismemberment, issuing blood. The violence of the word could, in a Freudian slip kind of way, suggest the violence of the mind from which it came. Had this young wedding guest played too many videogames? Or watched too many horror movies? I was only holding a pile of books, on cooking and home decor.

But a love of words can be an impediment. Communication is laborious enough as it is, why add to it particularities of usage? In fact, words are two dimensional and action is the thing that gives meaning. Perhaps what that wedding guest saw was a person full of words, full, full, full, becoming like paper herself and she was alarmed that all this paper, under stress, fragile as it was, would, indeed, rip. Maybe her word choice was perfect and I’d wasted all this time thinking it was not.

037-Encouragement

The boys coloured our paving stones before bed. The surface isn’t ideal, but they attacked the project like adding colour was their job. They don't care if there is rain in the forecast. They don't care if their time is limited or if they should continue or stop tomorrow. 

My daughter made 37 paper boxes for the fun of folding their shape in different colours. Sometimes she finds something to put in them. She isn't thinking of monetizing her confections. The production makes us both laugh, as if their proliferation were as random as mushrooms after a rain.

I need these constant reminders because I'm an adult, careworn and worried. I take encouragement I can find it, like sips of tea: “Every artist has a different journey, and you'll have to figure out yours - you'll have to determine how much you can endure. Because the roadblocks, doubts, and insecurity are all part of living an artistic life.” (Jenna Fischer).

036-Non-committal

The problem I have with tattoos is that I would be unable to decide on the design. Reading Inheritance, I was almost jealous of the way Dani Shapiro memorialized the life event that is the basis of her book. It was properly symbolic and fittingly permanent. I can't seem to settle on anything.

Time is constantly forward moving. Write a history of something and within your own life, revisionist historians can change the conclusion you came to. Maybe it's built upon. Maybe it's torn down. 

Has it ever scared you how some people hold on to a thing? Like say your dad always lied and so you've committed yourself to always telling the truth, and it's become the cure for the difficulties in your childhood and the pain you've worked through in young adulthood and now you tell everyone you know the importance of truth-telling. You tell your children, you enforce your rule with friends, you marry a blunt but sincere person. But sometimes you hurt people, because your conviction is not theirs, or rather, it doesn't take into account the delicacy of their situation and you never realize how you lost sight of the balance required by love. And then you're eighty years old and your children and grandchildren gather around and they say, "grandpa always told the truth" in the way that people who look for qualities say things about dying people that also mask a familiar pain. 

I worry about that. I worry about holding on to a thing so tightly that I lose the ability to let go and reach for the next thing.

035-Hair

In 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: "Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffs, as my wife calls them: and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily - but it is only because she sees it is the fashion."

Here, there is no fashion to imitate: the less salon visits, the better; grow out the roots and stay healthy, there is no one to impress. Of course, I tease, because, pandemic or no, there will always be vanity.

I used to live with an elderly woman who had snow-white hair. She declared that if she ever felt sick enough to call an ambulance, she'd take a bath first. She continued to age, and each health issue was like an axe swing to an oak tree, before felled in a hospital bed where she lie, awake to tell me a few days before she would die, that on the other side, when she ran into my dad, she’d tell him hello from me. I really don’t remember what her hair looked like, flattened as it must have been, against the pillow. 

It's summer now. My hair is long so I can tie it up. All I need is a hat to wear to the beach. I'm thinking of a fedora, but perhaps I'll check Instagram to see what other women are wearing.

034-Thursday Walks

While the kids had school at home, we took daily walks as an exercise regimen. We always did a loop in Henteleff Park near our house. On Thursdays we chose a park anywhere else in the city. And so we explored 13 other locations as an adventure.

Spirited Woods

St. Norbert along the dike behind what used to be Villa Maria.

The Sagimay Trail in Assiniboine Forest

On Earth Day I equipped the kids with gloves, garbage pickers and a clipboard and we picked up trash on a boulevard near our house.

Barrière Park

U of M grounds

Whittier Park on a rainy day

Kildonan Park before flowers were planted

A bit of the Duff Roblin Floodway Trail

Pollock Island

Assiniboine Avenue and the Legislative Building grounds

Cardiff Trail

The last bit of Bunn’s Creek Trail

All these walks were fun. For more ideas, I recommend the Winnipeg Trails Association website.

033-Favourite

This is goat’s beard.

I like its fireworks-like white flowers, feathery leaves and thick bushiness.

Our yard also has astilbes and false spirea which look like they’re from the same family of bushy, feathery, white-flowering plants.

Now, I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the other plants: the giant hosta, the fragrant lavender, the colourful annuals and gentle hydrangeas, but the goat’s beard is my favourite… It is striking against the orange-hued fence, and in spring, its died-back branches shoot up so enthusiastically you would think they were powered by magic.